The purpose of this post is 1. to complain (always the first and foremost motivation for my actions) 2. to kill time while I wait for my sedative to work and 3. to inform you of a problem I have that is driving me crazy.
I can't sleep! It is very annoying and there is no real reason behind it, beyond what I will explain in a moment. No caffeine enters my body, except in the form of chocolate and sweet tea, neither of which have passed through my lips today! I have had no caffeine! And I am still awake.
This is particularly annoying, because I was so sick last week, I had to miss WAY more work than I wanted to. I was in the fetal position, sipping water, all week while I prayed that I wouldn't suddenly stop being able to drink water too, and land in the hospital with dehydration. That's how bad my stomach was. VERY bad. I couldn't knit; I couldn't even read anything.
Well, now that the shiny blue pills the doctor gave me have begun to work their fancy magics, I am able to sit, stand, drink more than just the water, and EAT. I am happy about all of those things, but the thing I am happiest about is that I get to go back to work!
I am THRILLED. I missed leaving the house, I missed my coworkers, I missed the books and the patrons. I missed it all!
But now I cannot sleep, and that will make it harder to go back, because in addition to the weakness I have left over, I will be exhausted as well. Not fun.
Sedative? Kind of working now.
The reason I cannot sleep is very simple. I am nervous.
I don't know if any of the rest of you get this, but when I have missed something, anything, and am now going back to do said thing, I get nervous.
*pause while Laura snatches a fly out of the air and disposes of it*
How come no one is ever around to see that kind of cool? I want to know!
I blame my heightened sensitivity to stimuli, caused by this nervousness.
Because I have my father's genes and because I was raised in a never-disappoint-anyone-ever household, I don't just get a little nervous. I get full-blown waves of stomach-churning anxiety, and I have had enough stomach-churning lately.
There was a time when I had this level of anxiety all the time. Well, on a good day, I had this much, on a bad day, I had a lot more. But those days, thankfully, are over.
A person becomes anxious for one reason: Your brain is telling your body that something bad is about to happen, and your body reacts by flooding your system with adrenaline, making you go into fight-or-flight mode. Right now, my brain is telling my body that we need to run from that giant carnivorous dinosaur over there in the corner, lest it bring about the end of Laura. Problem? There is no dinosaur.
So I have all that adrenaline for NO REASON. If this happened in the day, I would run about and get a lot of work done, distracting myself from the problem. It, however, is not day. It is night. And I cannot run the vacuum cleaner at night, nor can I throw in laundry or rip up the carpet in the kitchen. I am totally out of luck.
The one thing that makes all this worse is thinking about it while lying in bed, as awake as it is possible for one human being to be. It might also make it worse for me to, say, actually meet up with something that DID want to eat me, like a tiger or a Kodiak bear. But we don't get many of those in this area of Indiana.
Instead, I turn on a tiny light and I do something that usually makes me fall asleep. Since I have no term papers to write, no essays on a giant text to flesh out before I turn them in, mere hours from now, I am left writing to you. I cannot knit, because it keeps me awake. Television doesn't help, because I tend to watch shows that are exciting, filled with psychopaths and strange creatures bursting out of the repair guy's torso. The book I am reading has the hallmark of being exciting, and finding a boring book would be a surefire way to get my brain working even harder than it already is, making sleep all the more impossible.
So here I am.
Not sleeping.
Thinking about what it will be like to walk into the library tomorrow and see everyone, and reminding myself that my coworkers are highly unlikely to draw and quarter me when they see that I have lost over ten pounds in one week. That's right, folks. Ten pounds. The only consolation? That's a lot of Biaggi's I can enjoy in the future.
I'm going to go look at yarn now. Have a happy Monday, everybody!
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