This Is Not Your Life! 21 November 1998

I'm having trendy disorder conflict, I think. I have some trouble sleeping - well, not so much with the sleeping part as the getting to sleep and living in this time zone. My understanding about how one is supposed to deal with that involves sleeping in a very dark room, to block out light cues and get the proper amount of sleep.

In the other corner, weighing in at 350 lbs., is Seasonal Affective Disorder. Because I have noticed something very curious. When I sleep in my bedroom, which is completely dark and has a very comfortable (if rather low to the ground) foam mattress, I oversleep, find it almost impossible to get up when I do wake up, and feel frustrated, angry, and depressed. When I go to sleep on the couch out here in the living room, under the big south-facing windows, even though it's horribly lumpy and uncomfortable, I almost always wake up in a pointlessly cheerful mood. I don't want to overstate it, it's not like I jump up a new man, but I'm much more content with the state of the old one. I can't see how the difference can be due to anything but that I wake up on the couch with the sun shining in.

Oh! I just had a thought. Ow. I think maybe the dark room thing is for travellers, so as to not adjust to the local time zone. Oops. I should have paid closer attention to that radio program.

(I've been reading P.D. James again, which probably accounts for some of the ill-fitting complexity of these sentences. I had a nearly-unstoppable urge to spell that word "programme". Britishism is a terrible disease - won't you help?)

I'm getting addicted to these spicy chicken wings from Fortune Wok. I just called up another order of them, even though it's only 5:30 PM and I could easily have walked to the local place and bought some, and be home and eating them in half the time. They're just not the same, though. At least I've stopped trying to mask my desires by ordering something else from the menu as a cover. "Yes, I'll have the Mongolian Beef, and, uh, my friend here would like two orders of the Hot & Spicy Chicken Wings." "OK, two order - you want napkin, or you just use your pants like normal?" "Aaah!"

More and more dreams about forgotten bits of my past that never actually happened lately. The other day I was sure that I had somehow been involved in getting a young girl out of some terrible home situation, but that after setting her up in a group home of some kind, instead of coming around to visit and taking a paternal role, I'd forgotten about her. Only to suddenly remember, of course. What a shmuck.

That's the usual pattern. Girlfriends I never had, important jobs that are overdue, or would be if they existed. Is there something real that I'm trying to remember? Am I just wishing I could wake up in a different life? I don't know. It's never a good thing, really, these memories. They're either something that it would be criminal to forget, or some long lost happiness that has since been thoroughly crushed. God knows I don't need to invent those. Well, I can always blame the holiday season. Or maybe just buy a sunlamp.

Tonight's fortune cookie says:

People find it difficult to resist your persuasive manner.

Hahahahahahahaha.

Willfully blind self-indulgent nebbish or amusingly quirky old coot? And how bout that local sports team? Discuss among yourselves.

yestoday		today		tomorrowday
	archive		semi-bio
listen!		random		privit
previous back two list all random     open pages     webring next five ahead two next
prev skip prev random     archipelago     list sites skip next next
All names are fake, most places are real, the author is definitely unreliable but it's all in good fun. Yep. © 1998-1999 Lighthouse for the Deaf. All rights reserved and stuff. The motto at the top of the page is a graffito I saw on Brunswick Street in Melbourne.