Wide awake

It’s almost 1 AM here. I have just finished folding and putting away two loads of laundry, and I made scones, and then I washed the dishes, and then I started the dishwasher. I’m not even tired yet.

I realized something this week: I am really bad at going to bed. I always thought I was just a night person. That’s true, actually: I am a night person. A night person who is really bad at going to bed at night!

I am fortunate never to have suffered from insomnia. Usually my face hits the pillow and I’m out until my alarm goes off, no matter what time it is. It didn’t matter whether I have had chocolate before bed, or whether the TV is on. But lately, I’ve been having trouble falling asleep. Each night, when I finally finish brushing my teeth and washing my face and all the other nighttime rituals that seem to stretch out for hours, I get into bed and turn off the light. And then I lie there, staring at the insides of my eyelids for what feels like several weeks. Eventually I drift off and sleep well (although I’ve been having some very weird, vivid dreams lately, which I can’t usually remember in the morning—one recent dream involved a woman with red-gold hair spread out around her head, and she was laughing as she lay on the ground with her hair on fire, but I couldn’t make her understand the danger).

Apparently, I was not the good sleeper I thought I was for all those years. I was just chronically sleep-deprived. Now that I am unemployed and have time to get my eight hours of sleep regardless of what time I go to bed, my body is not constantly crying out for rest.

Consequently, my bedtime gets later and later each week. First it was midnight. Then 1. Then 1:30. Now I’m almost up to 2. Regardless of the time, my body and my mind are wide awake and do an effective job of convincing me that they can stay up for another hour! Maybe two! They’re like toddlers, putting off bedtime. If I’m out of work for much longer, I will be going to bed at 4 AM and getting up at noon. The only way to fix this is to start getting up earlier, and then I will be tired at night. Except I don’t want to get up earlier. And it doesn’t help to set an alarm—I just hit the snooze and go back to sleep (and that’s the alarm that I place across the room on the dresser, so I have to get out of the covers and walk over to it).

I’m not sure what the solution to all this is, other than more daylight and more exercise. Oh, and maybe just getting a job. Wouldn’t I love that. I got a no-thank-you letter from the arts nonprofit at the end of last week. It was a nice letter, actually, saying that they’d had 160 applicants for one position, and only chosen a few to interview. I could be mistaken, but I believe the program manager added part of it just for me, because she made reference to something I’d said in my cover letter. So it wasn’t all bad. But it still wasn’t a job!

I applied for four more jobs last week, though. Tomorrow (today, if you want to be technical, but I don’t count late night after midnight as the next day—too confusing), I’m going to make phone calls to see if my application arrived and if there’s anything else I can do and wouldn’t you like to hire me, please?

Also, I almost fell in the shower over the weekend. I had just spent half an hour scrubbing the shower, and I must not have rinsed the floor well enough, because as I stepped out with one foot, the foot still in the shower slipped and I almost tipped over. (This would have resulted in hitting my head on the toilet, among other things.) When I told my mom this later, adding that I probably wouldn’t have been found for a couple of days if I fell, she said, “Yeah, and by then your cats would have eaten you.”

Thanks, Mom. Thanks a lot. She hasn’t even seen the Sex and the City episode where Miranda’s afraid her cat will eat her if she dies alone. But she has seen Bridget Jones’s Diary, in which Ms. Jones ruminates that she may expire and be half-eaten by wild dogs (in the book, it’s an Alsatian). Whatever the case, I gave the cats extra treats tonight and taught them how to dial 911 on my cell phone.