Already Almost Broke My New Rule

But I was asleep almost all morning! Which is a minor miracle for me.

I have lots of sleep problems. I have insomnia, sleep apnea, and restless leg syndrome. The latter sounds like it's a joke but it isn't -- it's where your leg twitches uncontrollably while you sleep, sometimes waking you up.

Yeah, I know, it may be real but it's still stupid. But all sleep disorders are stupid. Sleep is a necessity of life, yet for many people their brains or legs prevent it, for no good reason but just out of apparent spite. It's like if you couldn't eat one day because you had restless arms that uncontrollably threw food at your crotch. You'd be like "Hey, arms, man. What's your damage? We're all in this together. You need this food too. Why are you making this difficult for the rest of us?"

So all the sleep stuff has been a chronic problem lately. I'm sleepy all the time, going to bed early, always getting up at weird times, etc. I'm even lamer than usual in the evening, usually feeling like bed around 9 or so. It sucks.

Finally I decided I had to admit I had a problem and I went to an overnight sleep clinic, which I wouldn't recommend doing for fun by the way. I was kind of looking forward to it in a weird way. It seemed like a wild experience, being hooked up to machines and watched while I slept. Very original at least. It sounded like an interesting experience that someone could talk about slowly and calmly on that NPR show "White People Talking Slowly and Calmly About Something Sort of Interesting." But like most things that sound like a wild weird experience, it was actually very dull. It takes about an hour for them to stick all the diodes on you, during which small talk is strained at best.

The only kinda cool part is that they have a camera trained on you the whole time you're in bed. And they write down everything you do. So even as you're lying in the dark, looking around quizzically, with sort of a "What the fuck?" look on your face, they see it and write down "Patient looks around quizzically, with a sort of 'What the fuck' look on his face."

INTERMISSION

I just thought that if I were to write an pro-environment song, I'd want to rhyme "earth" with "turd." So it would be something like "She is our mother, we must love the earth .... Not flush it away like a moldering turd." It's evocative imagery, especially the "moldering" part. It would get a laugh, and then maybe people would stop and think. I think it could do some good.

END INTERMISSION

So anyway, I didn't sleep terribly well in the sleep clinic, in part because I had a dozen diodes all over my skull. The weirdest part was when I woke up and saw that it was 6:20 and wanted to get up for good. So I just kind of said, "hello?" And then a voice came over the loudspeaker, "Hello?" That's a creepy feeling, really bringing home the fact that you're being watched very carefully while you sleep. You feel like you're center stage in an extremely long and boring production of "Man Sleeping Uncomfortably." Then you decide that it's performance art and therefore brilliant.

It took about two weeks for them to interpret the results. And then I called and they said they couldn't talk about the results over the phone, which I thought was weird. But I thought maybe it was sensitive information because my sleep disorders made me a perfect candidate for a CIA job going undercover in a ... are you ready for this one ... sleeper cell! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Whew, feels good to laugh. So anyway, I had to wait another two weeks to get the results. Meanwhile I'm struggling to get through some days, and feeling like I have a very short attention span and could drop off very easily. I worried it was really affecting my performance at work. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Whew, sorry, still getting over that "sleeper cell" gag (hee hee ...). So the short version is that it all kinda sucked. There's a special brand of low-level suckiness reserved for illnesses and disorders that aren't serious enough to keep you at home laid up for a few days, so you have to just live with them for weeks.

And then I finally met with a doctor to see the results, and it was actully a nurse (which was fine of course, but I kinda wonder what doctors actually do these days), and it was a lot of very interesting stuff, charting my entire night in the sleep lab in great detail. And the final conclusion was ... I need to sleep on my side. When I sleep on my back, I start snoring and my throat closes up and my legs twitch and my hands start flipping off random people and my genitalia dance the cabbage patch and basically it's a big wild party. When I sleep on my side everyone calms down and helps out with the sleeping.

So that's it. The last few days I've been sleeping on my side and already I have the energy of a man half my age. I've taken up competitive ballroom dancing and already won a few medals in local competitions. I can jump over even the largest sleeping housecats and do so regularly. When I see a loose board lying around, I chop it in half, whereas before I would have given maybe a token tap and slumped away. And the changes in the bedroom ... woo! Now I sleep!