I am pretty much a toddler, when it comes to sleeping. At least seven hours a night. I’m twenty-seven now, you see, and not the spry young staying-up-late lass I once was. Except that I never was that lass, because I have always loved my bed with a near-unholy passion. I’m telling you I have never pulled an all-nighter, my friends. While it’s true I’ve been known to occasionally ring in the dawn, it’s a pretty rare event. I have to really really like the friend I’m talking to to stay up past midnight. Sleeping. It’s great. It’s free, easy, and low-calorie. Ah, sleep. I love it so.
You can imagine, then, the horror that is currently your friend Chiara right now. I fell asleep dangerously past my normal bedtime last night, and then woke up at three, four, and five in the morning. I had to be at work by seven, a half-hour’s drive away. I almost fell asleep asking an amputee about his social support today. I was pretty much worthless all day at work today. Between catching up on a three-day-weekend’s worth of email and falling asleep on my desk and getting dizzy because I hadn’t eaten very much, there wasn’t a whole lot of work to be gotten out of me. Oh. And you know what happened the minute I got back from the hospital and into my office? I walked in all bleary eyed from taking an hour to get from the hospital to my office, and someone swooped down on me and told me to run upstairs for a meeting.
A meeting. A meeting that involved my bosses putting electrodes on my head and making me “relax” for an hour. One of the projects my office does has to do with “hypnotic analgesia” which basically means tricking people by putting them to sleep and making them do your will, which, fortunately in this case, is to decrease their chronic pain. It takes an hour. A loooooooong hour, where, let me remind you, you have an electrode on your head. They have to stick it on you with special electrode sticky stuff. I didn’t have any chronic pain when the “meeting” started, but by the time the hour was over, I seriously did. Crazy.
Anyway. The reason I didn’t get my sleep the other night was because the ferry from Orcas Island was six hours late. Six hoouuuuuurrrrsssss late. Thank heavens we had six or seven books with us. Man. Six hours. And the reason we were in Orcas Island in the first place was because we were taking the long weekend to do something fun. And it was fun! We stayed at a very nice B&B and walked around and went for a hike by the beach in a state park. My hometown also has a state park and a beach you can walk along, although that’s pretty much where the similarity ends, because nothing in Florida remotely resembles anything that has to do with the word “hiking.” I have to say, though, that it’s pretty cool to walk through a pine forest and then come out to the water. We went out to this little rocky outcropping and looked down and saw tons of big fat Pacific Ocean starfish. Orange and purple and blue. It was great.
The other stuff we did involved sitting around and eating food and watching movies and reading books and walking around the little town of Eastsound. We bought each other books, which is a tradition I’d like to continue. We mostly just chilled. It was nice. It’s not like I have a super social life, and it’s not like I don’t spend a lot of time sitting around and reading anyway, but there really is something about being in a new place with someone you love and doing nothing with him. It somehow seems brand new. When we were done with all that fun, we packed up and waited in a ferry parking lot for six hours. That wasn’t so fun. And so I didn’t get my house cleaned or dinner cooked or laundry done or any of the other things I specifically didn’t do over the weekend, while I was sitting around and eating food and watching movies. And I had to drive for a long long time. And I didn’t get any sleep, and somehow Ziggy the cat seems to have gained thirty or forty pounds since I last saw him, which I know because he decided he was going to sleep on my chest last night…and you know, it’s not like I don’t empathize with the suddenly-gaining-weight thing or anything, but still! I don’t think cats should weight forty pounds dry. And I’m pretty tired today, so I have to go to bed early tonight. In fact, what are you doing keeping me up like this?