Adventures In Sleeping (Or Not, As The Case May Be)

I have trouble sleeping. Like, a lot. You name the trouble, and I have it. I have troubles sleeping that should logically counter each other, and others that don't make any sense at all. Sleeping is very, very hard for me. I frankly wouldn't bother except for that whole pesky 'biological necessity' factor. 

You think I’m kidding? Here is a brief list of the troubles that plague me when I try to settle down for the night:

• It takes me, on average, at least an hour to fall asleep. At least. I lie in the dark and count sheep and focus on my breathing and get in touch with my goddamn chi or whatever the hell it is that’s supposed to make you relax, and it can still take me hours to fall asleep. It doesn’t matter if I drink warm milk, or read relaxing poetry, or whatever you probably want to suggest right now.
  
  The bottom line is that unless I am drunk, I’m not falling asleep for a while. No matter how tired I am. And even if I am drunk there’s a pretty good chance I will just sit up giggling at stupid pictures on the internet instead of trying to sleep.
  
•  I have nightmares. Some are standard, trauma-related nightmares that are actually scary to an outside observer. A lot are about the zombie apocalypse. Some are harder to explain. Why was it so horrifying to share a salad with Stanley Tucci while sitting on a grand piano? You tell me, Freud. Regardless of the variety, my nightmares suck. And I have them almost every night. So even when I am asleep, it’s not exactly restful or pleasant.
  
• I wake up a lot during the night. We’re talking 3 or 4 times a night. For no reason. It’s like my brain really hates me, or at least hates the parts of me that like sleep. SCREW YOU, ASSHOLE. YOU WANT TO SLEEP? YOU SHALL HAVE NONE OF THAT. NONE AT ALL. And of course, once I wake up I have to start the whole ‘falling asleep’ process from the beginning.
  
• It’s hard to wake me up once I fall asleep. That might seem counterintuitive to what I just said, but here’s the thing. I can wake myself up no problem. If a mote of dust is getting too big for its britches I will be up like a shot, ready to defend the homestead against all invaders. But if, say, another person or alarm clock attends to wake me, it’s nigh on impossible.
  
  This isn't a new development. As a kid my parents would stand over me yelling in the hopes of rousing me. Threats, tears, and bribery were all ineffective. But if my dog wandered down the hallway at any point during the night, I was awake in an instant.
  
• I can get up, turn off a complicated alarm clock on the other side of the room, and go back to sleep all without waking up.
  
• I talk in my sleep. All sorts of talking. Not just murmuring softly under my breath like a normal person would. I can have full-fledged conversations with people while being zonked out. I almost never remember these later, which can lead to hilarious arguments about ‘Why didn’t you pick me up at the train station?’ and ‘Why were you laughing when I told you I was getting sick?’ Sleep Me is also kind of a dick.
  That’s not the only type of talking I do, though. For a while I would recite movie lines in my sleep (I have witnesses, who continue to view this as a singularly awesome trick). More recently, I will pick up conversations I am dreaming and continue them OUT LOUD, which is genuinely terrifying to people in the vicinity. I have friends who will vouch for the fact that I have yelled ‘SHUT UP’ at 5 AM at people who are NOT IN THE ROOM WITH US. This can be hilarious or fucking scary as hell, depending on the hour, the people, and what exactly I’m shouting.

The thing is, I like sleep. A lot. It’s one of my most favorite activities. Sleep is the best. And I would like more sleep, preferably without dreams of sharing salad with celebrities or whatever other horrors my evil little brain can concoct. Look, sleep is a pretty basic function. Many, many living things can do it. Newborns can do it. My dog can do it, and he is afraid of pretty much everything.

So in the hopes of returning to the loving embrace of slumber, I’m going to try out some apps that promise to help me fall asleep. And stay asleep, hopefully. I’ll let you know if any of them are wildly successful or delightfully counterproductive.

I’m pretty sure sleep isn’t supposed to be such a challenge. On the upside, I’m very close to evolving immunity to caffeine.

Musings While Sending Out Job Applications

• HOW can you require 15 years of experience for an entry-level job? Does entry-level mean something other than what I think it means? 

• I should do a shot for every resume I send out. The last few cover letters will be HILARIOUS. 

• 'I want this job because TEENAGERS ARE FLICKING BOTTLE CAPS AT ME WHILE I TRY TO SEND OUT RESUMES AND FRANKLY I CANNOT HANDLE THIS EMOTIONALLY.'

• I could be an Avon sales associate. I've worked in sales before. I'm good at sales.

• Holy shit I would be the worst Avon sales associate ever, I would totally smear black eyeliner all over my eyes and be like WHAT BRAINWASHED SUPER SOLDIER AM I hey where is everyone going.

• I should be a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. Not a high-level agent, but you know, I could get coffee for the important people. Clean Captain America's shield. Schedule the Black Widow's hair appointments. Arrange for Clint Barton's therapy. 

• A quick Google search proves that if S.H.I.E.L.D. is hiring they are not interested in electronic applications.

• How many more years until Starfleet exists? I mean they gave Jim Kirk a spaceship, I just want employment.

• DISCLAIMER: Kids, do not search for fictional jobs online. You will be disappointed by reality and become a bitter shell of the human condition.

• I feel like I'm applying for a blind date. A terrible, terrible blind date I don't actually want to go on but need to for complicated personal reasons. Of course blind dates don't usually ask for salary requirements, in my experience.

• I love when cover letters start to feel desperate. 'I'm smart, pleasant, and hard-working! I am the life of the party! I will fill your life with dizzying joy and also file all your paperwork!' If I met the person I'm pretending to be while writing this, I would punch them in their stupid perky face.

• Sending out cover letters is the actual worst, and anyone who says otherwise is selling you a load of lies. Back away slowly.

Notes From The Abyss

So, this blog will be resurfacing soon. With new posts about life, the universe, and fandom.

Plus, I'm debating releasing my much-discussed novel on here in chapters.

This corner of the web has been dormant for too long. Time to dust it off and start anew.

Children Are Our Future

For a while, I was a substitute teacher. I was not very good at it. I like kids, and generally enjoy them. I have a sibling and babysat a lot when I was younger, so children are not frightening or mysterious to me. But being a substitute teacher - a good one - requires a person of uncommon qualities. I did not have these qualities.

Maybe if school started later, it wouldn't have been an issue. I am by nature a night owl. I despise morning. Waking up at the crack of dawn to deal with a herd of screaming children, all demanding your rapt attention, is one of the circles of hell. So whenever I was called in, a lucky class full of bright-eyed students got a cranky, semi-comatose substitute who wanted nothing more than to declare an eight-hour nap time and curl up under her desk.

Despite my groggy demeanor, the students overall liked me. I often started class by stating, 'Look, I am not your teacher. I'm just here for the day. Let's just get through your work and we can all relax. You guys still take naps, right?' I didn't pretend to have any real authority, and I didn't bully them. I liked to think of myself as a cool older relative whose primary goal was to make sure nobody ate paste or set anything on fire.

I think my failure as a teacher can be summed up in one day. I was subbing for the art teacher, which is only slightly less hilarious than the time I subbed for the gym teacher. If I had to run for my life, I would die. If I had to draw a map to save my life, I would die, after being ruthlessly mocked for my tragic stick figures. But the administration didn't care about my inherent artistic abilities, so I was the art teacher for the day.

Teachers are supposed to leave you a syllabus for each class. You follow the syllabus, and unless a kid tries to stab someone with a crayon, it's pretty uneventful. But as the first graders filed in, I found myself without an assignment for 30-odd hyperactive 7-year-olds. It was not an enviable position.

It was the day of President Obama's inauguration, and I knew the kids had all watched his swearing in. I had what I thought was a brilliant idea: I told the kids to draw something that made them think of America.

"It can be a picture of the White House, the flag, a bald eagle, whatever you think of when you think of America!" I enthused. I'd had a lot of coffee that day, and was pretty pleased with myself. The kids would color, I would read a book and not have an existential crisis when I discovered that small children had more expensive phones than I.

And it worked. For a few minutes. The kids colored industriously, with a modicum of talking. I oversaw their work, feeling like a Real Educator. Then one little boy approached me to show me his drawing.

LITTLE BOY: I drew the White House!

ME: That's great! And who is that outside it?

LITTLE BOY: John McCain.

ME: Um... OK.

LITTLE BOY: My parents like him. They say he should be President.

ME: A lot of people thought that. But that's what's so great about America - we can all have different opinions.

I'd like to mention that I was enormously proud of my diplomatic response. And then it all went to hell.

LITTLE BOY: I don't like Obama.

At this point I should have pat him on the head and distracted him with something shiny. 'Look, an iPod! Justin Bieber! A unicorn! Justin Bieber riding a unicorn while building an iPod!'

If you are thinking of being a teacher, my one piece of advice is this: do not engage in political debate with someone who just recently mastered eating solid food.

ME: Oh? Why is that?

LITTLE BOY: He wants to kill the penguins.

ME: ....What?

LITTLE BOY: The penguins. He wants to kill them.

ME: The penguins.

LITTLE BOY: Yes.

ME: Kill them?

LITTLE BOY: Yeah, he's going to kill them.

ME: I don't think the President wants to kill the penguins.

LITTLE BOY: Oh, he does.

ME: We don't have any penguins in America.

LITTLE BOY: Well, he's going to drive to the penguins and THEN kill them.

By now the boy was looking at me like I was either incredibly stupid, or part of the Penguin Killing Brigade. And I realized I was arguing with a 6-year-old about the leader of the free world hunting down and murdering flightless birds.

It was a surreal moment.

Luckily, the situation was defused by the arrival of snack time. Rather than alerting the principal that I was plotting the demise of penguins, the little boy scampered off to enjoy his juice box.

As I watched the kids dig into the Goldfish Crackers and wheat-free cookies, I glanced down at their drawings. If you recall, I'd asked them to draw what they thought of when they thought of America.

Almost all of them had drawn money.

An Internal Monologue I Have Far Too Often

Me: I'M DYING.

Common Sense: No, you're not.

Me: No, really, this time I am. Totally. Dying. Like, the dead kind. SO DEAD.

Common Sense: What is it this time?

Me: My nose is stuffy and I'm coughing and cold and achy and tired. 'Because I could not stop for Death-'

Common Sense: You have a cold.

Me: LIES. Lots of hideous diseases present as colds, and you think it's just a cold, then BOOM DEAD.

Common Sense: Stop it. You do this all the time. It's tiresome and exhausting. Hypochondria is not charming.

Me: Just wait until I am dead from EBOLA. Then you'll feel stupid.

Common Sense: You don't even know what that is. Anyway, remember when you had an ingrown toenail and decided you had toe cancer?

Me: I was kidding.

Common Sense: Yes, but you were also legitimately concerned that it meant something was really, really wrong with you.

Me: It COULD have been a sign of a degenerative disease.

Common Sense: This is JUST like when you accidentally cut off that other driver and were convinced he would hunt you down.

Me: Road rage is a legitimate concern. Anyway, you should be nice to me. I AM GRAVELY ILL.

Common Sense: OR you are just overtired and eat terrible food, and your body is rebelling.

Me: ....Dying.

Common Sense: You know, when you're actually, genuinely sick, people don't believe you. Like the time the doctor said it was just anxiety, and it turned out to be a double bronchial infection.

Me: He was a TERRIBLE doctor.

Common Sense: Very true. However, perhaps people would be more sympathetic if you weren't ALWAYS sick. Tired is not sick. Bored is not sick. Annoyed is not sick. And sick does not automatically equal HORRIBLE, EXPLODEY DEATH.

Me: I know, but if I expect the absolute worst, anything else will seem tolerable.

Common Sense: Could you at least do it quietly?

Me: Fine. I have a cold.

Common Sense: Thank you.

Me: Which is EXACTLY how things started in The Stand.

Note: While writing this, I Googled for rare diseases out of curiosity. And ended up reading about necrotizing fasciitis. And panicked over the idea of getting it. There's a lesson here, but I'm too busy buying stock in antibacterial soap to think about it.

Serious Topics Taken Seriously

When I win the internet, I will be given a velociraptor-unicorn-pegasus hybrid, which I will ride whilst sipping from a goblet filled with vodka slushies.

This has nothing to do with anything, except that today on Twitter I have discussed the merits of owning a velociraptor vs. a dragon. I am firmly on the side of velociraptors. Wait! There is a logic to my choice.

I love dragons. I love them a lot, and would love owning one. But logically speaking, where would you keep it? What would you feed it? And what TYPE of dragon would it be? Would it be a Tolkien dragon? Because Smaug was scary as hell. Or would it be an Anne McCaffrey dragon? Or a Dungeons & Dragons type? Or one from Harry Potter? Or Jane Yolen? That's not even looking at the species themselves. There are dozens upon dozens of different types of dragons, with their own advantages and disadvantages.

The point is, some dragons talk and love gold and some don't and eat brimstone. Some sleep a lot. Some have wings. Some eat people. And I think when speaking hypothetically about wanting to own a fantasy creature, you need to consider these factors in a serious and rational manner. Do you have a surplus of gold? Does your house have insurance against pets that cause fires?

Raptors are easy. They eat meat. They are small enough to keep in a house, although not an apartment. That would be ridiculous. If you got it at a young age, you could probably train it out of eating your friends and neighbors. And I could ride one. AIRTIGHT LOGIC.

Speaking of dragons, my favorite dragon movie of ALL TIME is Flight of Dragons. It is life-changing and brilliant. It is The Last Unicorn of animated dragon movies. I just discovered that Netflix doesn't carry it, which means I'll have to buy it at some point. It's fantastic.

By the way, wouldn't Dragons Vs. Raptors be the best movie EVER? Forget Cowboys Vs. Aliens, I need Jon Favreau ON THIS. Imagine - dragons exist in the past, right? So why can't we go even further past, and have them battle velociraptors for dominance over the planet? Or they could both invade present day, and it could be the plot of the Jurassic Park reboot. That was a freebie, Hollywood.

This is the sort of post that results from it being very hot out, a surplus of sugar, and guilt over not having written anything of substance in about a week. So you get dragons and velociraptors. YOU'RE WELCOME.

Edit: DO NOT GOOGLE 'RAPTORS VS. DRAGONS'. OH MY GOD.

Edit 2: MY EYES ARE BLEEDING.

Edit 3: AND THOSE DINOSAURS ARE TOTALLY ANATOMICALLY INCORRECT. DINOSAURS DON'T BEND THAT WAY.

Edit 4: WHAT SORT OF JUST AND MERCIFUL GOD WOULD ALLOW SUCH A THING TO EXIST?

Edit 5: ALL I WANTED WAS A WHOLESOME, CHARMING MOVIE ABOUT DINOSAURS AND RAPTORS FIGHTING TO THE DEATH. THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I WANTED. UNCLEAN. UNCLEAN.

Edit 6: Sometimes, I really hate the internet.

Writer's Block Does Not Always Lead To Profound Passages

Note: I wrote this on virtually no sleep, on a Monday, while in a terrible mood. YOU'RE WELCOME.

Today has not been a good day for writing. As I had the day off, I figured I could accomplish something, and provide the blog with a clever new entry. Things haven't worked out quite that way.

It's the sort of day where you sit down, completely determined to type something witty and incisive. I sat at the keyboard and thought, 'Self, today I will post a blog entry that will break the internet with its brilliance. The world will shudder in exquisite ecstasy over the prose that issue forth from my fingers.'

Then after a few hours of staring at a blank screen that refuses to make words, I lower my standards. I am a realist, if nothing else, after all. 'OK, Self, let's write something that doesn't humiliate us. That produces a chuckle. No pressure.'

Right now I would settle for something coherent. Also, did you know that screaming, 'MAKE WORDS, YOU MISERABLE BASTARD!' at your laptop produces no effect? None at all. I tested this out, for science. You're welcome.

So to answer your question, no, things aren't going very well. I have applied for some freelance writing jobs. I purchased a shirt. This, in fact, is a succinct description of my day: Writer's block, writer's block, IMPULSE SHOPPING, writer's block writer's block, EXISTENTIAL VOID, writer's block writer's block....

And so on. So instead of a real, coherent blog entry, you have me yelling about how I need a career eating waffles:
About me: I want some fucking waffles, bitch.
Give me money to buy waffles.
Services Provided: Will eat ALL the fucking waffles.

I've been craving Belgian Waffles for like a week. In fact, my brilliant friend and I devised Rapture Waffles (PATENT PENDING): waffles covered in frosting. For the apocalypse. Look, it made sense at the time, and isn't nearly as weird as some of the things I ate to survive in college. Frankly, I think it was a perfectly rational reaction to the End Of Times.

So the majority of today has been spent attempting to write something semi-lucid, watching Black Books, chugging Diet Mountain Dew, and imagining a life wherein I get paid to eat waffles.

If you haven't seen Black Books, I recommend you rectify that post-haste. It is a brilliantly funny British show starring the glorious Dylan Moran. It consists of everything that is good in the world, and is the perfect recipe for when you feel nihilistic and sour about your future. BERNARD BLACK IS A GOD AMONG MEN. AND HE'S IRISH. THINK ON THAT.

Great. Now I want Dylan Moran to bring me Belgian Waffles and red wine. Can the internet make this happen? I mean, there are places where I can buy shoes made out of bread on the internet. For actual money, and not as a horrible joke. So why shouldn't a celebrity deliver me alcohol and waffles?

This blog entry should have ended ages ago. Instead it keeps going on and on, like some horrible cretaceous monster. IT HAS NO END. This is like the Jurassic Park of blog posts. It eats everyone you loves and wreaks havoc, and then there are two sequels of debatable quality.

This isn't like procrastination, when I don't want to write anything so I blather on endlessly, and usually the results amuse me for their randomness if nothing else. No, I WANT to write something good. Really, I do. I just can't. But there are only two blog entries on this page, and they're JUDGING me.

I can't believe I used to write every goddamn day. I am terribly out of practice.

So what have we learned?
* Don't start writing without a predetermined blog topic.
* Writer's block and procrastination are entirely different beasts.
* There should be more careers available involving the consumption of Belgian Waffles.
* I will always capitalize Belgian Waffles, for obvious reasons.
* Rapture Waffles (PATENT PENDING) will sweep the nation, coming December 21st, 2012.
* Everything is better with frosting. EVERYTHING.
* Black Books is an underrated and wonderful show.
* Dylan Moran should set up a wine and waffle delivery service.