The ravel'ed sleeve of care...
Oh, Reader. Has Cupcake ever mentioned that she doesn't sleep very much? Yes, yes-- she believes she has mentioned that once or twice.
Every roommate Cupcake has ever had has at one point or another said, "Do you EVER sleep?"
Yes, Cupcake does sleep. A couple hours a day seems to do the trick. Tonight it was- and with the help of Tylenol PM no less - 90 minutes. From 11:30 to 1:00. Wide awake after that. No problem with it. Just catapulted from the arms of slumber into a sudden consciousness with no purpose.
It's not a problem, exactly. Cupcake has friends who suffer from insomnia. Cupcake doesn't suffer from it at all; she rather enjoys it. The one pang she has about the situation is that it baffles her that, in the course of 21 or 22 waking hours, she doesn't get more accomplished.
But that's another matter. What Cupcake wanted you to know is that it's just strange, experiencing the world when most other people are sleeping.
There are things that occur because of this regular purposeless consciousness.
It means that Cupcake knows every 24-hour restaurant and store in Jersey City.
It means that Cupcake knows infomercials better than most people. Or she used to, anyway, before the TV started making a weird slanty-flickering that drives her crazy to the point that she can't even watch Law and Order. But it doesn't bother her enough that she ever remembers to go buy a new television, even when she does have enough cash to do that.
It means that Cupcake wishes she had more friends in other time zones.
It means that Cupcake can really super assiduously check out the nocturnal activity in the ghettos of Jersey City where she is considering purchasing a home, circling blocks for hours to determine that yes, there really does seem to be a lot of drug trafficing on that corner, and huh, it really does seem like that young lady in the garrishly blond wig and super tight hot pants has a lot of men friends in various cars.
It means that Cupcake is usually available for friends who are suddenly arrested, or themselves unable to sleep. (File that away, Reader, should you be prone to drunk driving or spousal abuse in the wee small hours of the morning and need someone to bail you out.)
It means that Cupcake gets to spend a long time admiring the sleeping visages of men who might want her to grace their beds. (If it's not an admirable visage in the first place, she's unlikely to grace it. But knowing that she's going to be lying there staring at that face does in fact change the prospect of such supine intimacy, creating a greater need for asthetic selectivity.)
It means that Cupcake has plenty of time to do laundry, poke around the house looking for stuff to throw away now that she's moving, go down in the basement and play with the delightful rabbit (also a nocturnal creature).
Cupcake just wishes it weren't so darn lonely all the time. The rabbit is indeed a pleasant companion, but not much of a conversationalist. As the clock moves towards midnight, Cupcake sometimes catches herself guiltily engaging her roommate (who is as delightful as the rabbit but not as nocturally animated) in late night conversations that are probably ungenerous if not downright greedy. Cupcake hoards every word of them, knowing she will be starved for companionship later in the night.
Yes, yes-- of course Cupcake could devote the time to her writing. And sometimes she does. Tonight, though, what with the house being sold and no clear plan as to where she is going, Cupcake has been pacing, stopping to lift weights, and pacing some more. Eventually she will go back to bed with a cup of tea and flip through a book, mostly to be out of the way of the aforementioned delightful roommate while she gets ready for work. And then around 9 or so Cupcake will propel herself out of the house and down to the artsy Jersey City coffee shop where she is wont to spend her days since she quit the Job From Hell.
Dunno. This is probably a very dull posting. Which is why I don't spend every sleepless night writing. Sometimes I might be awake but the Muse isn't.
Anyone else have -- not a problem with sleeplessness as much as an expanded waking time? How do you fill those hours?
Oh well. I'm going back down to play with the bunny.
posted by Cupcakegrrl at Tuesday, November 15, 2005
6 Comments:
Sadly, When I cannot sleep I turn to some online games. But I am a geek and clearly not a Cupcake.
I sleep about six hours a night and that seems about right to me. If I sleep less than five, it begins to affect me after a few days. If I sleep more than eight it feels pretty damn good, except my lower back starts to hurt. Age robs us even of good rest.
On rare occasions when I have sleeplessness, I lie in bed and imagine all sorts of ambitious home remodelling projects, none of which I will ever do.
Bollix! You only don't SUFFER from insomnia because you don't have the succubi which slide down the ceiling fan and push you towards the butcher knife. I rather usually enjoy my insomnia, but the goddamned demons...the horror...the horror.
I feel your pain, dear cupcake. Like you I also "suffer" from a combination of not needing much sleep, and when I do, it's not always the "normal" time to do so. To make matters worse, my best friend is the Father of 2, one being 3 and the other 11 months. He's also a union sheet metal worker. He's up at 4 am, and has not stayed awake beyond the first quarter of Monday Night Football in years. I usually end up half watching the football game and half chatting with his wife while she scrapbooks.
My girlfriend is a zombie by 10. I have tried keeping her up until midnight just to see if she would turn into a pumpkin.
The sleepless are a lonely bunch. I've even resorted to bringing my laptop to Denny's for pseudocompany. Sometimes alone in a crowd of lost twentysomethings is better than being alone, alone.
i've always enjoyed being awake while everyone else is asleep. there is something lovely about the quality of silence at that time.
however, lately, because of the troubles in my family, sleep is just an ornery lover that offers no solace and i avoid it as much as possible.
Insomnia runs in cycles through my life. There are periods during which I sleep only an hour or two out of every twenty-four, and then suddenly, I will find it within me to sleep for twenty hours, three days in a row.
The curveball in my life has always been nocturnal tendencies. I don't hate the sunlight, rather I love it. But something in my nature does not like to wake up at five or six in the morning. The effect of this is that I've become known as the go-to guy amongst friends & relatives for all things after 7pm. Can't sleep? Call Gates! Don't know where to eat at 2AM? Call Gates! Looking for a good bar or afterhours club? Call Gates! Having a bad acid trip at 3am? Go find Gates!
While I don't see it as a problem, I find that it does isolate me in some regard to the chronology & experience of most people I know. My life tends to saunter in the face of this deadline-driven city. As the years go by, words like 'tonight' and 'tomorrow' lose more and more meaning. I try to fill this void with reading, writing, laundry, and the occasional spat of obsessive-compulsive housecleaning.
Somewhere in Marisol's blog, there is the story of a friend of ours, Diane, whose mother called her during the wee hours of the morning. Ecstatic, Diane's mother had been calling all her children to urge them, "Get up! There's more room at night!" And in my humble opinion, she's right.
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