I'm very familiar with sleep deprivation. I've gone through several stretches of that in my day. I am not surprised that the converse exists, but I never guessed it would be so difficult to work through a sleep surplus. I have spent way too much of the last eight or nine days unconscious. The last two nights have been a lesson in extreme boredom as I lay awake for hours in the dark, my body refusing to sleep again while I have so much in the reserves. I have tried to turn it into a positive, however. In between turning on my right side and tossing over onto my left, I came up with a plan. I'm guilty of opening up far too many time-wasting games on the computer during the day. So I decided to challenge myself. When I am tempted to throw an hour or two in the trash, playing Bear River or something else equally repetitive, I'm going to try to write a scene first. One scene, attached to nothing. I don't have to link one to the next. They don't have to tell a whole story, and I don't have to fully explain any of the characters. I spent the last year and a half teaching myself to write every single day in this space. I think I can start to build on that now, and teach myself to create worlds until it is as ingrained of a habit as this blog is.
The first 18 hours or so of my challenge exceeded expectations. Not only did I write two scenes, one last night and one this afternoon, but they ended up falling out of my fingers as complete short stories, and I love them like I have two new children. I guess the exercise of trying to wrap things up each night (not always succeeding, but always trying) made it easier for me to write the arc from start to finish. Each story started with a picture, like the opening shot of a movie, and I built the story around it. I have a third picture, but I haven't had the story around it bubble to the surface yet. I made no promises to myself that I had to stick to any theme, so the first one was a four-paragraph horror story that bloomed from the image of a sheet of blood rolling off of a well-maintained knife. The second was quietly sweet and sad, from the picture of an old woman's hand caressing the curve of her husband's casket lid. I don't know how to describe the third picture yet. I know what it is--a detail of a carving--but I can't explain it yet.
I had more energy today than I have had in more than a week. I'm still not a hundred percent healthy, but I'm not considering pain pills an option anymore. I have eaten at least one meal a day for the last two days. I've gotten up and done a lot more today, but I'm still way behind in the things I wanted to accomplish lately. The man of the house, on the other hand, is starting to get into mischief. He has been home for, what, three weeks now? He timed his "get-reacquainted days off" perfectly to run all the way into the holiday, extending his home time. He needed plenty of rest to adjust to the time zone and come down off of his unreasonable work schedule for the last year and a half. I think he's been getting cabin fever for several days now. He started reorganizing the garage early on, so he could store his rugs on the shelves and take a truckload or two to the thrift store drop-off site and lighten our load. The house was an absolute mess while he did that and I lay motionless on the couch, wanting to die. Today he appears to have reached his limit on tolerance for the mess. He cleaned industriously all day, up to and including shampooing carpets and attacking the fireplace with Simple Green and a scrub brush. I couldn't help but laugh. He fantasizes about the day he retires, when he can do nothing, for the rest of his life. But if this is how restless he gets after two or three weeks, he hasn't a hope of handling retirement. That, or he really is going to wander off into the mountains, and start building log cabins with his bare hands. Don't expect a whole lot of sunset years pictures taken from rocking chairs on the Smith Retirement Park porch. That's not where we will be.
No comments:
Post a Comment