260 and 256

It is the 260th day of 2007. I've written 256 posts, which is more than I thought it would be, given the multiple days I didn't post due to vacations. Heck, I was in Mexico for a week! And in or on the road to and from Colorado for another week. Not to mention the shorter periods of no internet access. What a mystery.


I've been feeling low on steam for this project lately. The last week or so I have been having trouble sleeping, I think I may have been all wound up about the Food Bank moving on Saturday. You see, I had told the Food Bank Director that I wanted a triple-wide trailer for my birthday, and he made it happen. Unfortunately the move-out date was my birthday so I wound up working on my birthday for the first time in four years (which had been the first time in at least four years, but I had been "released to work" on that day so I had to go in).


Last night took advantage of feeling sleepy after dinner and got under the covers to read pretty much immediately. Being in bed for two hours before sleeping works much better when you get in bed at 830 than when you get in bed at 1030. And I actually woke up rested this morning for a change!


All that was part of my saying that being tired makes it hard to write. DaveO and I used to look at each other on Fridays, after a week of studying, and say, "My brain is full!" I don't know what it's full of now, but it feels like cotton and not much of anything to write about most of the time. I couldn't even plan a big birthday event for myself (like ice cream at Knudsen's) and as a result didn't have one, which bummed me out.


Here it is almost ten pm and I'm writing this post now. However, I'm also ending it so I can go to bed. G'night!

We're Off!

The Killer Lady and I are heading out today for The Cabin. We're taking the northern route through Reno and Winnemucca in Nevada, Salt Lake City in Utah, and Glenwood Springs and Aspen in Colorado. Google says it will take 18 hours and nine minutes. There's nothing like driving cross-country to make you realize how truly large the United States is. Growing up in San Francisco, the borders were always far away but almost always cultivated. There's a whole lot of nothing but plains and mountains in the distance out here.


I think I've been having trouble sleeping because I'm excited about the road trip and seeing old friends I haven't seen, for the most part, in five or more years. Work has been tiring but I've been having trouble settling down in the evening, and then I've been waking up early in the morning. This morning I dreamt that the Killer Lady and I were at The Cabin and I had slept through the whole trip!


The Cabin has no Internet access so I will be offline until after the 27th. I plan to write everyday, in longhand, in a notebook (how old-school is that?). In the meantime, have a lovely rest of your July.

Best Laid Plans

My first year on the staff at Odyssey I was very close with one of the other staffers, Somwell. Somwell was large and gentle, always gave people his full attention, told the truth about how he was feeling (most of the time), and was basically magnetic. We were attracted to each other, and it felt, that week, as if we were attached at the hip in the few off hours that we had during camp. I remember one time when we sat so close that I felt his beard on my cheek while we were chatting with some other staffers.


Many of those hours of chatting happened late at night. The youth staff took over around 10pm, and the younger set of the adult staff would hang out in the lodge for a couple of hours afterwards. During training Somwell and I had hung out until the early hours of the morning, and during camp we did too. Camp was emotionally and physically draining, but it was hard for me to wind down at night, and I had never liked going to bed anyway.


We had a staff meeting every morning directly after breakfast. Halfway through the week, at the meeting I made an announcement asking people to encourage me to go to bed by midnight. Everyone agreed. That night, while shooting the breeze in the lodge, several people noted that it was creeping toward midnight and that I had asked them to tell me to go to bed. I agreed that I had, and I thanked them and headed out.


Sitting on the picnic table about ten yards from the lodge was Somwell. He was looking at the night sky, and it seems that I can remember he was looking at the moon or that he was looking at the stars. The place where camp was held was in a pretty rural area, so the sky would have been lit up either way. He called to me, and I walked over. I hadn't seen him as I had passed the table. He asked me where I was going "so early" and I explained that I had asked people to help me go to bed at a reasonable hour. He didn't remember that; it turned out that he had missed the staff meeting that morning. Of course if anyone was going to keep me up it would have been he, and we talked for at least an hour.


I got back to the bunk cabin I shared with some other staffers, crept in to get my toothbrush and paste, and went to the bathrooms to get ready for bed. As I walked away from the cabin, again I heard my name called, this time by one of my bunkmates. She had followed me out because she really wanted to talk about something that she felt she could only share with me. She'd heard me ask for support for my relatively early bedtime and had been waiting. That led to more conversation in the bathrooms after I was done brushing my teeth.


I remember this specifically: The clock by YaYaWOT's bunk read 2:20 when I climbed into my bed.

Sleeping

When I was a kid, I didn't sleep much. Assuming I got up at 7:00 to go to school, I probably slept four hours a night, on good nights. By "kid," I mean I was keeping those hours as a young child, even when I was a student at Dudley Stone Elementary, which means before fourth grade. No and I shared a room when we were small, and I remember watching him sleep even then.


I spent hours and hours lying in bed in the dark, waiting for it to be tomorrow. It didn't matter what was going on tomorrow, but I hated lying in bed, doing nothing. I wasn't allowed to read all night, although I was always saying "Just to the end of this chapter... to the end of this page... to the end of this paragraph" to my mother. I never read under the covers, due to a lack of flashlights rather than a lack of desire.


After our neighbors moved to Lafayette at the end of my second grade year, I went out there to spend the night. At the time Lafayette was the country and as far away as I had ever been from home without my mother. Lisa and I determined to stay up until midnight, which seemed like something a teenager would do. We struggled to stay awake, watching the clock so we could stop talking and lie down in the dark.


Finally the clock turned to 12:00 and Lisa promptly fell asleep. I watched the clock, resentful that my previous exhaustion had fled, for at least two more hours. I wished I could sleep and was so frustrated that I never could. Every sleepover was the same way, I was always wide awake hours after my friends had fallen asleep. I was also the first one awake, and felt obligated to wait for my friends to awaken before I could go downstairs and get some cereal or watch TV. More boredom, but more uncomfortable than at home, lying in a sleeping bag on the floor. If I was lucky, there was a bookshelf nearby that I could pull from until the host woke up.



I continued to not sleep until sometime during 11th grade. I realized after the fact that I was sleeping better, but I was also keeping later hours - at 16, Mom wasn't checking to see if the light was off in my room. And teenagers need more sleep, albeit at later hours, than people at any other age. When I was in college, at least once a semester I would stay up all night, without intoxicants or stimulants, which I thought was my body just resetting its clock.


Unless I'm sick, I still need a pretty specific set of requirements to be met to sleep. No noise, like people talking, the radio, or TV, or even the tapping of the keyboard when Zirpu's pulling late night for work. I need to be lying down (I absolutely cannot sleep on airplanes). I can get myself into a physically restful state that looks like sleep to others (which I realize sounds really stupid, like "Thinking with my eyes closed"), but my mind is usually going on at its usual speed. Sometimes I'm thinking, "I wish I were sleeping now."