Pees and Queues

Fall semester: day thirteen

So much of the past two days has been a blur.


Before I went to teach my class yesterday on West campus, I was so tired that I had to slug down a good six or seven cups of coffee to actually wake up. I'd set my alarm for 5, even though I didn't need to. I do this because, even though I don't have to leave before 8:10 or so on Tuesdays/Thursdays, it's a pain in the ass to reset my alarm clock every other day. For those of you who don't know, I have an alarm clock radio that's not a typical clock; it's voice activated. To set the time, you hit a button and talk to it. And if you don't enunciate enough or speak quickly/slowly enough, it will require you to do it over and over again, because it will interpret you as speaking a different time than what you said. Not only that, but when I'm exhausted, it's not like I'm going to remember to change the alarm time every single night because I teach at different times on alternating days.

So, regardless of whether I have to get up at 5 or not, I just set the alarm, and on Tuesdays/Thursdays, I generally hit the snooze button about ten times before getting up. It's just easier, and allows me to wake up a bit more gradually. I've never been one of those "get up and go" people, and twitch internally when I hear somebody try to say something along the lines of how a snooze button is worthless because if you can hit the snooze multiple times, you can just set the alarm for the time you would actually get up anyway. It's not like that. People who say that are either those "get up and go" types or they're people who don't have to worry about alarm clocks in the first place. There are many times that I need to wake up slowly, and be awakened multiple times, before I can be conscious enough to get up. Unless I'm waking up from a horrific nightmare, I can't go from deep sleep to fully and completely awake in the span of a second. I also know that if I'm tired enough, no matter what the day holds in store for me, I will, subconsciously and without even knowing it, roll over and turn the alarm completely off sometimes. That's what happens when you're constantly sleep-deprived, yet for some reason your body and mind won't let you sleep for more than six hours most of the time.

Anyway, I came home from class yesterday, watched a movie while I ate lunch, and passed out around 5:30 or so. I slept well into the night. Every time I stirred awake, I told myself no, and forced myself to lay still until I would drift back off. It was a hard process, and I found myself repeating it numerous times throughout the evening and some of the overnight hours. No, Brandon, I told myself, you WILL sleep. You will not get up, you will not go work on things that you don't have to do for weeks, you will not go eat or begin drinking coffee again, wearing yourself out more. You will fucking lay here, and you will fucking sleep.

I shouldn't have to reason with myself, or do "tough love" like this in order to get any real rest. My brain refuses to cooperate with my body most of the time; I can be incredibly physically tired to the point where all of my muscles and joints ache and are having trouble holding me up, and yet I can still go downstairs and lay there staring at the ceiling because my brain will not just turn off and go into sleep mode.

"You need to learn how to meditate," Daisy told me a few days ago, as she's a big proponent of meditation.

"No, I need to medicate," I replied her. "I more than likely need some sort of sleep meds, something that will turn my brain off for me and knock me out so that I actually get the rest I need, because I am incapable of doing it on my own most of the time."

More likely than not, this is something psychological. It's not something physical, that's for damn sure -- my body is, as I mentioned before, feeling older and more creaky by the day. I don't tend to have any more stress right now than I've had in the past; in fact, my stress levels are greatly lessened compared to past semesters when I've had a ton of my own work to do in addition to student work, but over the past year or so, my insomnia has worsened to levels I've never seen before, where it's nothing for me to stay awake for 24-36 hours because I either have to or because I just can't sleep. I'm not drinking any more coffee or smoking any more cigarettes than I did before; in fact, I'm probably doing less of both, really. And, for the record, even though I work four days a week now, it's not like I haven't done that before within the university system, and for much longer stretches of time spent on campus over those four days.

Of course, the problem with needing medicine to help me sleep means that I would either have to get OTC stuff (which, frequently, doesn't really work for me) or get a prescription from a doctor. Hah, like I can ever afford to go to a doctor. I don't even know anything about that Obamacare health insurance stuff that's coming up, and that's supposed to kick in next month or something like that. The other problem is that no matter how much I may need it, I couldn't take any meds of this sort on the nights before the days I have to teach, unless I were planning to go to bed by 5PM every night and sleep until my alarm went off twelve hours later. I can't do that; I have too much shit I have to do on a daily basis; I just can't pass out and be dead to the world for 12 hours a day. So, really, I have no truly viable options.

When I couldn't sleep over the summer, I didn't notice it as much. Oh, you can't sleep? Okay, Brandon, well, when you need to sleep you can sleep as much as you want, because you don't have anything pressing to do. Feel free to sleep from 4AM to 3PM if that's what you need. Yeah, well, I can't do that anymore. I have a job. I'm a normal human with normal human responsibilities.

I stayed awake last night (as I could sleep no more), took a shower and got dressed, and went to teach my 011 class today on campus. I may have been exhausted, but I can put on a decent professional look and demeanor for a few hours if necessary most of the time, regardless of how much (or how little) sleep I've had beforehand. I filled out my background check form, and filled out the digital one online that the University emailed to me -- which is really what that paper form was for -- and submitted it all. Everything on my end has been done, so now I wait to hear when I'll get my first paycheck, whether that be on the 13th or the 27th, depending on how long it takes for that stuff to get processed. Regardless, I'll be fine money-wise until I get it.

When I came home this afternoon, it was hot -- the temperature had shot up thirty degrees or so from the time I'd left the house this morning. We're back in our "slowly rising heat wave" again, and while it's not 100-105 outside, it's still in the mid-90s for highs this week. Heat saps my energy more than anything else. I was in bed by 2:30 this afternoon.