I'm Back!/Sleeping Woes

Hello World! I am back. I decided to start fresh with my bloggie, so I deleted all my old posts, which dealt a great deal with political topics. However, I found one that I had not completed. It must have been at least 5 months old, sitting there, incomplete. So, as my first "new" post, I am putting it in below. I will then update you all about my progress since then, since I am sure everyone will take time out of their very busy lives to read about me. Here it is:

For the life of me, I cannot fall asleep. Well, to be fair, I can fall asleep, just not at the right times. I can fall asleep during lab meetings, where other lab members have been hedging bets as to whether I will be able to stay awake or not. I can fall sleep during any science talk where data is discussed. I can fall asleep on the train, during a 13 minute ride to the mall. I can fall asleep after lunch, when I should be working. But when most normal people pack up their lives and say goodnight to the moon, I am awake. I lay in bed and stare at the ceiling, the bedpost, the wall, the door. All sorts of thoughts come to me. "Perhaps, if I learned to sew, I could be a fashion designer." "Perhaps, if I learned to walk, I could be a supermodel." "It would be nice to fly first class on British Airways to Cairo." "Gosh, I want honeycomb, with the beeswax."

Many things come to me as I lay in my bed, but sleep comes last. And then I dream. I dream terrible, terrible things. Muzza dying. Being mugged. Things about me, like looking in the mirror and seeing saggy flipfloppy man boobies staring back at me, love handles, a happy trail gone seriously sad... the list goes on. I feel like the character in the Edgar Allan Poe story, The Tell-Tale Heart. But it isn't a heart I hear beating; it's my own brain screaming.

My frustration can hardly be put into words. But my thoughts will not stop flowing at these hours. About a dozen simultaneously cloud my poor head each and every time I lay to rest. So when I wake in the morning, I have slept a maximum of 5 hours each night. And so my body grabs back every minute of sleep it can: in lab meeting, at lectures, at journal presentations, on the train...

I cannot focus on anything. What you can do in 1 hour, I can only dream of doing in two. I am so completely out of it that even to carry on a conversation with some people is difficult. If I am not interested in what you're saying, then I more or less zone out. And every now and then, I come back, feel bad about my ignoring you, and pretend to be interested.

This has made for some awkward situations, of course. Someone might be talking about their brother, perhaps.

Person: "So my brother broke his leg... (I begin zoning out).... and he had to go to the hospital... they put a cast on 6 weeks ago... luckily he's gotten it taken off just before soccer practice starts back up... so now he can run again (I zone back in and feel bad)..."

Me: "Well, I'm glad nothing is broken"


Okay, this is where it ended. More later.