To the Beat of the Rhythm of the Night

Back in the day when I was a young lass, I was friends with sleep. Me and the Sandman, we would kick it. Hardcore. I could sleep any time. Anywhere. When I was a teenager, my friends and I would carouse about town doing teenage things (2am sundaes at McDonald's! whoo hooooo!) and then I would crash into sleep wherever I ended up. In the back seat of a car? No probs, holmes. On a friend's couch? Bring it! On the floor of a friend's living room, my blue mascara (oh no) crunched together, my white keds kicked off and my jaw all aslack? Totally. I would sleep. Just like that.

Somewhere, in my early early 20s, things changed. The Sandman broke up with me and sleeping was never quite the same again. I would spend hours, awake. Reading, watching tv, gnashing my teeth in frustration. At the time, it was the least of my problems. I was in the middle of a period in my life I like to call Puberty the Sequel, where everything that happened was dramatic and exhausting. So in addition to the lack of sleeping, I was doing a lot of Diane Keaton-style crying about stuff. You know that whole montage in Something's Gotta Give where Diane Keaton just walks around busting up crying over everything? That was me, around age 20. (And if you have never seen that montage, you have to so totally click on that link there. It is so freakin' funny.) So really, I didn't have time to sleep. I had a full day's worth of waterworks to get through and I was burning the midnight oil doing it.

After Puberty the Sequel ended, I went into a phase where I could sleep, but would wake up over anything. Traffic noises outside my window, a creak in the ceiling, the next door neighbors having sexual furniture-moving episodes that I could hear through my wall. (What is a sexual furniture-moving episode, you ask? It was what I chose to name the sounds that I was hearing, which could not be described any other way than to say that my neighbors were clearly knockin' boots and pushing their furniture around at the same time. I tell you, there is a fetish for everything). Just when I was getting over this hyper awareness of sound and sleeping through all the racket, I moved. And my new apartment? Was totally silent. I remember my first night in that apartment. I was wide awake most of the night, freaked out by all the nothing that was happening in my presence. No traffic, no neighbors, no nothing.

The Sandman was chased away once again, and came back slowly and cautiously and settled into my new silent room. And then? Wham! Nordic Boy got sick. Really, really sick. In and out of the hospital, almost kicking the bucket kind of sick. When that was going on, my sleeping habits grew even lighter than they ever had before. "Sleeping with one eye open" is what I believe it's called. I was atuned to everything about Nordic Boy-- I would wake up if his breathing pattern changed. I would wake up if he moved in the slightest. I was watching him for any changes and so conking out was out of the question. And during this time, the Sandman was fed up and just hightailed it out the door and never came back. To this day, I will wake up if Nordic Boy so much as sighs in his sleep. The fear of that period has never left, I suppose.

So for the past two days, Nordic Boy has had a very slight cold. You wouldn't even know he had a cold really, it's so slight. But for the past two nights, the congestion has made him snore. I am talking full on, buzz saw, cartoon style snoring. It's like a nasal nocturne all night long and it ain't soothing. So for me, the girl who usually is functioning on a few hours of sleep a night, and who wakes up when a mosquito farts, this has meant no sleep at all. At all.

The Sandman has screwed me over once again. Maybe some day I will sleep a full 8 hours again at some point in my life. Sleeping for real seems like part of my lost youth, gone forever just like Pixie Stix straws and DeBarge.

I'm tired, peeps. As usual. That's all.

I'm out,
Librarian Girl