I have a confession to make. I've sort of stopped sleeping since coming to Kentucky. Okay, this is a bit of a lie. But I can count the number of nights I've gotten more than 6 hours of sleep in the last 2 weeks on 1 hand and 2 fingers. Guaranteed, not all of it is due to being wide awake at 4 or 5 or 6 am. Probably half of this sleep loss is due to the fact that I'm spending so much time with people. I'll go to Summit City, then go to someone's apartment after it closes, hang out until 2:30 or 3 or sometimes 4 (oops...), go home, go to sleep, wake up at 8 and go to work. This isn't insomnia. This is stupidity.
But the other times, I go to bed at a decent hour, fall asleep, and wake up too early for my alarm, unable to go back to sleep. On these occasions, I go downstairs, pack my lunch (this morning it is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich), read a couple pages of whatever book I'm reading (currently Jim Crace's Being Dead), and fall asleep for a couple hours on the couch and wake up feeling more rested, but also kind of messed up. Couches are for people who are drunk and can't drive home, people who have been sexiled, people who are couch surfing. I have a large bed, a roommate who doesn't sexile me, and don't wake up at 4 am and decide that it's a good idea to do a couple of shots by myself then fall into a drunken stupor. I just can't sleep.
I really hate this. I would give anything to go to bed at a normal time and wake up with my alarm, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. But it just ain't happening. I think insomnia is usually a negative thing, but for me it's lately been a result of excitement and scheming and heat. This morning I woke up and couldn't stop thinking about my radio show I'm doing in 2 hours. Other times I've been plotting my weekend plans, or ideas for the radio station, or what I'm going to do with my life. I rarely have insomnia when I'm feeling depressed. It's always when I feel like my life is full of possibility, like at the beginning of a semester, or like right now, when I'm busy planning radio journalism stories, what songs I'm going to play on my show, or whether or not I'm going to break my fear of vinyl by playing that Violent Femmes record my friend gave me on my radio show.
I also have this weird idea that insomnia makes me more interesting as an artist. And I don't consider myself an artist at all. But I feel like famous writers, painters, musicians etc. were always alcoholics, drug addicts, manic depressives, nymphomaniacs, or insomniacs. There's no glamour in addiction or mental illness, but something about not needing to sleep appeals to me. When I was 16 and in the peak of my "I'm not going to sleep, I'm going to stay up all night talking to boys" phase (which I have since outgrown, I think...), I did a little basic math and found out that if you sleep for 8 hours every night, you're sleeping 1/3 of your life away. My solution of course, was to not sleep. But this isn't sustainable and leads to stress and the haggard look that I'm trying to make disappear before my parents come to visit, and random bouts of crying for no good reason. Life started to catch up with me, and now I'm the kind of person who really needs 8 hours of sleep a night to avoid turning into a complete and total bitch. But because this doesn't seem to be the case any more, I think that maybe I am like one of those crazy artists and on the brink of the great American novel or Citizen's Correspondent Corps journalism piece or even just the great American radio show. Or maybe I'm just so excited to be alive right now, that I don't really want to sleep when I could be talking, reading, or blogging.
you are an artist
ReplyDelete