On Sleeping

Most of you know me for the pumpkin that I am

In college being a pumpkin meant simply that I turned in ahead of most of my friends.  Nuthin’ personal, y’all, I’m off to bed. I pulled one all-nighter in my early twenties: when I was jail-sitting after a Take Back the Night Rally.  A number of fellow organizers were arrested and some of us stayed outside the jail that night. I found it an intriguing physical sensation, that kind of flying unreality. It was fun eating a big breakfast at an all night-diner at 4 in the morning. I never had any inclination to repeat the experience however. I mean, I also get a jolt of excitement when I overdraw my checking account but you don’t see me running out to do it again.

Now in my thirties I am the veritable pumpkin that Cinderella turns into at midnight (or is it her coach? whatever), only I fall over asleep by ten PM almost every night. And I do mean every night. There was a recent family wedding and when we got the invite I got a little worried. It was in downtown Chicago and AT NIGHT. Like, they got married AFTER 8 PM. Translated to my Eastern time that was AFTER 9 PM. I immediately started calculating how to handle the weekend as the wedding was not at a hotel. I could go into paragraphs of the planning but my uncle saved my ass by – you guessed it folks – HE DROVE (thanks Uncle N!).  I got to bed by midnight EST and that was the latest I’d been up in months and months. I’d already scheduled the next morning so I could sleep extra time. I also have a fairly rigid getting-out-of-bed schedule that symbiotically reinforces my bed time. I used to sleep in as late as possible. Posh. That might mean you go to bed later the next night! or, horrors, have trouble falling asleep.

Not falling asleep is not acceptable. It could mean that you didn’t get enough asleep for the next day. It could mean you’d be tired, as in the physically ill sensation of exhaustion you get when you don’t sleep well. Performance would be off, uncontrollable crankiness a real possibility, unprofessional facial expressions damaging your reputation at committee meetings. All because you didn’t get enough rest. Everything your mother ever told you about getting enough rest is true. Certainly everything my mother ever told me about getting enough rest is true.  She said it when I was 5, nevertheless…

So, last night the weirdest thing happened. The evening started off normal enough. First, I set the VCR to tape the Palin speech and The Daily Show.  I didn’t expect to be up after 9:30. See, this morning I had to be at work about an hour early for a special project and before that I had to stop off and pick up donut holes and bananas as treats for the participants. Then we had to work our butts off for 5 hours racing against the clock on a Web project that everyone in the library would be watching as it happened because we have no development area and the whole thing had to done live (don’t get me started on the whys of that IT set up). So I had to be on my game. And perky about it to boot.

I changed into my jammies and watched Guliani introduce Palin. I wasn’t tired. I’d had a Vicodin for my back and normally that makes me sleepy but not last night. I was excited about seeing Palin and when she got up to speak I saw the VCR start recording. Perfect! I wouldn’t miss the ending. Only, I never got tired. Well, that couldn’t be right. I went to bed anyway. Nothing happened. I mean, nothing. I continued watching Palin. I watched the end of Palin’s speech. I commented out loud that this was the damndest thing. I got out of bed following proper sleep hygiene techniques and not lying awake in bed more than 20 minutes before getting up and trying again later – and I watched the Daily Show. Tried to sleep again. Nothing.

I got everything ready for the next morning – laid out my clothes, got my bag packed for PT, picked out my jewelry – EVERYTHING, because I knew I was going to be dragging badly when I got up. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to go into work at all but no, I HAD to go. This was the culmination of four and half months of team effort. I could not cancel and I had to be there personally for this one. We had a lab scheduled by another department for the work. I mean, today was the day.

After a while I got online, I mean, I had nothing else to do. Chats popped up. “You’re awake?” people asked, “Is everything OK?, Is your back OK?” I ended one chat with the announcement that, of course, I was going to bed. She understood immediately. I still couldn’t sleep. Started another chat, that one went on well into hours I haven’t seen in many years. It ended with the notation that I was, of course, going to bed. And I did, two more times. No luck.

Finally, it was 3:30 in the morning and I decided to eat breakfast so I wouldn’t have to do it when I got up. I did fall asleep sometime after 4:30 and was up promptly at 6:30, dressed, and out the door in minutes. I was at that goddamned lab booting up computers with donut holes in one hand at 7:15. Also, three cups of coffee.

I kept expecting to just fall over. For whatever reason, it still hasn’t happened, and I’m not particularly tired, and its almost 9 PM now. I have taken tomorrow morning off (but I’ll go in the afternoon) because this will end and I will fall over dead at some point and its not going to be pretty. I’ve considered the matter very carefully and come to the conclusion that was I am experiencing is normal. More normal for other people than for me, but normal for me on rare occasions, too, I think.

The title of this entry is an homage to my friend Unlibrarian who posted on the opposite problem this summer at her blog.