2016-03-03 

I can’t sleep. Actually, that’s not true, falling asleep isn’t the problem. This past week I’ve been tired all the time but that’s because there’s not enough time in the day to get everything done and sleep ends up being the casualty. I’m working forty-hours on a job (Full Sail Labs) that doesn’t pay me enough to stay ahead of my debts, which depresses me, making it impossible at the end of the day to concentrate and put in the extra effort needed to improve my career situation, which then leads me to vegging out with sci-if and porn, and thus the cycle continues. Fuck. Sleep isn’t the problem, it’s lack is the latest expression of my unhappy state of being. Damn.

2015-02-17 

Except for Saturday mornings I’ve historically tended to survive on as little sleep as possible. Freshman year at LMU, I loved staying up late writing. And when my roommate fell asleep I’d slip out into the night air, walk to the on campus mailbox and post my letters, surrounded by the stillness and silence of the night. Then over my 15-year run with the phone company I spent a good portion of it working the evening or night shifts from either 4pm to midnight or midnight to 8am, driving from CO to CO troubleshooting some failed circuit with the darkness as my companion. I loved the timelessness of night. What can I say, I was young and stupid.

2023-09-27

As one can guess from the preceding two paragraphs, written after I’d been laid off from my teaching position at Full Sail University in Florida, I have a natural tendency to ignore what some might consider “normal” sleep cycles under the mistaken notion that I was squeezing as much as I could from every day. And this was my life changing encounter with CIDP, that one would think would have reset my understanding of the importance of getting enough sleep. And now that I don’t have to be on-campus by 7:20 every morning, I’m still negotiating how to get enough sleep, get enough “done,” and recognize my night-owl tendencies. 

I can only imagine that my “early bird” dad, when he retired, must have driven my night-owl mom crazy. The last few times that I visited them it seems like they’d adopted her stay up late/get up late schedule. After dad passed away, when I stayed with mom, I frequently found myself going to bed before she was ready to call it a day (even though she had been falling asleep on the couch most of the evening…). 

Sixteen-weeks into this new reality, I’m working on a basic weekly schedule so that I don’t drive myself crazy obsessing on whatever the latest “I’ve been meaning to do thing X.” This past month the biggest thing that needed to get done was setting up my Medicare coverage, but right in the middle of all that (and my daily writing) I restarted digitizing my DVD/Blu-ray collection to my media server because that’s an essential… Ugh. So, sleep… I’m trying to be better at it (and still get “everything” done). [sigh].