Insomnia

Today is the last day of my at-home vacation, my little experiment with unstructured time. But last night, I couldn't sleep. Insomnia.

I hate that sensation - tossing and turning, the mind anxiously jumping from one topic to another, including the fact that it's now 3:45 in the god-damn morning, and I have got to get to sleep right now, there's things to do in the morning and the alarm clock is going to go off in exactly 3 hours and 15 minutes and I need more than three and a quarter hours of sleep, but that will have to do, so go to sleep NOW!, which would be easier if the pillow weren't so hard/soft and the blankets weren't so heavy/light, and the noise from the furnace weren't so loud and why is the heat on now anyway, I really ought to reprogram the thermostat, last month's gas bill was three times the month's before, but don't worry about it, there's nothing I can do about it now so just go to sleep (is it 4 a.m. yet?), this really sucks, should I set the alarm for a little later, will that really make any difference anyway, tomorrow I am definitely going to get a better night's sleep . . .

And so on. At some point, whatever anxiety kept me from falling asleep in the first place was forgotten and replaced with the anxiety of not getting to sleep. A sort of self-reinforcing negative feedback loop. I once read somewhere that if you have trouble falling asleep, the best thing to do is get up out of bed to break the cycle, read a little or something, and then try going back to sleep again. I got up, drank a small bottle of fruit juice, read J.D. Salinger's "It's a Perfect Day for Bananafish" over on Tony Pierce's blog, drank a second bottle of juice (my mouth was still dry) and then went back to bed. No use. I still couldn't sleep, but now, on top of my other complaints, my stomach felt bloated from the two bottles of juice.

I had wanted to get up and go to the Sunday morning service at the zendo. I even showered and shaved my head the night before so I could get there early, but around 4:30 a.m. I realized that I wasn't going to get enough sleep to make it, so I gave up my ambitions and turned off the alarm clock.

A lack of exercise sometimes leads to insomnia, and I did spend a lot of yesterday sitting on the sofa watching college football, but after the Georgia-Wisconsin game I was too emotionally drained to focus on the other games still in progress, so I went outside to do some yardwork.

Earlier this week, I took down a small tree that was growing over the house and blew the leaves off of the roof, the back patio and the driveway, and even raked along both sides of the street to clear off autumn's deposits. But there's still a lot of yard buried under three to six inches of leaves, some areas from as long ago as the three hurricanes that blew through here last fall. My neighbors all seem to be using professional landscaping companies who send three- or four-man teams of Mexican laborers to clear off their yards, each company leaving their flyer in my mailbox, wondering perhaps why I'm holding out, but I'm stubbornly trying to do it myself. Making the work part of my Zen practice.

So anyway, after the Georgia-Wisconsin game, I went and did some raking, and broke a sweat walking up and down the steep driveway carrying the leaf bags to the street. I worked for about two hours and only quit when I finally ran out of empty bags in which to put the collected leaves and besides, it was getting dark. But my point is, I did get some exercise and I didn't spend the entire day as a couch potato, so I should have been able to sleep.

Part of the problem might have been that my body clock had shifted during my time off of work. As I had blogged on Christmas Day, anytime I'm off of work it seems that my body rhythm quickly goes nocturnal. And what with all of the late, West-coast football games on the last couple of nights, I've been staying up until 2:00, 3:00 or even later and sleeping until 10 or 10:30 in the morning. So my attempt to put myself to sleep at midnight so I could get up in time to make the 8:00 a.m. Sunday Zen service might have conflicted with my new cicadan rhythm. How will I ever get to the office tomorrow by eight?

And that anxiety also played through my head as I laid there sleepless last night.

So, other than completely messing up my sleep cycle, what did I accomplish during the week off? What did I get done during this structureless week?

Not much. I had composed a list of things to do for myself before the week began. Let's review the list and see how much I got done:

1. Fix computer. You might not know it by reading my blog, but the computer I'm using to compose these posts is running like shit. It keeps freezing up, constantly needs to be re-booted, and generally acts like it has no RAM. It has 128 megs, which ain't much (although it seemed like some real horsepower back when I bought it), but it was enough to run the computer until recently. I tried running the defrag program, ran it for almost 24 hours, but it still said "0% complete." Is it possible for a computer to get so defragmented that it can no longer run the defrag program? So my plan was to buy another 128 megs of RAM, install it, defrag the hard drive, and see if that helped. But I never did make it to the store. However, I did notice that the computer was running a little bit better after the 24 hours of running the defrag program, despite the zero percent completion, so I've been trying to continue to let the program run during non-use periods. However, I've not seen any more improvement in performance, and am worried that the whole thing might crash any day now, and I'll lose all my files, MP3s, pictures, programs, etc.

2. Change address on driver's license/tag registration. According to Georgia law, you have 30 days after you move to change the address on your driver's license and to change the county sticker on your tag (license plate). However, the way Georgia is set up, this requires two different visits to two different offices, both of which are notorious for their long lines and under-motivated public servants. Since I moved in mid-August, I was supposed to have this done by mid-September, but I've been putting it off for months now, so I resolved to take care of this during the past week. Of course, it didn't happen. I only got as far as identifying the locations of the two nearest offices, neither of which is really convenient to me, but what with holiday closures and weekends, I never made it to either office. So meanwhile I'm driving around as a ticket just waiting to be issued.

3. Fix toilet in condo. Forget about it - I never use that toilet, and besides, who wants to spend their day off in an unfurnished, unsellable condo in Vinings trying to fix a toilet they never use? Some other time . . . .

4. Get duct tape marks off car. Last October, before leaving for the Panama City dive trip, my driver's side window wouldn't roll up, and I finally had to pry it up and keep it closed using duct tape as a last-minute, desperation fix as my ride was leaving. I eventually got the window repaired, along with a host of other things, but the duct tape left marks on both the window and body that don't come off in the car wash. I was determined to clean these off this week using razor blades and solvents, but never got around to it. However, there's a good chance I will do this today.

5. Join a gym. Nope. I didn't even make it to karate this month. Besides, most gyms are overrun with "resolutionaries" in January, so it's not a good time to join. Better to focus on running and karate, and join a gym, say, this spring, when things have thinned out a little.

6. Buy living room furniture. When I moved here from the unsellable condo in Vinings last August, I had enough furniture to fill most of the house, except for the living room (the sofa and television went in the den). Which is embarrassing, because the front door leads into the living room, and the first impression a visitor gets upon entering my house is that no one really lives here, or that I've taken some sort of vow of poverty. I did get as far last week as driving to Perimeter Mall and checking out a sectional Bloomingdale's had advertised, but it wasn't to my liking. However, the salesman advised me that February is the best month to buy furniture - that's when all the big sales occur. Oh boy, just what I needed - a rationalization to procrastinate.

7. Buy mirror and sconces for bathroom. The previous owners took the mirror and lights from the main bathroom (not the master bath) with them when they moved, leaving me with big gaping holes in the bathroom wall. But unlike Task 6 above, I didn't even get as far as shopping for replacements. No alabis. Just didn't get done . . .

8. Yard work. Okay, I did make some progress on at least this one task. However, there's still plenty more left to be done, and since all the neighbors have hired professional landscapers to remove their leaves, my home is now the neighborhood eyesore, with brown leaves still all over the front yard. But at least the roof and driveway are clear.

So, what did I do with my time? Watched football. Wrote in my blog and read other blogs. Other than that, I don't really know how to account for myself. Even today, after finally getting some sleep, I wound up waking up late and am even right now squandering an otherwise sunny, beautiful day (one of only 8,549 I've got left) sitting inside writing this blog.

The lesson: I'm still not very good with big stretches of unstructured time. Fortunately, I go back to work tomorrow (if I can get up in time), and I have a sesshin next weekend. Therefore, I don't have any "free" time until January 15. And since all my other time is taken up, I probably will have "must-do" chores for that weekend, so my time will have some structure to it for at least the next two weeks.

Hopefully, that realization will allow me to get to sleep tonight.