Can't Sleep, Won't Sleep

So I'm told that being physically tired is a good way of ensuring you sleep.  Not necessarily sleep well, but sleep nonetheless.

I've inadvertently spent my entire life disproving this theory, and today is another example of this as I've just started going to the gym again after a months hiatus (off-season) and yet find myself with less than a normal persons amount of sleep.  How much less?  Well, exactly none.  After getting a couple of hours last night I've given up today, hoping that tomorrow will be better.  

Fingers crossed I can get to work alright tomorrow (what is actually today in real terms), get that shit done, then come home and just fall asleep on the sofa or something.

But, I hear exactly one of your cry, if you sleep during the day you'll mess up your sleep cycle!

Yes I reply, but if I don't sleep I'll die of headaches and/or total brain shutdown.  Also, my sleep is already messed up hence why I'm in this predicament in the first place.  I'd rather try and tackle this problem from a place of actually having slept at some point in the past, rather than where I currently stand.  Have you ever desperately kept yourself awake until 9pm only to find that your brain turns around and says "actually no, fuck you, no sleep tonight."

That's not fun, and it happens.

So basically it's another insomnia post.  Yay!

On the positive side when I was on holiday I didn't have many issues, it turns out that just getting up whenever your body says to and going to bed whenever you're tired is a really good way of getting enough sleep.

Who would have thought it.

A Few Reasons Why I Love Being an Insomniac

Reason number one.  For every hour I'm awake beyond the normal, I lose five IQ points.  This goes on throughout the entirety of me being awake, until I level off at around forty-five points.  This essentially means, for the days that I am affected, I cannot do anything for myself.  I'm a chimpanzee, or an infant.

Reason number two.  Even when I do sleep, for up to twelve hours, I'm still tired.  No matter how much sleep I get, I'm always tired.  Not to the point of it affecting my work or behaviour, but the huge panda eyes, lethargy and headaches are a semi-permanent feature of life.

Reason number three.  There's no cure.  Drinking honey tea lemons and sunshine while upside singing 'gone with the wind,' may well be the cure for some people.  Drinking warm milk, or reading a book may be what works for others.  The truth is, none of these have any physiological effects.  They're all psychological.  It's all in your mind.  If you think these things will work, they will.  When you realise they're all nonsense, however, you're somewhat screwed.  The alternative is powerful sleeping pills which I tried in university.  Interesting fact: my doctor in university didn't believe I was actually sleep deprived, so gave me a placebo at first.  The problem with the real sleeping pills is that although they don't work in the stated doses, going overboard and taking enough to make sure you do sleep, ensures you have the crappiest nights sleep ever, and you wake up as tired as when you went to bed.  The only difference between taking the pills and not taking them, is that after a weeks usage you won't end up dead.

Luckily I've not had a week-long period of not sleeping.

I'm fairly certain I would get fired if that were to ever occur.

Then again, I would be dead, so I'm not entirely sure I would be worried about the job at that stage.




On an entirely unrelated side note.  Read this article by a moron employed by the BBC about why arts and crafts departments within English universities are failing.  Then, after laughing for five minutes because he's obviously a moron who had a terrible time during his classics degree at Oxford, (presumably because the other boys were bigger and bullied him) read some of the comments.  One of them stated that an american style degree, where everyone has to take compulsory Maths, English and Science classes alongside their own, produces more well rounded individuals who fulfil the authors requirement  that universities make better human beings.

Then read this.

Yeah that education about how to be all happy and alone is really working for them.

Dumbass.

The Reasons Why I Haven't Posted

My boss made me do some bullcrap pointless work that's now, not five days after being implemented (that took two months to finish), been taken down.  This is reason number one as to why I've not been posting.

This then gave way to a fierce sickness.  That's reason number two.

My laptop mysteriously stopped accessing the internet, but still allowed me access to skype.  Reason number three.

These three reasons cover the past three weeks of zero posting.

Now, for the past few days I've slept terribly.  In normal human beings, being insanely tired would lead to a good nights sleep somewhere along the line.  Obviously, being the human freakshow that I am, I'm not allowed to sleep.  It's Christ knows when in the Christ knows when, and I can't sleep.  So the photos I uploaded Christ knows when go another few days without being illustrated.  Obviously illustrated is the wrong word, but I don't know what the correct word is.

When you have a picture and you write words to describe the picture, or what's happening within the picture.  Like illustrating a narrative, but in reverse.  I don't know what it's called.

The particularly frustrating thing is, I obviously do know what the word is, I just can't access it.  Being stupid is one thing, forcibly becoming stupid due to inherent genetic deficiency is quite another.  Ignorance is only bliss when it's not optional.

Another fantastic thing is that I went to the gym today.  I'm physically exhausted, and due to crappy sleep for the past few days, mentally exhausted.  The good news is that because I went to the gym I ache.  I ache really badly.  The fantastic news is that my exhaustion and fatigue have left me with no apetite, so my body has nothing to repair itself with.  This will lead to me aching for the next few days instead of hours, as it should be.

This physical and mental self-destruction is a generally fantastic way to go about life, and I  recommend everyone deprive themselves of sleep and food as I have.  I foresee it becoming the next fad diet.  It's all the more beneficial if a third party forces it upon an unwitting subject without knowledge or consent.  I find it all the more effective this way.

I can't wait to relapse into illness again, because the system shock of zero food and sleep makes my body shut down.  Yay, a solid month of undoing all the gym-work, fitness and health I've cultivated up to now.  Woo hoo.

This is one of the few times I will say this.  This post will have spelling mistakes, punctuation errors and grammatical anomalies.  I do not care.  I defy anyone to write in this condition and make sense.

So It's Come to This...

So I have to explain some internet terminology first. (In my own style)

Flamewar - When two competing sides of an internet debate (see: argument) get so inerged in the fantastically insignificant details of a petty (or sometimes not so petty) argument; that virtual blood is spilt.  For a brilliant example of this (in the sense of it being archetypal flamewar material - not in the sense of this ludicrous behaviour being brilliant, because, quite frankly, reading any forum for more than five minutes gestates suicidal thoughts within me) see any 'mac vs PC,' 'debate.'  Obviously the PC is better, so I don't know why everyone is so worked up over such a thing.

Secondly, another brilliant example would be the five yearly console war, between Nintendo fans, Sony fans and recently, Microsoft fans.  (What, people actually support Microsoft in one of their endeavours?  Perish the thought.)  People literally cry when a new console is announced.  Most fanboys cry twice.  Once when their company announces an amazing new console; and once again when the enemy announces theirs.  The astute will notice a glaring mistake, three's a company right?

In this case, the three companies in question are usually divided by: Most loved.  (Cue tears.)  Most hated.  (Cue tears of rage.)  And the 'meh,' category.  Time for another definition:

Fanboy - Someone so blinded by their irrational love of _________ , that they cannot see the virtues of competing products, or in some cases, anything else at all.

All this arose from a couple of comments on my previous post about what to do with a broken bone.  I maintain that you don't ice breaks, but let's get the flamewar started!

So my internet geekology lessons aside, what else is happening?

Well I'm glad you asked Sam, because I get paid tomorrow.  For the last four days I've been living on the meagre contents of my fridge.  This meant eggs every day (usually more than one.  How unhealthy is that?  Seriously I need that question answering) with leaves of some description, onion, garlic (contrary to popular belief you can never have too much garlic, and it makes everything taste better) rice, bread, butter, some spreadable cheese and water...

All I can say is, I hope vitamin pills do work.

Joking aside, four days of living a terrible diet isn't too bad.  As far as is humanly estimable, every other person on the planet orders takeaway four or five nights a week, and that's unhealthy.  That's unhealthy in more ways than I can describe in a lifetime.  And as mentioned, vitamin pills are surely good for you.  In the future all our meals will be consumed in pill form, so I'm merely working ahead of everyone else...

So this weekend was a complete scrub.  I did some marking, went to the gym for an hour, (it's amazing how much a crippled finger can destroy plans) and that was it.  The rest of the time I phoned home, slept and was hungry.  It was absolutely, fundamentally the correct decision to bring my ps3 with me, exactly for weekends such as this.  Unfortunately I don't have the right cables for it.

It's 1AM here, and I'm really not sleeping well.  The problem of having nothing to do, is that you think.  Thinking can only take two forms, invariably these are thinking about the past; or thinking about the future.  One is littered with stupidities, oddities and mistakes; the other is scattered with the possibility of mistakes, stupidities and oddities.  Which to choose from?  It's a tough decision; so tough that I wish I had enough money for beer, a well enough finger that I could go to the gym and wear myself out, or a working playstation.  Remember, these things exist for this very reason:  Living life in the now is hard.

Just for this weekend, I really wish I'd had an 'opt-out,' button.