let's just say...

I cannot sleep, so I am (attempting to) bake bread.

No joke. This is happening!

Update, two hours later: bread turned out more like a glorified biscuit or flavorless muffin, but if I have learned anything at all in this short life of mine, it is that everything warm tastes good with butter on it!

I may have made whipped cream too...this was a mistake. So, one failed (wheat free, mind you) bread recipe and a bad tummy ache from all that lactose and sugar later, and I am still wide awake. Rosco (our small yorkie) on the other hand is looking at me sleepily, "like WTF, bitch?  We are supposed to be sleeping right now. This makes no sense."  Bless his little heart.  I should probably clean up the kitchen and try to get to sleep one last time.

sweet dreams? If you can have them.

I should change the name of this blog, to "shit an insomniac girl writes at 3 am in the morning."

second update 9/13/12: Sweet success is mine! I tried my hand at the bread recipe again and all went perfectly! It tasted so delicious I ate both loafs in 48 hours!! Lol.

yum!

crestfallen

crestfallen: sad or disappointed, relates to the days of jousting, when the losing protagonist was knocked from his horse, along with his shield or crest

Get a hold of yourself!

This is a phrase I repeat often while laying sleepless, restless even, in my bed, 3am.  But tonight my chants against defeat were abruptly interrupted.  The night air whooshed into my room through the open window, forcefully blowing my feather weight curtains in a flurry, carrying the sound of gushing water, too strong to be a sprinkler. I was startled. Never before had I heard that noise on our street. Surely, this must be some sort of alien invasion! How can water just magically appear spewing out of the ground.  Okay, okay, so yes, geysers, hot springs, nature, I get it.  But through concrete and asphalt?  No way, Jose!  I shuffled to the kitchen, peered out the window, only to see a shadowy figure illuminated by the yellow street lights.  It was a man, a man from the fire department.  He had undone the hydrant to do some late night maintenance. Phew! My nerves subsided and I simply watched, listed, felt the cool aura of the water hugging my face.  It was almost pure zen, clearing my mind, calming my thoughts. And then BAM! Down the stairs stumbled my roommate and the dogs, baseball bat ready to swing, aliens ready to die. Gently, I explained to her what I witnessed, she drop the bat, and the dogs laid down.  together we watched, listened, felt the cool aura of the water hugging our faces.  It was majestic, allowing no room for discontent and crestfallen feelings, only glory and wonder.

So, thank you late night construction workers.  Tonight's sleep has been sponsored by you!

moxie

moxie: Force of character, determination, or nerve

Typically our two year old lab, Mender, has oodles of moxie.  He is strong willed, energetic, and determined to play fetch twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.  If you have ever owned a lab you know this quality I speak of.  And you know that when you do sit down to rest or avert your attention elsewhere, they whine, "plaaaaay with me, come on, play with me! Look I have a ball, and a Frisbee, and a rope! I can get the little dog if you want. Pleeeeease play with me. sad face. come on, just play with me. Oh, idea! play with me!!" This is extra true, until you are unpacking from a trip out of the state, and a melatonin tab escapes onto the floor...rolling...rolling...rolling...spinning round to a stop and whooosh, in dives Mender, licking up the tab. TRRRRRREEEAAT!

Oh no. So, then I shout to my roommate, "Mender may or may not have eaten a melatonin tab just now. Don't worry though, it's perfectly natural, it will just make him sleepy."  Sleepy, that's an understatement!  When it was time to go to bed, we reached the stairs and he turned and looked at me, his eyes said, "are you kidding me, I'm not hiking that huge mountain, I can barely even wag my tail." He turned to lie down right in that very spot, and instead, crashed into the garage door. Bang, his head hit, but he was too cracked out to even notice. We, yes both of us, had to push 80 pounds of tired up the stairs, lift him into bed and hear his snoring for hours.  Apparently, we learned this from doggie WebMD, melatonin is used as a sedative for pet with debilitating anxiety.

let's just say...

"and better isn't always doing well, I know because I am better now myself...I wish I didn't love you quite as much" -Wye Oak

There are two parts to the quote above.

--

First, I can't sleep, again. I got nearly 6 hours of sleep Friday night. Big f-ing deal, right? Unfortunately this means that awake will be my state for the next 72 hours.  This might also mean it's time to give Ambien a second shot. Uck.

Have you ever seen those sleep aid commercials with Abe Lincoln, an astronaut, and a beaver?  Their catch phrase is something practical like, "your dreams miss you."  Well funny thing about that is that I have determined the cause of my insomnia (or at least one of the main causes) to be avoidance of my dreams.  When I do sleep I have been having horrific nightmares about being trapped, chased, robbed, or murdered.  Come to think of it, I wrote about this in an earlier post.  Moral of the story is that your dreams may want you back, but you might not want them back. So, that ad campaign can suck it.  I don't know what it's going to take, but boy would I sure love to make a change in my sleep patterns and mental health, a genuine non-drug assisted change.  If I had dreams filled with Abe Lincoln, astronauts, and beavers (so long as they were not actively trying to hurt me), I wouldn't be an insomniac, guaranteed.

Hmm, guess the campaign won an award.

--

Second, some heartaches will last a life time, this I have decided from firsthand experience.

brooding

brood: to sit upon (eggs) in order to hatch, to dwell on a subject, to meditate with morbid persistence, or to worry persistently

"I don't think she ever knew that a deep-brooding love hung over everything she touched"- Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

oh the things I do when I can't sleep...make pancakes, talk to Nick when he calls at 1 am and feel briefly better, listen to really loud music (it only works if you can feel it shaking your entire being), watch Fargo and then let my morbidity take over, enough at least to write the following prose.

The alarm clock stabs at my ear drums. 5:30am. The dark blue of the morning seeps in through the blinds.  I open both my eyes just barely, like two slivered almonds on the mask of my face.  I peer down at my ankle and follow my leg up to the crook of my hip.  Another bruise.  Another morning, another bruise.  It's been a year now and the more matured ones have started to heal, bleeding back from their purple-black color into a more jaundiced yellow.  But my entire left leg still looks like an over-ripened banana, freckled with innumerable bruise. I stumble over to the dresser and fumbled through the deep drawer of socks and stockings.  I settle upon a pair of navy blue poke-a-dot tights.  Slowly, I roll them over my leg.  First the toe, then the ankle, then the bruises.  It's like driving a steam roller over a mine-field, you never know which one is going to hurt the most.  This morning it's the little one on the center on my shin, the last of three lined up in a row, three dime-sized spots of hell.  It stings at first, but then a familiar euphoria takes its place.  There's a thin line between pain and pleasure.  Some days, I fantasize about amputation, I just haven't convinced myself yet that life with only one leg would be any better.  So I leave it, and I suffer through an indescribable amount of pain.  I have no explanation for their genesis, they just appear. My only rationalization is that they're there to remind me how fucked in the head I can be, how pathetic it is that, just like my bruises, I can't escape thoughts of you without cutting off a crucial part of myself.  As one heals, another appears.  Everything seems like it's my fucking fault.

hooray for creative writing.

update: okay, apparently I need to make something more clear, because right now my family thinks I've completely lost my marbles.  The above creative writing piece is just that, a creative writing piece.  Apart from the few bruises that I have gotten from roller derby, my legs are not covered in bruises.  The bruises are a metaphor for the character in this story's emotional state.  This is how I deal with the normal ups and downs of life and with my occasional bought of depression. I write and write and write some more.  I mean, I also workout a lot and hit girls while on skates and listen to music and make pancakes, but for the most part, writing is the way in which I deal with things. I am an intense person and intense people need outlets, this is mine.  So please, family and loved ones, quit worrying about me.  And for the love of god quit taking the things I say in my poems and stories literally. I'm fine.

lucid

lucid: easy to understand, suffused with light, vivid

I've been having trouble sleeping lately, surprise surprise!  Sort of half-sleeping, where I never reach deep REM.  Makes for lucid and realistic dreams.

take for example...

I thought I saw you at Burger King, but it was just a dream. You know the one, it's right next to Wallmart and your school. You were standing there, in the longest line, arrogantly aloof, attractive in your own stupid way. I watched for a few minutes. Nothing significant happened. Your phone buzzed and you looked at it discreetly. You slipped your hands into your pockets and leaned back onto your heels.  Then you smirked and drug your feet a few steps forward to close a gap in the line. Just little things. Weird but, this was the you I once knew.  I stopped watching when you got to the counter and gave your order.  Shrugging my shoulders, I turned to leave.  As I was pressing my way out the tinted glass door, you approached me. But it wasn't the you I knew.  This "you" was different. Significantly less attractive and much more gregarious.  We stood there awkwardly for awhile.  I complacently listened to you tell me all the things I once wanted to hear.  I should have been happy, right?  I wasn't. "You" just confused me more. Who was really the ugly one?  The you standing in line or this new "you." I woke up longing for authenticity and truth.

Apparently,
I still can't shake you off my conscious,
too many stubborn thoughts and mulish memories,
although better than the tears,
I bang my head and shake my ears,
no matter the ferocity, they simply won't fall out
stuck, like water from the poolso clear, they were once invisible,
now a murky chlorine green,
almost gone, I was wrong,
they're slowly seeping back while I sleep.

search

search: to look into or over thoroughly in an effort to find or discover something; come to know by inquiry or scrutiny

I am a slave to Google.  I'll admit it.  I can't even fathom what it was like before there were search engines. I am utterly dependent.  I even text Google to define words for me when the dictionary is sitting two feet away.  Lazy. Really, I'm just another measly member of the Internet's indoctrinated chattel. Take for example that I'm writing about this on the what?...oh that's right, the Internet! For crying out loud. Sites like Google, Facebook, and Readit are today's postmodern information oligarchicy.  They are today's contemporary gatekeepers.  So, what happens when this small group implodes? How will I ever write papers, keep up with current news, or define words for christsake?! well I suppose I could try the dictionary. Ahh man, but it's such a long stretch of the arm.  Too...ti...red.

This was one of the topics discussed during an MLIS class that I sat in on last weekend.  I drove up to Seattle for an admissions interview at the University of Washington and learned all sorts of magnificent things about their graduate program.  Now if only I could magically move the Udub's program out of rainy Seattle.  I need (need need) to get out of the northwest, I've been here far to long.

It's official, senioritis has set in early.

Also, I attended the annual Mary Stuart Rodgers Scholarship Banquet.  This year they gave fellows paper weights instead of rings...well that and a sizable amount of $ for school.  Thanks Rodger's family endowment...

Little to no social life, an ulcer/insomnia, and hours of homework have paid off.  Finally, I am now the proud owner of a paper weight!

That was rude. Sorry, I can be rude sometimes...or all times really. I should work on that.