Friday, July 16
Insomnia Leads To Lie-Ins
For the past few weeks, my sleeping patterns have seemingly altered quite drastically. I used to be quite lazy, and not get out of bed until 11 in the morning, which would then lead to going to bed at sometime around 1 or 2 that night.Recently, however, I've somehow switched to not going to bed until gone 4am, which thus entails me not dragging my ass out of bed until gone 12 at lunchtime, sometimes even closer to 2 in the afternoon! I'm still getting the 8 hours of sleep that I've become accustomed to, just a good few hours later than everyone else.
The problem is that I'm not sleeping particularly brilliantly. Even on the days when I don't get woken up by a phone call, I tend to wake up around 10 or 11, and then spend an hour or two tossing and turning, perhaps only getting 30 minutes of solid sleep before waking up and falling asleep again.
I think this is due to the general hubbub in my household, which can get a little noisy, what with there being seven of us here. It probably doesn't help matters that my bedroom is next to the living room, with only a paper-thin wall dividing the two. When one of my housemates turns the TV on in the morning, I generally hear it loud and clear, which wakes me up and then keeps me from falling back asleep.
I can't complain, except on the rare occasions that it is on particularly loud, since it is my own stupid fault for going to bed late and not getting out of bed at a reasonable hour. I will mount a slight defence by noting that when I'm up later than everyone else, into the wee small hours, I am very conscious of keeping the sound levels down. If I have my stereo on, it is at no greater volume than a whisper, and if it's the TV that I'm watching, I keep the volume just above audible.
So far I've had no complaints, so I must be doing something right. But once again, I'd like to repeat the fact that I bear no ill will to my housemates for waking me up by watching TV at midday. Hell, if I can't be out of bed by midday, there's something wrong with me.
Why am I up so late anyway? I'll tell you why. I blame a few things for keeping me up so late.
The first is the Internet. I constantly find something to amuse or interest me at 2am, become engrossed in it, and then suddenly realise that daylight is starting to creep in at my window. I've spent countless hours at websites I can't remember, reading things I have no recollection of the content of, and absorbing information that I have now forgotten.
I don't know how, or more importantly why I do it, but I have come up with a possible solution: Just stop doing it! It's easy because it's exactly what Nike don't want you to do... How am I going to put this into practice? Well, that's the difficult part. Basically, if I happen to be online at 2am, I need to force myself not to click any links whatsoever.
Links always lead to pages, which contain links to other pages, and before you know it, you've spent half an hour hopping about the web from one random page to another. This is especially true when reading blogs. Everyone has their favourites, or their friends, and I like reading blogs so much that I can often spend a few hours moving around the blogsphere, trying to find something/one that I like and can read again.
The second thing that I want to apportion blame to is Major League Baseball. We get it on Channel 5 over here on a Sunday and Wednesday night (except this week, what with the Allstar game), and I've become quite addicted to it. I find the commentary quite relaxing to listen to, just like golf commentary, as the two guys meander through conversations, often concerning people, places and teams that I have no inkling of as to their relevance.
The problem is that the matches don't start until 1am, and can last until 4.30am (ish). I struggle to tear myself away at 3am, with the knowledge that I will not know the final score, and will probably forget to look it up the next day. Basically, it's an all or nothing thing. As soon as I sit down and watch the first inning, I know I'm going to be there until the end of the ninth (heaven forbid there be extra innings!).
And so once more I end up having a very late bedtime...
What else can I use as
Champ has become both the bane of my existence, but yet the reason for my continued presence on this planet. For the uninformed amongst you, 'Champ' is Championship Manager, in this case CM4. It's a football management game on the PC, and is considered the best in an ever-more-full marketplace.
It is highly addictive, and very involved. I bought my copy after my exams last year (note, after my exams: I did have some sense back then), played it religiously for a while, but have neglected it for a while this year. My other housemates have been playing excessive amounts of an older version on the aging laptops that have taken up residence in the living room, but I still remained slightly distanced from it.
This is mostly because the new Champ has some great features, such as being able to watch each match in a classic, top-down Sensible Soccer view. In the older versions, you have to put up with mere text descriptions. It's difficult to describe how you can end up cheering on a large dot on a green rectangle, or calling it a "fucking cunt" when it puts another, slightly smaller dot (representing the ball) wide of a tiny white rectangle (the goal), so I won't go into too much detail here.
Anyway, when I got my new laptop, I installed Champ onto it, as I knew that I'd probably be playing it at some point in the next year. Games-wise, I only play Champ, Minesweeper and Freecell on my computer. I used to play Quake III quite a bit, but got bored with having an ultra-slow dial-up connection on which to play internet games. I like addictive, simple to play but difficult to master games, especially those where you can gauge your current performance against previous ones (Minesweeper high scores, Freecell stats, Champ Hall of Fame, etc). I have an ego to beat!
In my late-night Champ sessions, I usually combine it with doing something else. For instance, if I'm watching baseball, I'll have my laptop on my, erm, lap, playing Champ at the same time. I can multi-task, don't you know?
The final thing which I would like to blame for my inability to go to bed whilst the sky is black is my work. On an average night, I don't get home until gone midnight, often close to half-past the hour. I then need a good hour or so to wind down before I can even contemplate going to bed. One hour quickly turns into two, then into three and four, and it's suddenly daylight once more!
I can't say I mind working these hours too much, nor the travelling involved, but I do feel that it is contributing to my apparent laziness each morning. If I was given some lunchtime shifts too, I would need to get up earlier each day, and therefore would have a solid reason to go to bed before daylight hits my window. Stupid rota-setters.
Anyway, that's my little random piece on my sleeping patterns over and done with. Like I said a few posts back, I've got a load of little posts that I want to write in the very near future, on all sorts of random subjects. Such as this one.
Oh, and I say "little", but this has turned into 1300+ words... Once I get writing, it just flows out. Now if only I could find the time to write, preferably during daylight hours, rather than the current time of 3.27am! Off to bed, I suppose.
