So…hungry…

Since I am pretty much in a perpetual state of sleep deprivation, every now and then I’ll take a run at what is the sleeping equivalent of jumping a retracting drawbridge in your car. For me, this is a) putting Mia to bed at 7-ish, and b) trying to go sleep right afterward and sleep through the entire night, until Mia wakes me up at 6-ish a.m.

I compare this to jumping a drawbridge because, first off, it’s thrilling and wonderful and immensely satisfying if you can pull it off. But it is also beset with peril. When I attempt to go to bed so early, my body thinks I can’t be serious, and instead wakes me up in about an hour or two, believing I just wanted a nap. If I’m extremely tired, I can fight back and refuse to consider getting up, watching TV, using the computer or anything like that, and just keep lying there forcing myself to go to sleep. However, if I can’t put myself back to sleep, then I’m screwed for the rest of the night, because it’ll be 10 p.m. and I’ve just taken a three-hour nap and am feeling extremely rested. I have no chance of going back to sleep anytime soon. And if they laid odds on this sort of thing, it’d be 5-to-1 of me NOT being able to go back to sleep, because given the couple hours of rest I just got, any little stimulus is enough to bring me back to the waking world.

Tonight, that stimulus was the dead-battery warning on Mrs. General’s cell phone blaring out from the kitchen every 90 seconds or so. I should be used to this, since it happens at least twice a week, always in the middle of the night, awakening me and only me. Apparently this problem is impossible to solve. Perhaps next time I will attempt to solve the problem on the garage floor with Mrs. General’s phone and a claw hammer. ANYWAY, for some reason, Holly is deathly afraid of the dead-battery warning (she is also terrified of the same warning on smoke detectors), and when she hears it, she climbs up on the bead and shakes harder than Robin Williams at a rehab center. Combine these two, and I’m up now, for a good while. It’s 1:20 a.m. and I have no clue when I’ll be back asleep. If I get back to sleep before Mia wakes up at 6, I’ll be lucky.

And if it’s not bad enough that I’m awake at this hour with no prospects of sleep on the horizon, the double whammy is how painfully hungry I am. I cut off eating food around 7 p.m. these days, and I still get hungry if I’m up later, but I can manage it. However, now that I’m actually awake, GOD AM I STARVING. It makes me wonder, am I this hungry in my sleep every night? Surely not, or I would dream about nothing but Dairy Queen and ribeye steaks, and in actuality I dream of neither. And this is the worst time to eat, because I know my metabolism is very slowed at this time of night.

Maybe I will eat Mrs. General’s phone.

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16 January 2007 | Josh's Posts | Comments