October 24, 2011

Insomnia.

Right on schedule last night, since it was Sunday night and all, I had a wonderful case of insomnia around 2:30 a.m. Sunday nights have always been rough for me. I don’t know if it’s the pressures of returning to work or what the deal is, but I couldn’t get my head to slow down soon enough so that I could fall back asleep. I was still looking at the clock at 4:15.

There are few things more frustrating than staring at the ceiling, knowing that you need to fall asleep but you can’t and then getting more panicked about sleepwalking through the workday when you know you’re not going to have enough sleep under your belt. I tried counting sheep but that didn’t work. I tried the trick of walking through my old elementary school and remembering the teacher that occupied the room, the color of the room and the like, but that didn’t work. I counted backwards from 100 in French. And in English. I tried saying “Om” to myself. None of it worked, but then I guess I fell asleep around 4:35 or so, just in time for the alarm to go off at 5:30.

One of the things that bothers me about insomnia is that I usually get a song stuck in my head and it plays really loud and I can’t turn it down. One time it was “The Lord’s Prayer” by Sister Janet Mead and I couldn’t get it to stop until I looked the dang thing up on the internet and listened to the entire thing. It’s kind of catchy when you’re exhausted. Last night it was “Silly Love Songs” by Paul McCartney and Wings, but then just before I fell asleep I found myself trying to find a way to mix Jenn Cuneta’s “Come Rain, Come Shine” into “Silly Love Songs” (because Jenn’s song samples the older track) and then apparently this is what made me fall asleep.

I think another contributing factor to the bout of insomnia is the brightness of my alarm clock. A couple of years ago I bought a beautiful HD radio alarm clock, complete with iPod dock, surround sound and all sorts of goodies. Aside from the fact that we don’t have many HD radio stations in the area, it’s a sweet sounding setup, even though I had to install modern rabbit ears to get it to work properly. The problem with this little technological wonder is that it uses a backlit LCD display and even on it’s very lowest setting, the damn thing lights up the room like Times Square. When modern digital clocks started rolling around in the 1970s they used the dim, red LED displays and it was good – they barely lit up the room but you could still see the numbers without an issue. I think the backlit LCDs are cheaper and that’s why they are in use today. I usually put a picture of the husbear in front of the alarm clock, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a clock on your nightstand since I could easily rely on my phone to do the waking duties in the morning. Perhaps that’s what I’m going to do: sell the high tech alarm clock and just use my phone. I always squint at Earl’s clock on the other nightstand anyway because it uses the aforementioned red LED display.

Anyone want to buy an HD radio? You’ll be helping cure insomnia and I will have one less thing to bitch about here on this bloggy thing.