Insomniac Diaries

Hello. My name is Trish and I am an insomniac. I've been an insomniac for as long as I can remember. I can remember lying awake at night in my pink-and-white candy stripe bedroom and staring up at the ceiling, trying to find "constellations" in the glitter embedded in the acoustical popcorn ceiling texture. Who ever heard of a child who can't sleep?

The sad part of my problem is that nothing is keeping me awake. I don't lie there and worry, unless I really have something to worry about. I'm not wakefully considering my Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, or solving for y, or contemplating a cure for cancer. My mind wanders around like those Family Circus cartoons. You know the one where Mom tells Billy to put the hammer back in the tool shed, and you see Billy's path (by the dotted line behind him) and he goes to the tree house, the dog house, the out house, around the house, over the swing, through the car and under the porch in a squiggly path of distraction. THAT, in a nutshell, is my wakefulness. It doesn't make a bit of sense and accomplishes nothing.

Let me take you on a brief tour. Two nights ago, I stretched out with my eyes wide open, and thought about the first day of class. The instructor reviewed the rules, one of which was "no food or sweetened drinks in the computer lab room". No big surprise there...we all know what a Dr. Pepper can do to a keyboard. Uh oh. Here it comes. I see a bunny trail of foolish wakefulness coming on. What would I do if I spilled something on my keyboard? I've had to clean out keyboards before. (I eat at my desk a lot.) But a big spill? And I am NOT going to drink unsweetened coffee, so don't even go there.

I turn on my side and look out the window and notice the way the moonlight makes the red hummingbird juice look like a gem, my mind still on a sticky keyboard. The only way to clean it would be to unplug it, remove all the keys, and get started with a bottle of alcohol and a pile of cotton swabs.   Don't even bother to point out that it would be far simpler to cough up the $15 for a new one.  Logic is not in the driver's seat here.

Could I remember the order of all the keys to put them back correctly? I know where all the letters go, thanks to six years of training in "touch typing". Do you remember touch typing? What about the tilde? Where does that go, again? I'm not sure about the brackets and slashes, either. The cursor keys would be easy, but what about that mess above, with the "insert", "delete", etc. keys? Oh, and the number pad! Are the numbers laid out like a phone, with the 1 in the upper-left position? Or a calculator with the 1 in the lower-left? Pretty sure it's like a calculator. What about all the other things that are there? Num lock, +, - and few others. What were the others?

Let me think... what else is on the number pad? And thus begins round 2 of my mental bunny trail.

And this is the useless, silly drivel that cranks out of my brain when I should be dreaming.

You know what is worse? At some point in my mental meandering, I ask myself the question, "what started me thinking about this?" and I BACKTRACK through all this silliness, trying to figure out why I'm thinking about it.

Sigh.