Why Am I Still Awake?

WHY?

am I STILL?

AWAKE???

It's no secret that my sleep has been all kinds of fucked up for years now, but lately my brain has been keeping me awake literally until dawn arrives. Then, when the rest of the world is starting their day, I'm crawling under the covers and missing out on... well... a whole lot of crappy heatwave stuff apparently... only to wake up when the day is finally starting to cool off again.

On second thought, insomnia has its perks.

But on third thought, I'm already weird enough without adding a vampire-like palor to the mix... like I have right now:

Don't be frightened. Not an actual vampire.

So this morning, or yesterday morning, or whatever day it was because I've lost track now, I was getting into bed again and I thought, "No, fuck it. I'm up. The world is up. I'm fixing this damn sleeping disorder now and staying up all day. Yeah. And by the time 10 or 11 PM rolls around, I'll be out like a light and presto! Normal sleep schedule."

Okay, so the day dragged by and I accomplished NOTHING other than reloading my iPod, because I was so zonked from the sleep dep that I couldn't see straight or concentrate on anything while feeling a little woozy and dizzy... though the dizzy part was kinda cool, especially the trails... and finally10 PM rolled around and I thought, "Oh, hey. I never checked the mail today. Better do that so nothing important sits out there to be vandalized by nogoodniks overnight."

I dragged my ass down to my mailbox in the dark, when no neighbors are around, and when everyone else is brushing their teeth, because that's just how I roll... when lo and behold... there's Disc One of Season Two of Carnivale. Fuck yeah! I've been waiting to see what happened for over a year-and-a-half, while HBO took it's sweet time making the discs... really jonesing here... truly. I don't have cable because I don't believe in paying for tv in my home and haven't had it since 1992, so that leaves me at the mercy of video releases, and so I had to threaten to kill everyone near me when Season Two was airing last year if they uttered a word about the turn of events. Then the series went and got canceled and now two seasons is all she wrote. Literally.

I know. I'm rambling. Deal with it.

So it's 10:15 when I get back inside, because I stood at the end of my driveway for 15 minutes lost in rambling thought, much like I just put you through just now. Of course I had to fire up the player and pop that puppy in.

Dangling preposition, I know, shutup.

How would I have reserves for the watching a dvd? Grad school, that's how. Five years of undergrad followed by another five of graduate education and all-nighters... though overwith a year ago... have left me with the restitudinal fortitude. (No, not even I know what I mean at this point.) In much the same disappointing way that I found out after 8 dry years of no alcoholic consumption whatsoever, that once I did drink again, my youth training (and my Irish and German genes) was so thorough that it still took me 4 or 5 servings before I even felt a buzz. And that's really annoying as an adult, when drinks are far more expensive than they were when we used to steal them from our parents wetbar bottles and store our booty in a bottle behind one of our hi-fi speakers in our room.

Or maybe that was just me.

So anyway... two episodes later and it was midnight... and my brain was all fired up to do... um... nothing... because I have the attention span of a Setter... (...wait for it...)... an Irish Setter. So instead I made some dinner rolls. At 1 AM. You know, the kind you roll up and put in the oven for about 10 minutes. Rolling them took awhile, because I forgot what I was doing halfway through.

I swear I sound like I'd eaten a whole batch of pot brownies by myself, rather than just being an insomniac.

But you know what I hate most about this sitch? It's the fact that it screws with my whole "fitness agenda" ... I mean, aside from the batch of dinner rolls in the middle of the night. It keeps me from going to the gym, because by the time I'm fired up to go, it's like 8 or 9 PM and living like a vampire pretty much keeps me from going to the gym at that time... there's just too many damn mirrors in a gym for a vampire. Think about it. You never find vampires at the gym, do ya? And as supporting evidence of the mirror theory, think about all the Weeble-shaped goth chicks you know. Mmhmm. I rest my case.

Okay, that's a lame excuse. I could still go. But I feel silly and I think, "If I go this late, I'll never get to sleep before dawn." Then I sit around stalking everyone's profiles on Myspace until I hear birds chirping outside anyway. Or else I flip through the few channels that my attic antenna can pick up and complain about how bad tv is. To no one, of course.

Tonight, however, I saw a pleasant surprise. Despite my previous jab at round goth girls, I don't have any problems with other people's weight. Hell, I need to lose several hundred McNuggets myself... hence the gym membership... but I don't want to be a waif. I just want to be healthy and not taste metal and see a tunnel filled with dead relatives whenever I bend down to lace up my Fluevogs.

Hang on... Fluevogs? Vampires? McNuggets? Perhaps I need to make sure I'm not a Weeble-shaped Goth chick.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see Matthew Sweet tonight on Conan... not that I'm a big fan or anything... hell, I don't even know if I'm spelling his name right and I'm too woozy to check... but just that I finally saw him rather than just heard him. He's a big guy. In the music business. Good for him!

Of course, my level of impressedness (is that a word?) was short-lived when I saw that he was performing with Egyptian-walkin stick-figure, Susanna Hoffs (again, I don't give a rat's ass if I'm spelling that right). They looked like just about every sitcom couple that exists out there in tvland right now... dating back to the Cramdens and the Flintstones.

Suddenly I'm pissed off and over tired and eating dinner rolls in the middle of my living room at 1:30 in the morning, shouting vitriolic feminist spew at the set while flakey crescent roll chunks are flying this way and that, while chupacabras and centaurs pranced around gathering up the edible droppings and reminding me about the teachings of Jacques Lacan and only making me angrier that they'd be purporting such backward Freudian gobbledy goo.

I'm not sure if any of the above was true. Not even the Matthew Sweet part.

Please, please, please... Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream!

Don't mind the typos. I'm too groggy to whatev.