insomnia, anecdotes, bad habits

so apparently when the time leaps forward an hour + i stay up into early morning hours pretty much every day last week + i was in a time zone 2 hours behind the one i'm currently in, well, that equals insomnia. hooray. oh, how i've missed you, sweet anti-slumber.

so i will write you, friends, and i will let you know things about me that maybe you don't know. or maybe you do know them. more power to you if you know me well enough to have heard such minor anecdotes from my life already. i have no idea why i would have already told them to you, but sometimes i say pointless things about myself for no reason other than the fact that i'm a little more self-involved than i really care to admit. hence the sharing of my life for no real reason other than i am bored and up at 2:50am on a work night. but i digress. back to me.

when i was very young my worst nightmare involved being chased around what i'm pretty sure was a dungeon (but it might have been a giant kitchen) with those wooden meat pounders that people use to flatten poultry. i don't remember my mom ever actually using our meat pounder for anything, so it would just sit in the kitchen next to other utensils looking like some ominous club with spiky ends that could be used to brutally damage small children. it was extremely distressing. maybe that's why i don't really enjoy cooking.

when i was in 4th grade i remember twisting my ankle while walking up the stairs in front of a lot of the kids in my grade. i fell flat on my face and people laughed. so i brilliantly decided to fake an injury in order to make everyone who laughed at me feel very bad about themselves. i went to the nurse with a "sprained' ankle and faked a limp for the rest of the day (it was a little harder to fake the swelling and bruising, but somehow i managed). my mom even came to pick me up from school early. it was awesome. i am a badass. to this day i still lie senselessly about stupid unimportant things, but i'm very good at it and also very subtle so people don't suspect this of me. of course, everything in this blog is complete truth. it's not as fun to lie if it's not to somebody's face. i'm sure it will all come back around in the end, but the end isn't now, so i'm not that concerned with it. moving forward.

when i was about 12 i was obsessed with i love lucy. unfortunately, it came on from 10pm to 11 and that was a good 1/2 hour after my bedtime. so i used to take this little black and white television into my closet and i'd lay on the floor and watch i love lucy instead of going to sleep. i did this pretty much every night for like 2 years and i don't think my parents ever caught on. that's because i am also very good at trickery.

when i was in seventh grade, i got my first real pair of basketball shoes. they were black converse high-tops and yes, they were boy's shoes, but i still felt very cool whilst wearing them. that is until the boy i liked asked me with an extremely disgusted look on his face why i was wearing boy's shoes. feeling very shamed about being called out on my obvious ungirliness, the only response i could come up with was "because i'm a boy, didn't you notice?" That was not the cute, smart quip i was hoping for, nor was it a revelation i really wanted to make to the boy i liked. unfortunately 12 years later, i am still not any smoother than that because i still can't come up with anything better that i should have said.

when i was fifteen, my dad used to drive me to school every morning. most of you know that i have a perpetual problem with being late, which i'm pretty sure must be some congenital defect. i really don't have the energy to discover any other explanation. i'm hoping it will show up as a diagnosable disease in the next DSM of Mental Disorders so i will have a legitimate excuse for being perpetually late to absolutely EVERYTHING. that way i can just show up late and be like "i'm sorry i have chronic punctualityphobia. there's no cure. i really can't help it." so my dad would be waiting for me in the driveway in the mornings and my mom would always make me cinammon toast and put it in this little to-go container because who has time for breakfast if it's not on-the-go, and we would zoom off to school with about 6 minutes to go until the late bell. we would avoid school zones, cut through parking lots, run yellow lights that were sometimes actually red. i only lived about 4 miles away but if we ever hit a traffic light, i was pretty much screwed. i was dropped off at the door nearest my classroom every morning and i would still get to class seconds after the bell rang on most days. if i had a spare minute before class started to pee or something, it was a very good day. you'd think that eventually my dad would have become very annoyed with this morning routine, but i think he actually kind of liked the excitement of it. whenever he would pick me up in the afternoons, he would usually ask if i was on time that morning. even though i usually wasn't, we would never leave any earlier the next day. i think he liked cutting it close. it was a thrilling challenge, like cutting seconds off of your forty or something.

sometimes when i find a song i really like, i will listen to it over and over and over again until i imagine most people might become physically nauseas if they are ever forced to listen to the song ever again. i do the same thing when i find a food i really like. for example, my whole chocolate and vanilla jell-o pudding obsession that lasted a solid 8 years and is still going on to this day. so with music i will on occasion listen to a song i really like probably close to about 40 or 50 times in a row at any one sitting. for instance when i first heard joan osbourne's "what if god were one of us" when I was fourteen, i sat in my room and listened to that song for about four hours straight. i did the same thing with "the boxer" by simon and garfunkel. Also with stevie wonder's "superstition" and currently i'm doing it with cheryl lynn's "got to be real." i have very eclectic and rather odd taste in music. notice i didn't say good taste in music. i'm really working on that, but man, sometimes you just have to indulge that part of you that wants to listen to the same crazy song 40 times in a row even if it is 3:23am.

What you thiiiiiiink ah
I think I love you, baby
What you feeeeeeeel now
I feel I need you, baby
What you knoooooooow-ah
To be real

To be real
Got to be real, it's got to be real
To be real
Got to be real, it's got to be real
To be reeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaalllllll!!!!