insomnia

Okay, here's the deal: I've decided to put a few pieces of writing up on this page. Why? I don't know. Because I can.

I've spent the last half an hour or so trying to figure out the correct code so that I could use cuts in order to make the page look nicer. When I was much younger, I used Livejournal, which had a feature that allowed you to 'cut' to a plain, white page with extra text and images on it, thereby not cluttering up the main page with these things. It appears as though Blogger doesn't have this feature, so I ended up using this site's lovely little writeup. It seems to work, however it does not link to a plain, white page but rather a duplicate of the main page with only the one post on it.

Okay, I just realized that was probably confusing. Basically, the point is, I'm worried that the following may be hard for you to read because I didn't design the layout of my blog to be particularly conducive to reading long bits of text. The next piece of writing I plan on putting up is quite a bit longer than this one, so if anyone would like to give me some feedback as to whether or not this one is difficult to read, please do so. If it turns out that people are getting frustrated with the layout, I may just put the next one in a PDF file.
Anyways, on to the writing. The following is just a short musing on insomnia that I thought you may enjoy.

Comments and criticisms are welcome. Flagrant insults, not so much.

Squiddy


It is estimated that nearly half of the population is affected by insomnia at some point during their lives, but when you’re lying in a sweaty tangle of limbs and sheets at two o’clock in the morning, that statistic means absolutely nothing. You can try drinking green tea or counting sheep as they jump fences inside your mind, but when that doesn’t work, there’s nothing left to do but try to enjoy the extra eight hours you’ve been afforded. You’ll notice, as you roll over and over, trying to find a comfortable position, that there is a period of time between about midnight and four AM that doesn’t really seem to exist at all. At this point, daytime is long gone and twilight has passed, but dawn is still a long ways off. It is during this empty bit of time that the only thing that is alive is you. Even the nearly half of the population who is apparently also awake at this ungodly hour are mere figments of your sleep deprived imagination.

At this point you’ll do the first thing that everyone does when they can’t sleep: turn on the television. But at this time of night, even television sleeps. As you flip through the channels, you’ll find static, re-runs, static, pornography, more static, and terrible old films like that one in which Pierce Brosnan fights a volcano. Sometimes you’ll punch in a few digits at random and be greeted by the maniacal grin of Billy Mays, his spray-on beard becoming increasingly filled with spittle as he yells and thrusts containers of Oxy-Clean at you through your television screen. I can’t take this, you’ll think, and when you click the ‘off’ button on your remote, you’ll realize that you have no idea what to do with yourself for the next four hours or so.

Since you’ll have some time to kill, you may as well throw on a coat and go for a walk. At this time of night, and in your sleepless state of mind, you’ll observe that without any other bodies to take up reality’s natural resources, the world seems to exist more intensely than it does during the sunlight hours. That shadows colour the world in blacks and greys, and with every breath, your lungs are filled with thick and dewy night time air. You’ll perceive that silence hangs heavily in the atmosphere, broken only by the humming of streetlights as they cast their circular orange oases onto the pavement below. That there is no rain or wind, and even the weather seems to sleep. You’ll find that it is as though while you were tossing and turning, you somehow slipped through a crack in time and ended up stuck in limbo between two moments.

When you get home and settle back into bed, you’ll start to feel your limbs grow warm and heavy, and in the back of your mind you’ll acknowledge the fact that you seem to be going to sleep. It is just at this very moment, as you finally begin to succumb to the blissful haze of slumber, that you will be jarred awake by the sudden realization that never in your entire life have you ever seen a sheep jump over a fence.
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squiddy is a deadbeat blog owner

Sometimes I like to get ridiculously busy and disappear for months at a time. Deal with it. That's how I roll, baby.

York keeps emailing me. I'll be sitting at my computer, wasting time on one or many of my time-wasting websites, when all of a sudden a little box will grow out of the bottom right hand corner of my screen to inform me that I have received an email from York University. Heart pounding, I click the little box and wait with bated breath as my hotmail page loads until after what seems like hours, I am finally greeted with the words 'March Newsletter Now Online!' Yeah; thanks, York. Good of you to at least send me a newsletter while crushing my hopes with trivial emails.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sulk about how the loaf of bread I just baked turned out really poorly, how overworked I am and how much I'd like to hear back from York soon.

Exhaustedly,

Squiddy Click this.