Insomnia: Part IV

You guys are probably sick of reading about my sporadic insomnia, but I'm not sick of writing about it yet, so here comes the latest episode.

I don't know if tonight's insomnia is due more to the mocha coffee that I had this evening, or to the bar of delicious organic dark chocolate that I had after that, but whatever it is my mind is racing and I can't shut it off. Granted, I do have a lot on my mind these days...

I've already planned out, put a lot of thought into, and even jotted down two pages of notes for my next 6 blog entries or so (not including this one, number 7 I guess), and I still can't sleep. I've also already put a lot of thought into the 5 or 6 projects/tests/homeworks that I have due over the next couple days, but still my mind won't rest. I haven't had any MINI-mania tonight though... nor have I spent much time thinking about fixed gear bikes. I've probably rolled over in bed from one side to the other at least 30 times so far, but still no sleeping.

Anyway, I have lots to do tomorrow, so I should really try hard to get some sleep. We'll see how many of those planned blog entries I actually end up writing too, since last time I did this I didn't end up writing about any of them...

After I posted my last entry about insomnia, the next day I remembered a good song called "Insomnia" by a guy/band that I really like named Faithless and I was kind of mad that I hadn't posted this song instead. But then I thought that there will almost surely be another chance to post a song about insomnia, so tonight I'm posting that video. There are a few other songs by this group that I also really like and maybe I'll post them too in the future.

Yet More Insomnia

I'm at it again, not sleeping. Again the culprit is a myriad of thoughts racing through my head. There are so many things racing around up there that I can't even stay focused on being distracted from sleep. Here are just most of the things that are occupying my thoughts. Sorry if it reads like a long, boring to-do list. Feel free to skip it if you want, my feelings won't be hurt:

• I am giving a presentation in my Spanish linguistics class tomorrow. I am feeling so confident and ready and excited for it for some reason. I am thinking about all the clever and insightful things I hope I remember to say during the presentation. I'm thinking about how it will be such a good presentation that it will just blow everybody's socks off (I hope their feet aren't too stinky).
• As soon as I'm done with that I have to go to Longmont to take the written test to get my CDL permit. Have I studied enough? Will the test be hard? Mostly though I'm just excited to be another step closer to realizing my dream of driving a bus. Why am I so freaking excited about driving a bus? Who knows... it's a mystery. Kind of related to the CDL test tomorrow is that while I am headed in that direction I should probably drive up to Dad's house and take my summer tires up there for winter storage. I definitely don't have time to go up there, but as long as I am halfway there already it would probably be most efficient to do both things in one trip.
• Speaking of taking steps towards driving a bus, before I can get the permit I had to get a physical exam today. I think I am pretty healthy, and mostly I am, but the doctor said I had a slightly abnormal urine sample. I had trace levels of blood and protein in it (sorry, TMI?). The doctor didn't seem REALLY concerned about it, but he said it could be indicative of anything from a benign urinary tract infection (although those are rare in men), to bladder cancer (scary). But he said I should just be aware of it and come back in a few months for another urine sample. Kind of scary though, what could it mean? Should I be worried? Should I not be worried? I guess I'll just forget about it for a few months and hope it turns out to be nothing.
• My bus-driving training starts bright and early on Saturday morning. I'm so excited!!! I wonder if they'll get me behind the wheel on the very first day... I hope so. I hope I love it as much as I think I will. But on the flip side, how the hell am I going to balance a steadily increasing course load as deadlines for final papers/projects/tests near, PLUS do 80 hours of bus-driving training before I can start work the day after school ends, PLUS keep up with the transcribing job with which I have already been failing to get all the hours I'm supposed to? It sounds impossible to me... I will be really amazed if I manage to pull it all off.
• Then there's the presentation for the International Affairs class from hell that is due only a few days after Thanksgiving "break." But I'm trying not to think about that very much.
• The application for the JET program teaching English in Japan is due at the beginning of December, I'm not sure if I'll be able to pull that together in time. Then what?
• Oh dang, my car insurance bill is almost due. I don't want to pay it. Maybe I should just sell that car and make my sister chauffeur me around instead.
• How on earth am I going to work enough hours at my transcribing job so that they won't fire me? I've never been fired from a job before and I would like to keep it that way for a little longer at least.
• I still have to find time to finish that one last online assignment for my online International Economics class...
• I really need to clean my room. It's so bad that even I am bothered by it. That's pretty bad.
• Oh, how could I have forgotten about the Portuguese presentation that I've also been thinking about. It isn't for a few weeks still, and I only have a vague idea of what I'm going to talk about (China - Brazil relations), but I'm pretty sure I'm gonna blow the socks off of that one too. I can picture me speaking pretty fluent sounding Portuguese, but when it comes time to actually do it, the words still don't come out that smoothly for me, but it'll just take some practice. Portuguese sounds pretty sweet, by the way.
• I have a couple of ideas that I think would make for really interesting thesis papers in linguistics. Too bad I don't have time to write a senior honors thesis paper. Maybe I'll try to remember them for grad school or something though...
• What will be the next dumb/annoying and time-consuming task that my grandmother will require of me?
• So, that's most of what has been racing through my head keeping me awake tonight. Of course there's also the normal background noise of VTEC Mini Coopers, fixed-gear bikes, random linguistic crap, needing a girlfriend, etc...

Today's video is a pretty song in Portuguese that I don't understand and a video about a stick-figure who really uses his disproportionately-large noggin.

Substance-Induced Insomnia

Well, I had another sleepless night last night, but this time it was due to neither high winds, nor mini mania (Part I, II), nor fixed-gear fantasies. Nope, this time the culprit was something entirely new: experimentation with pyschoactive substances. After living in a college town like Boulder where practically everyone does it, I figured that I should try it too...

Yup, I've started drinking coffee (haha, did I trick you?). Being the novice coffee drinker I am though, I drank too much coffee too late last night and when I was finished with my work and came home to go to sleep, I was just too hopped-up on caffeine to sleep (that reminds me, cafeí­na - "caffeine" would be an excellent subsitution in the Gasolina o Quesadilla? song...).

Last time I wrote about having a sleepless night my dad commented that when I can't sleep I should just accept and embrace the insomnia and get up and do something while I'm feeling awake. I pondered this, but then I realized that regardless of whether I can get to sleep or not, I still have to wake up at the same time in the morning, so I should just stay in bed and keep trying to fall asleep on the off chance that it works. And actually, even though I failed at that, I still managed to get just as much accomplished laying there in bed pretending to sleep as I would have had I gotten up and tried to do some homework or something. As I was laying there, I thought up at least 5 or 6 blog posts worth of material, which means I have potentially saved myself several hours over the coming days and weeks of agonizing blog-planning time. Actually, that's not true because I will probably keep thinking of new things that I want to write about, so really I am just at a deficit now and I will have to write extra in order to keep the topics from piling up too high. So really I've just made MORE work for myself?!

I think about blog topics fairly often as I'm dozing off, but I often forget about them by the morning because I don't want to get out of bed and write anything down because it might disrupt my train of thought (that and I'm also usually tired and lazy and comfortable in bed). But last night I actually wrote stuff down so I won't forget it...

After several hours of laying in bed mentally planning out my next several blog entries (I last looked at the clock at 2:30, and I'm sure I was still awake for at least another half an hour or so...), I finally began to arrive at the final laps of the mind-race. I got this strange spacial sensation that I have always gotten from time to time for pretty much as long as I can remember; I wonder if anyone else has ever had this sort of sensation. It happens when I am somewhere around probably 60% consciousness and my body becomes really relaxed. It becomes relaxed to the point where I almost can't even feel it. Then I get this strange feeling that I am just a head, no body, and I have become very small and I am in the corner of a very large room on the floor where it meets the wall. But I can still kind of feel my limbs, and I can also still hear and listen to the real room that I am actually sleeping in, which still sounds like a normal sized room. Theses two conflicting sensations almost seem to combine to where the overall sensation is an illogical feeling of being a tiny, bodiless head that is at once both lost in, and filling up the huge room with my body. It is a really neat sensation. After laying there for a few minutes I start to become aware of how I can't really feel my body and it makes me want to move, twitch my arm, stretch my leg, just to feel that it's still there, but at the same time I want to resist the temptation to move because when I move it immediately interrupts this whole sensation even if only for a moment.

Anyway, today's video is "Risingson" by one of my all-time favorite musical groups, Massive Attack. I haven't been listening to them as much lately though because I have instead been listening almost exclusively to Muse (at least I resisted the temptation to put up another Muse video though...). Their CD Mezzanine was the only thing I listened to all day, everyday for pretty much the entire summer of 2000 while I was working at AGENCY.COM coding HTML. I chose this video because even though it's a pretty boring video, I think the song makes a pretty good soundtrack to insomnia.

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...