who needs sleep?

I found out early in life that sleep and I were going to have a relationship with a tense love/hate dynamic. Meaning I love sleep, but I hate how LONG it takes me to get there. By the age of nine, I used to get so frustrated when listening to the radio when the music program would change from "Light on the Bays" to "Night on the Bays." "Night on the Bays" basically meant that the DJ's were peacing out for the night and switching on an automated playlist of soft rock favorites. This is why I know all the songs of my parents' generation. Never missed a single one. My parents at this point would be in bed, my brother and my sister were beyond comatose, my dad would be snoring, the house would be creaking, and I would be fully aware of the fact that I was the only one in the home awake. And now not even listening to any Delilah-wannabe's talking about touching personal stories (ya know, special song dedications for husbands in the military, Grandma's passing away, Ronny being sorry to Jeannine for breaking up, etc). I'd look out the window to find not a single light on in any of the houses. I was ALONE. This was very distressing for the nine year old Betsey. I was a weird child, what can I say. (I also used to take every single one of my stuffed animals, pile them into a mountain three times the size of me on one half of my bed, cover them all with a sheet and try to hug them all protectively with one arm because I was positive that if someone climbed in my window to rob our house they'd head STRAIGHT for my yellow Care Bear or my Glo-Worm. Logical, no?)

Anyway, when you're one of these crazy people who ends up staying awake til the sun comes up without any good reason, you have to be creative to keep yourself entertained. At least until sleepiness, that lazy bastard who always seems to take his sweet freakin time getting here, decides to swing by. On weekends, sometimes it's fun to still be up at 3:00, 4:00, 5:00am... because you can stop watching the crazy television that they put on at these hours and from the window you direct your attention down upon the groups of people coming home from the bar. While this can at times be a bit depressing, as they are coming home from a fun night out and you, in your sweatpants and your hair in an attractive ball-like configuration, are stalkishly staring at them from a dark window. But then you get to laugh when things happen like when the drunk girl, clutching on to her boyfriend to keep the ground from spinning so much, trips on her own dominatrix-style boots, resulting in an out of control, inebriated stumble... complete with flailing limbs. And I, having seen it, can laugh just like Jon Lovitz in that scene from Wedding Singer after Adam Sandler sings that song to Drew Barrymore... (Jon Lovitz says, "He's going craaazy... and I'm reaping all the benefits" and then laughs evilly, his eyes bulging threateningly, as the curtain slowly shadows his face) I'm a little less creepy though, I think. I hope?

My brain activity peaks during the nighttime hours (I'd actually like to hook my brain up to a monitor sometime and compare the activity levels during, for example, History of Architecture class, during which the little bleep would flatline, compared with sitting in bed at 3:00am, when it'd be all over the place). In fact, I bet anything that I think more in one night than I probably do in a week's worth of daytime hours. This, of course, can be a positive or a negative thing, depending on your mood, the day you've just had, etc. It can be a good thing if you're thinking of fun things, or upcoming events, or happy memories, or funny moments that make you laugh out loud in bed, or weird thought patterns like relating Yoda to grammar, or just organizing things in your head... You eventually fall asleep content, or perhaps smiling and thinking about big multi-colored lollipops and clouds made of marshmellows. You have absolute freedom to let your mind wander to wherever the hell it wants to go because you are competely alone with nobody to distract you... everything that enters in your mind is absolutely pure, and raw, and untainted. Clearly it can be a bad thing when, for example, you can't help but replay scenes from the whopping three scary movies you've seen (the tunnel scene in 28 Days Later with the rats and then when the girl comes popping contortedly out of the tv screen in The Ring are the ones that CONTINUE to haunt me.. you think I'm kidding..), or when you replay and overthink things/ conversations/ scenarios/ comments/ etc, or when you stress out about this paper or that test coming up. At a certain point you just can't stop and it all just builds upon itself... and this is the worst sleeplessness: you eventually fall into a restless, worried, depressed, frustrated sleep that often follows you right up until you wake your ass up.

And those are my thoughts on insomnia. And now that it's 5:28am, I'm going to try for the second time this evening to go to sleep. Good night, and may fluffy marshmellow clouds and cute hopping bunny rabbits be with you. Don't ask.