Sleep, where I am a Viking

Weeknights, my bedtime comes at midnight. That’s generally the earliest I pass out and that means I average seven hours of sleep a night. It works. It grinds me down a bit as the week goes on, but I usually catch up on a few lost hours over the weekend. Now, I’ve tried experiments with getting less sleep before which have always been unsuccessful. But this week I’m trying something crazy: I’m getting more sleep. I think it started Sunday, where I was half unconscious by 11:00, and rather than fight it like I usually do I just went to bed. And I felt really good the next day. It felt so nice I tried it twice. Then it occurred to me that there are worse weeks for me to be building up my sleep stores. So, all of this week I’ve been getting a full eight hours of sleep. I can definitely feel the difference. My concentration is better, my mood has been consistently good, in general I feel measurable more with it. I miss that hour, though. That’s a full on hour of Me Time I’m losing each night. It puts me really behind on my watching of bad late-night TV; behind on my stealing of automobiles from the good people of San Andreas.

Between you and me though, all this sleep-hoarding is the result of my fear that I won’t make it through this Movie Marathon. Sacrilege, I know, but the specter of last year’s quitting still haunts me. I know it was the right thing to do, and I know it was the result of bad movies, endless shoveling, and probably too much alcohol, but it has ingrained in me this fear that I’m incapable of pulling off an all-nighter anymore. I know it’s ridiculous, and I know that I’ll do it, but the fear is still there.

Oh, and we’re having this kid and all, so I might as well soak up the sleep while I can.