Sleeeep

26_05_05, originally uploaded by xdrjohnx.

One thing I really, really despise is being tired and not being able to just lie down and sleep for a while. That's how I felt all day, but I knew my sleeping schedule would be totally fucked if I took a nap in the afternoon. Whenever I get in a mood like that where I'm annoyed that I can't do something as simple and natural as lie down and sleep, I always imagine how it would be to live on a beach and catch/eat fish. Annoyed isn't a good word for the feeling, though - it's more like a feeling of mediocrity or being dissapointed in yourself. Because if I really wanted to, I could pack up my shit tomorrow and go live on a beach in Malaysia. But I don't. So I have no one to blaim but myself (and my mother when we're driving in the same car and she's assaulting me with that goddam voice of hers....my teeth are going to be ground to dust before I get out of here)

Not sleeping is interesting, though. Up until about 7 or 8 AM you feel really good... then you start looking at the clock: what the hell are you gonna do for 14 hours before you can sleep again? -> boredom -> tired -> cranky. If you didn't sleep the night before, the worst time is always from 2PM to 4PM. Vedddddy bad. You better be away from any sort of bed, in the sun, moving around, and have lots of coffee at hand.

I once stayed up for three nights in HK - about 82 hours I think it turned out to be. It was very interesting. I did it because I had to; I was leaving for Vietnam and I had a ton of shit that had to get done (visas, papers, projects, finals, meetings, planning, packing). At some points I felt seriously great. I'd be listening to music, dancing around my room... but other times I was a goddam zombie. I was doing my final set of chinese paintings for a class a few hours before I left and it was very difficult. I would concentrate as hard as I could but some thought would come into my mind and it would lead to another thought and another and I'd look down and find my brush was in the middle of a huge, growing blot of ink. That happened twice and I had to trash both paintings. After painting, I sat on my bed to write a short letter to a teacher. I took me at least an hour. I would be writing but, again, my thoughts would drift off, my hand would stop writing, and I'd be sitting there with glazed over eyes just think the letter through for fifteen minutes. The finished letter probably went off on a few tangents... I did a few tests at one point and found that when I closed my eyes, it took just five seconds before I started dreaming/hallucinating. Bizarre. After I had done everything, I was seriously contemplating just sleeping like a bastard all day and putting Vietnam off till the next morning. But I had sense enough not to so I headed down the mountain and hopped on the train. I actually didn't sleep for probably 5 hours until I got on the sleeper train from Guangzhou to Nanning... I had the top bunk, the light for the car was right next to my face, there was a speaker blairing something directly over my head, and I was asleep the instant I closed my eyes. Slept for a very solid, very REMy 14 hours...