Insomnianiac

First of all, no, insomnianiac is not a real word. And it probably isn't actually insomnia if you've only had it one night, but I had almost no sleep last night. Here are some signs that you might be having a sleepless night if you find yourself lying in bed thinking about these kinds of things:

• You start planning out what your are going to write about insomnia in your blog the next morning.


• You begin to wonder, what is the etymology of the word insomnia? I remember talking about it in my etymology class last semester, but I don't remember the details. I think in- is a prefix meaning "not," and SOMN- is a base meaning sleep?


• How do you say, "didn't sleep a wink" in Spanish? Turns out it's no pegar ojo or pasar la noche en claro. And in Chinese? Um, I have no idea. I guess just 睡不好觉。


• Your watch just beeped on the hour again and you have lost count. Is it 4:00am or 5:00am now?


• In an effort to fall asleep, you try to force your brain to shut off by focusing on something, like blackness, or an imaginary dot and try not to let your brain think about anything else. But then you are focusing so hard that you start think about how hard you are focusing on not thinking about things like focusing on not thinking.


• You realize that you are finally starting to doze off, but that realization wakes your right back up.


• Just as the sun starts coming up in the morning is when you finally nod off and get some quality slumber. Unfortunately you have a hard time sleeping when it's light outside, so you end up only getting a few hours of hard-earned sleep.

Luckily I don't have this problem very often as I think I inherited my mother's skill at sleeping. The last time I couldn't sleep like this was back in April when I had MINI Mania (Part I, Part II). I just couldn't stop thinking about all things MINI. Last night was actually kind of similar because I just bought a new (old) road bike, and I kept thinking about how much fun I'm going to have with it and stuff and all the upgrades I want to get for it. Here's a picture of it (you can click on it for a full-size version if you want to):



I'm pretty happy about it. I found it on Craigslist and drove down to Aurora with Casey to get it last night. It was a little over $100, which I think is a pretty good price. I've been wanting a road bike for awhile now and this will be a good way for me to get into road biking for cheap. It's an older Motobecane bike (1970's I think?), but it's all in great shape and has some character to it. I think riding a decent old bike is pretty equivalent to driving old cars. It may not be quite as good or as fast or as efficient as a new one, but they just provide a different kind of feel that you can't get on the newer ones. Also, it has some neat details, like the frame is lugged which just has more neat visual details compared to a non-lugged frame. Also, when I buy a newer bike someday when I have more money, this bike will be perfect to build into a fixed-gear single-speed, which is also something I've been wanting for a long time; perhaps even longer than I've had MINI Mania...