#6- Sleep and why I suck at it.

I, like many people in their early twenties, have a hard time sleeping. Not just getting to sleep, but staying asleep is a chore for a myriad of reasons.

For starters, I have tinnitus, which is a constant ringing/buzzing/whooshing/humming in the ears usually associated with hearing loss, and have had tinnitus for as long as I can remember. I can hear just fine, but unfortunately the constant ringing interferes with sleep. It's impossible for me to sleep now without some kind of external white noise in the background, like a fan or something, because the ringing in my ears drives me bonkers. Also, I think I'm OCD, because the noise has to be constant. If there's any kind of tapping, clicking, or rustling noises, I have to find out what exactly is making that noise and find a way to stop it. Hunting around the room in the dark wastes an enormous amount of time I could be sleeping.

Noise problems aside, it's hard for me to turn my brain off. It literally will not shut off no matter what I try to do. I can try meditating, I can try focusing on my breathing, I can try counting sheep, to no avail. SOMETHING in my memory banks is always much more interesting than trying to sleep. Then the adrenaline starts pumping because I'm so pissed off at my brain, and we all know adrenaline keeps us awake, so that's another hour or so lost just because I can't turn my brain off.

It's at this point, when I can finally get my evil conscious mind quieted down, that my bladder decides to say, "Hey, I'm full, get up and empty me."

So then I get up, incredibly angry, and by the time I get back I'm right where I started.

Laying there, as the adrenaline starts to wear off, I sometimes look at the clock. This is always a mistake. It always starts a chain reaction in my brain: I look at the clock. Then I calculate how much time I've wasted trying to sleep. Then I calculate how much time I have left to get to sleep. Then the countdown begins. I constantly have to look at the clock every half-hour or so just to see how much time is left. Why? I don't know. It might be the OCD.

Now, some of these problems aren't psycho- or neurological. Sometimes they're external. Such as the two roosters that my neighbors have--those little bastards crow constantly, starting at midnight and going off every two to three hours. That's not when the aforementioned neighbors have their oompa-loompa-Mexican-polka music playing at some ungodly hour of the night.

Or when the cat gets locked out of the main house and comes into my room (out in the guest house) at one in the morning. My door doesn't properly latch every time you close it; you have to fiddle with the doorknob and lift it a bit before it clicks into place, so it's easy for the cat to get in and start meowing.

Or perhaps when my roommate talks/moans in her sleep. This is a recent development, and it greatly concerns me, because it sounds like she's having nightmares. She never remembers them the day after, but she does moan, and it does keep me up at night. The solution to that one is simple, all I have to do is reach across with my leg and lightly kick her mattress so she rolls over and stops moaning. Sixty percent of the time, it works every time.

There's also my mom's little Dachshund who is let out every morning around six-thirty and simply must bark at everything, just in case anyone forgot that we had a dog.


So, because of all of this, I in my sleep-deprived mind at two-thirty one morning decided to go into the spare room to sleep. I turned on a fan, snuggled into bed, and was asleep almost instantly. It was wonderful.


Until the bird started chirping.

Actually, I'm not sure if you could quite call it chirping. I have no idea what kind of bird it was, but the sound it made resembled the sound of two marbles clacking together loudly. (Mockingbird, maybe? Who knows what those critters will imitate.) Anyhow, that one little clacky-bird was almost the cause of a mental breakdown. That day, I remember, was awful.

So that night I took more sedatives than was recommended on the bottle and slept like a baby.

I wouldn't recommend doing that, though-- the next day I was incredibly groggy for my drive into San Diego, and it also really scared the piss out of my mother.

Warm Regards,

Liz.


P.S.-- To all four of you that watch/visit this blog, I've been figuring out how to fiddle around with how it looks. Thank you for putting up with the changes and expect more shenanigans in the future, but for right now I think I like how it looks. Much better than the black background with the neon green font-- what was I even thinking?...

#5- Happy Saint Patrick's day.

Being from a primarily Irish Catholic family meant never missing Saint Patrick's day. Of course Mom always made sure that we wore some form of green to school to ward off any pinches, and she continues to make sure all ten of her kids wear green to this day.

But, as the four oldest of us ten kids (I'm #4) spent most of our growing up in Virginia, we four had another reason to eagerly await March 17; during the night, we would be visited by an honest-to-God Leprechaun.

It was like Santa visiting us on Christmas-- no one actually saw him, but those presents weren't there the night before, so therefore he must have come and put them there. The Leprechaun didn't leave presents; he just left a fucking mess everywhere. And it was hilarious.

For some reason, he always dyed the milk green. Always. At first I thought it meant it was spoiled, but after Kid #1 drank it without immediately throwing up, we all drank it till our tongues were green. So every year we could look forward to green milk in our cereal, nice and festive. Then we would look on the ground and realize that he had left little green footprints that lead from the fridge to all over the house. Seriously, those footprints went everywhere. We'd find other things colored green, like the water in Mom's angel fountain, or the rosary around the statue of the Virgin Mary. Sometimes he'd leave chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil, sometimes he'd leave a note, but he always left that fucking amazing mess behind.

At school I learned quickly that no one believed in leprechauns the way I did. I was shocked to discover that not one of my classmates had a leprechaun visit their house. I must have been in a lucky house!

After suffering though the day's lectures we'd come home and always watch the same movie every year, Darby O'Gill and the Little People. (Actually a pretty good movie, I recommend.)

Then it happened; the year 1999. We moved to California, and the Leprechaun stopped visiting.
It's been twelve years now, and still no sign of a leprechaun.

I wonder sometimes if that smarmy little bastard still hangs around the old house. My guess is no, because we sold the house to a bunch of old people, and older folks don't like pranks too much.

So tonight as you all get drunk, be on the lookout. If, by any chance, you see a leprechaun through your drunken haze, tell him Liz says hi.

Warm Regards,

Liz.

#4- Blogging is hard...

I have had other blogs in the past that I eventually deleted because I no longer cared about posting in them. However, I decided last night that this time I was going to dutifully catalog interesting/funny things in this new blog once or twice a week and not let it die.

So I've been sitting here for two damn days now wondering just what was so vitally important that everyone in the world had to know about it.

So far I've tired to write a post about family (I got paranoid and deleted it), how crappy my previous jobs were (I again got paranoid and deleted it since I didn't want future prospective employers to read it and think I was a whiner), the fact that it was now March (March evidently is not interesting enough to post about).

And this ramble is the result.

Hooray for me.


Warm Regards,

Liz.


EDIT: So apparently the Oscars happened. Whoop-dee-doo. I honestly could care less about spectacles like that.