Sleep
Product review: sleep. Okay, maybe sleep isn't technically a “product”, but just get off my case, for fuck’s sake! Like I need you coming around and pointing out the obvious.
Okay, sorry, sorry, I just didn't get much sleep last night, and I'm a little irritable. There's the biggest problem with sleep, the amount you get. Either you get too little, and you're tired and cranky and miserable the next day, or you get too much, and you're tired and cranky and miserable the next day. There doesn't seem to be the right amount of sleep.
They arbitrarily came up with 8 hours being the ideal amount of sleep per day, but seriously, who are “they”, and what right do they have to tell me how much I should be sleeping? This idea of 8 hours is most likely a newer invention that completely ignores the history of human sleeping patterns. We live in a glorious age, where most of the things we think are common knowledge were in fact conceived by crackpots long ago enough to be ingrained in us, yet not recent enough to actually have any basis in science or reason. A lot of our health and nutrition is based on “science” practiced by turn of the century weirdos who thought things like cocaine, mercury, and enemas cured everything, and you could measure a man's worth by the bumps on their head. The 8 hours thing was probably dreamt up by some guy who was also a palm reading hypnotist, mermaid hunter, and a KKK member who preached about the cult of Isis and believed in eugenics.
Now we are stuck with it, one more stupid thing to obsess over and fixate on, to ruin our lives chasing the unattainable. What’s worse, our brain does some annoying sleep accounting all the time, so if you don't get enough sleep on Sunday night, all you can think about is making it up the next night. But God forbid you doze off at 6 o'clock on the couch watching TV, then you wake later and can't sleep at your normal bedtime. So you do some quick calculations in your head, and figure that you needed an extra hour and a half to catch up for Sunday, but you slept two and a half hours on the couch earlier, so you can actually go to bed an hour later and still break even. Then you look at the clock and see it's 2am, and you've been doing convoluted math for way too long, and now the whole week is fucked. I've been trying to balance my sleep register since 1984.
In fact, one of the main reasons I can't sleep is because I'm worrying that I won't get enough sleep. I mean, really, how shitty is that? Fuck you, brain.
I'm in bed, the lights are out, I'm comfortable, I'm tired. I've done everything in my power to give you whatever you need. I've brought the whole thing home, you're already at the finish line, all you have to do is take the baton.
But no. Your brain is not satisfied with all that. It laughs at all your preparation and hard work. It mocks you that try so hard, and are so good to it. Your brain is like Robert Duvall in The Great Santini, unable to stop demanding and pushing you, never happy with anything you do, and punishing you for trying.
In case you have no idea what The Great Santini is, what I'm saying here is that your brain is a huge fucking dick. It understands completely, knows exactly what you want, then keeps it from you. Not just in regards to falling asleep, but with pretty much everything in your life. It all starts with sleep, though, and your brain is always going to be that schoolyard bully, holding it just out of reach again and again, until it finally gets bored and leaves you alone. Don't worry, it will see you again tomorrow at recess to start the game all over again.
When you finally do fall asleep, you'll find that the brain is not done fucking with you. Sleep is a weird thing. To the outside world, you just stop moving and talking and being you. It's like someone turned you off, and you just lay there, vulnerable and boring. It's like you died for awhile, but no one is really concerned or misses you. For some of you unfortunate souls, that might be the case when you actually die, so please; stop being so difficult, and make a few friends.
No, your brain will give you dreams to deal with. We like to think dreams are either whimsical flights of fancy, or nightmares, but that's not really the case. The majority of dreams are unnerving manifestations of every anxiety, insecurity, or bad choice you've ever experienced, often with weird and grotesque CGI effects to make it more horrible than anything David Lynch could ever come up with.
So while you're reliving some horrible moment you blocked out of your waking life, this time you will also be unable to run, or underwater, or naked. In dreams, there are all sorts of things that don't happen in real life, most of them not amazing or terrible, just annoying and frustrating.
I know, sometimes you do have pleasant dreams. Sometimes, the weird playhouse in your head casts you in the role of a lifetime. Everything is wonderful! You're reunited with your loved ones or your dead pets, or you're living a life full of happiness and love and contentment. These are even worse than the miserable dreams, because at some point you will have to awaken. Then you will you find yourself in the afterglow, that brief moment where the world seems great, and you've finally won...and then it all comes crashing down as you realize the horror that you are back in your own life again, with all its chaos and loneliness and existential dread.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I need to be comfortable before I fall asleep, and the older I get, the harder that is to achieve. When I was young, I fell asleep in the back of my parent’s car, or with my head on my desk at school. A little older, and I was fine sleeping on a floor, or depending on the way the night went, under a pool table.
Now I need to get in exactly the right position, and then the countdown timer starts. I have a certain amount of time to fall asleep, and if I don’t, I’m screwed and have to start all over again. I will angrily flop around, rearranging my sheets and pillow, until I start the process again. God forbid if I notice that I have to pee. Then it’s off to the bathroom, and really starting all over from scratch.
You can’t even get your body to agree on the right temperature. You are either a little too hot, or a little too cold. Usually it involves making the room cold, putting on a blanket, then figuring just how much of your leg or arms you need to keep outside the covers to achieve the optimal balance for sleep. Then you usually wake up twenty minutes later, either freezing or sweating like a pig. At no other point in our day do we pay that much attention to the temperature, and need to monitor our thermoregulation so closely. God forbid we are one or two degrees too hot or cold while we are unconscious.
Even if you find that optimal position, and you fall off to sleep, as comfortable as can be, when you wake, it will be an entirely different matter. You usually wake up contorted, and in a vastly different position than you fell asleep in. Usually it results in discovering aches and pains resulting from the messed up angles you wound up sleeping in, but there’s also another really fun thing sleeping does to you. You sometimes wake up in the exact same relaxing and comfortable position you fell asleep in, and for some reason, you have even more aches and pains than if you ended up on the floor, with one foot in a toaster.
Somehow, by some strange and ridiculous mockery of physics and biology, sleeping soundly and comfortably seems to inflict more pain and misery on you than running an obstacle course. You might open your eyes, and feel refreshed and well rested for a moment, but then you reach for the alarm, or try to sit up, and you discover an ache in a muscle or joint you didn’t even know you had. Somedays, a good night’s sleep actually hobbles me.
So as much as I recognize that sleep is important, and I realize that despite the occasional horror of dreams, sleep is much more preferable than being conscious, I still can’t give it a five-star rating. The most I will go is three, and that is only because it is the closest thing to being dead I can achieve without actually being dead.
It also fills me with resentment, when I look at my cat sleeping about 22 hours a day, with no problems whatsoever. It sleeps hanging off the back of the couch, on a table, in front of the air conditioner or in the hot sun streaming through a window. A cat can sleep anywhere, at any time, in any conditions, stretched out or curled up in a tight little ball, like it’s mocking me. When it wakes up, it stretches once, and is immediately up to full speed. It can go to sleep on a full or empty stomach, it never seems to have indigestion, or the need to sleep sitting up with a pillow propped a certain way. I have actually seen a cat wake up from a sound sleep puking, vomit on the floor, and be back to sleep in a matter of seconds. I’m sure I did something close to that in my 20’s, but I think I was technically passed out, not sleeping.
So yeah, I think three stars is as high as you can go for a rating on sleep, unless you’re a cat.
Okay, sorry, sorry, I just didn't get much sleep last night, and I'm a little irritable. There's the biggest problem with sleep, the amount you get. Either you get too little, and you're tired and cranky and miserable the next day, or you get too much, and you're tired and cranky and miserable the next day. There doesn't seem to be the right amount of sleep.
They arbitrarily came up with 8 hours being the ideal amount of sleep per day, but seriously, who are “they”, and what right do they have to tell me how much I should be sleeping? This idea of 8 hours is most likely a newer invention that completely ignores the history of human sleeping patterns. We live in a glorious age, where most of the things we think are common knowledge were in fact conceived by crackpots long ago enough to be ingrained in us, yet not recent enough to actually have any basis in science or reason. A lot of our health and nutrition is based on “science” practiced by turn of the century weirdos who thought things like cocaine, mercury, and enemas cured everything, and you could measure a man's worth by the bumps on their head. The 8 hours thing was probably dreamt up by some guy who was also a palm reading hypnotist, mermaid hunter, and a KKK member who preached about the cult of Isis and believed in eugenics.
Now we are stuck with it, one more stupid thing to obsess over and fixate on, to ruin our lives chasing the unattainable. What’s worse, our brain does some annoying sleep accounting all the time, so if you don't get enough sleep on Sunday night, all you can think about is making it up the next night. But God forbid you doze off at 6 o'clock on the couch watching TV, then you wake later and can't sleep at your normal bedtime. So you do some quick calculations in your head, and figure that you needed an extra hour and a half to catch up for Sunday, but you slept two and a half hours on the couch earlier, so you can actually go to bed an hour later and still break even. Then you look at the clock and see it's 2am, and you've been doing convoluted math for way too long, and now the whole week is fucked. I've been trying to balance my sleep register since 1984.
In fact, one of the main reasons I can't sleep is because I'm worrying that I won't get enough sleep. I mean, really, how shitty is that? Fuck you, brain.
I'm in bed, the lights are out, I'm comfortable, I'm tired. I've done everything in my power to give you whatever you need. I've brought the whole thing home, you're already at the finish line, all you have to do is take the baton.
But no. Your brain is not satisfied with all that. It laughs at all your preparation and hard work. It mocks you that try so hard, and are so good to it. Your brain is like Robert Duvall in The Great Santini, unable to stop demanding and pushing you, never happy with anything you do, and punishing you for trying.
In case you have no idea what The Great Santini is, what I'm saying here is that your brain is a huge fucking dick. It understands completely, knows exactly what you want, then keeps it from you. Not just in regards to falling asleep, but with pretty much everything in your life. It all starts with sleep, though, and your brain is always going to be that schoolyard bully, holding it just out of reach again and again, until it finally gets bored and leaves you alone. Don't worry, it will see you again tomorrow at recess to start the game all over again.
When you finally do fall asleep, you'll find that the brain is not done fucking with you. Sleep is a weird thing. To the outside world, you just stop moving and talking and being you. It's like someone turned you off, and you just lay there, vulnerable and boring. It's like you died for awhile, but no one is really concerned or misses you. For some of you unfortunate souls, that might be the case when you actually die, so please; stop being so difficult, and make a few friends.
No, your brain will give you dreams to deal with. We like to think dreams are either whimsical flights of fancy, or nightmares, but that's not really the case. The majority of dreams are unnerving manifestations of every anxiety, insecurity, or bad choice you've ever experienced, often with weird and grotesque CGI effects to make it more horrible than anything David Lynch could ever come up with.
So while you're reliving some horrible moment you blocked out of your waking life, this time you will also be unable to run, or underwater, or naked. In dreams, there are all sorts of things that don't happen in real life, most of them not amazing or terrible, just annoying and frustrating.
I know, sometimes you do have pleasant dreams. Sometimes, the weird playhouse in your head casts you in the role of a lifetime. Everything is wonderful! You're reunited with your loved ones or your dead pets, or you're living a life full of happiness and love and contentment. These are even worse than the miserable dreams, because at some point you will have to awaken. Then you will you find yourself in the afterglow, that brief moment where the world seems great, and you've finally won...and then it all comes crashing down as you realize the horror that you are back in your own life again, with all its chaos and loneliness and existential dread.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I need to be comfortable before I fall asleep, and the older I get, the harder that is to achieve. When I was young, I fell asleep in the back of my parent’s car, or with my head on my desk at school. A little older, and I was fine sleeping on a floor, or depending on the way the night went, under a pool table.
Now I need to get in exactly the right position, and then the countdown timer starts. I have a certain amount of time to fall asleep, and if I don’t, I’m screwed and have to start all over again. I will angrily flop around, rearranging my sheets and pillow, until I start the process again. God forbid if I notice that I have to pee. Then it’s off to the bathroom, and really starting all over from scratch.
You can’t even get your body to agree on the right temperature. You are either a little too hot, or a little too cold. Usually it involves making the room cold, putting on a blanket, then figuring just how much of your leg or arms you need to keep outside the covers to achieve the optimal balance for sleep. Then you usually wake up twenty minutes later, either freezing or sweating like a pig. At no other point in our day do we pay that much attention to the temperature, and need to monitor our thermoregulation so closely. God forbid we are one or two degrees too hot or cold while we are unconscious.
Even if you find that optimal position, and you fall off to sleep, as comfortable as can be, when you wake, it will be an entirely different matter. You usually wake up contorted, and in a vastly different position than you fell asleep in. Usually it results in discovering aches and pains resulting from the messed up angles you wound up sleeping in, but there’s also another really fun thing sleeping does to you. You sometimes wake up in the exact same relaxing and comfortable position you fell asleep in, and for some reason, you have even more aches and pains than if you ended up on the floor, with one foot in a toaster.
Somehow, by some strange and ridiculous mockery of physics and biology, sleeping soundly and comfortably seems to inflict more pain and misery on you than running an obstacle course. You might open your eyes, and feel refreshed and well rested for a moment, but then you reach for the alarm, or try to sit up, and you discover an ache in a muscle or joint you didn’t even know you had. Somedays, a good night’s sleep actually hobbles me.
So as much as I recognize that sleep is important, and I realize that despite the occasional horror of dreams, sleep is much more preferable than being conscious, I still can’t give it a five-star rating. The most I will go is three, and that is only because it is the closest thing to being dead I can achieve without actually being dead.
It also fills me with resentment, when I look at my cat sleeping about 22 hours a day, with no problems whatsoever. It sleeps hanging off the back of the couch, on a table, in front of the air conditioner or in the hot sun streaming through a window. A cat can sleep anywhere, at any time, in any conditions, stretched out or curled up in a tight little ball, like it’s mocking me. When it wakes up, it stretches once, and is immediately up to full speed. It can go to sleep on a full or empty stomach, it never seems to have indigestion, or the need to sleep sitting up with a pillow propped a certain way. I have actually seen a cat wake up from a sound sleep puking, vomit on the floor, and be back to sleep in a matter of seconds. I’m sure I did something close to that in my 20’s, but I think I was technically passed out, not sleeping.
So yeah, I think three stars is as high as you can go for a rating on sleep, unless you’re a cat.
Coming next week: Product review: Stupid fucking cats. Unless I’m too tired.
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