sleep

anything but a.m.

January 5, 2012 by krisis

This is an actual thing. Or at least, an actual thing in development. I would consider buying it, but I think there would be a lot of commensurate psychological trauma involved with waking up every morning. Of course, that is a good motivator.

I remember clearly the abject horror that child Peter had at waking up early in the morning.

I would do anything to delay the inevitable. Play dead. Let my body go limp so that it could not be dragged out of bed. Agree to relocate to a chair or couch and then promptly go back to sleep.

When all else failed, I would plead. Ten more minutes. Five, even. Any stay of execution to stand between me and a fully waking state.

I'll admit a certain affection for waking up every morning to the banshee screams of Ms. Love before dawn. Given the choice, I think that's what I'd still be doing.

I look back and wonder how I ever got myself to high school on time, let alone every day. It’s the same way I look back at sophomore year of college and wonder how I stayed alive when all I remember consuming was vodka and chicken cheesesteaks.

My attitude towards waking up has improved as an adult. Slightly. I don’t like sleeping late, per se. I can even be up ultra-early to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for a special event.

Still, my preference is for my alarm to begin ringing in the form of some terrifying, unignorable noise an hour or two before I have to set foot on the ground. That gives me some time to come to terms with the psychological ramifications of waking up.

E is not so much a fan of this arrangement. We’ve negotiated it down to a normal alarm ring within 45 minutes of actual waking.

I don’t know that I will ever be able to delight in dawn. I hear there are some people who are in the gym by the time the sun comes up.

Still, there is some satisfaction to starting a day early – if only in that I’ll manage to squeeze in so much more of my life than if I had woken up an hour or two later.

Blackouts

July 27, 2010 by krisis

Today I woke up at six.

Yesterday and the day before I woke up at six. On Saturday it was close to seven. Friday, six fifteen.

Do you sense a trend?

In our old house sleep was a black box.

I remember the conversation we had when we first moved in. Three bedrooms, and only the front and back ones were big enough to hold E’s queen-sized bed.

“Well, the front is bigger – more room around the bed, and for beaureaus and things. But it’s at the front of the house – streelights, cars passing, people talking, kids playing – it will all be in the bedroom with us.”

We wound up in the back. Smaller, cozier, and immune to all that street noise. Except, the backyard world of our home had its own noise – yapping dogs and yellow security lights, always on watch.

We adapted. I slept some nights with headphones, or earplugs. Our curtains were blackouts, thick and inpenetrable. Eventually E bought me a sunrise clock complete with chirping birds, so I could still wake up with some semblance of morning in my life – even in the black box.

People joked that I would be freaked out by the quiet at our new house. They weren’t wrong. Everything is silent at night (save for crickets), with everyone tucked into their discrete living rooms hundreds of feet from our door.

Sometimes I feel sheepish even playing guitar, before Elise reminds me that they could easily be doing that (or louder!) in their own homes. Such as is the silent expanse of our street.

Our bedroom is in the front of the house. No earplugs. Yes, blackout curtains, but not drawn carefully across every inch of every window from frame to frame. It’s just out of habit – to make sure no moonlight falls across my body as I drift to sleep.

The difference is the morning. Still quiet. Still no traffic. Yet in place of the sunrise clock I have … sunrise.

It turns out, I’m a morning person. For five years I had fooled myself, because my tiny electric sun was no replacement for an entire world of delicately spun light.

Tomorrow I will probably wake up at six.

I (mostly) #blamedrewscancer for my disappearing week.

August 13, 2009 by krisis

By rights and logic I really ought to be asleep right now, but if I don’t recount the past week it’s going to sleep out of the memory banks and completely disappear into the ether. At least this way I can prove that it actually happened.

So. If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been since that last post and why I am not writing you wonderfully detailed bulletins about my life, here is the download.

A week ago right now I was up late on the couch, laptop on my chest, firing out #blamedrewscancer emails. (Yes, I know I owe you the last chapter in the skydiving story. All in good time.) Around the time I planned to go to sleep National Mechanics emailed me and Mike(y) to ask if we were planning to bring some live acoustic cover music with us to the #bdc event next Thursday (i.e., TODAY).

Um, no. We had talked about it and thought music might be overwhelming. Given the open invitation, suddenly I was firing emails to all of my Philly artist friends who carry a bevy of covers, trying to find a bill for the night.

I fell asleep mid-email in that same position – lying on the couch with the laptop on my chest. When I awoke just shy of ten on Thursday morning (don’t worry; I had the day off) I literally opened my laptop before I opened my eyes. I had originally allotted the day half to #bdc and half to myself, but it wound up being double #bdc, and then some. Project managing, writing emails, talking to Drew, rinse, repeat.

It kept churning into the night (interrupted only to spend three hours researching my own well-documented credit history because – to the best that I can discern – CHASE is a bunch of predatory frauds. Without getting into my personal finances, they sent me a letter changing my terms that was blatantly untrue. Like, each “reason” they listed was immediately and factually refutable. The letter I wrote to them in response, it’s a beautiful thing. Elise speculates that they’ve never encountered such a document before in their lives. I can’t wait to fax it.)

Then, Friday. After work I found myself in a telecommuting menage a trois with Drew and Britt. What I couldn’t tell you then and can now reveal thanks to TechCrunch breaking the story earlier tonight is that I was working on a sponsorship proposal for 23andMe.

I started occasionally following 23andMe shortly before they were a Wired cover story in November of 2007, to the point that I knew just who they were when Cecily K. recapped her experiences with their commercial testing kit a few months ago. The reductionist version is that you spit in a test tube for them, and they report back to you about your predisposition for health and disease, and on your family history.

Point being, 23andMe is a real, tangible brand to me – a brand providing a valuable and potentially life-altering service. And I was proposing that #bdc (and, by extension, me) should be their business partner in a sponsorship.

So, yeah, just a little stress on Friday. Luckily, Drew is a wonderful human being who can make me laugh and cry remotely via instant message, and between the two of us everything was fine and from Britt’s abstract we all created a really wonderful proposal.

Saturday E and I headed to the burbs to assist in moving some friends into their first house (YAY!), and then I had a two hour intermission before heading with Gina to West Philly to play a house party fundraiser for her FringeFest play, Fefu and Her Friends. I’ve never played a house party before in a formal sense, where I was billed as a feature and was expected to play for some certain amount of time. It was awesome, but it kicked my ass – even when I wasn’t on I was still ON, from six at night to four in the morning.

In that ten hours, I played three or four hours of music. I also met, mingled, sang, and danced with some of the most beautiful and talented people in Philadelphia, namely the cast of Fefu and their amazing friend Ed, who is half lounge-singer and half space alien come to earth to reclaim Prince as one of his people.

Also, I played an on-command version of Cher’s “Believe” totally off of the top of my head, and at some very late point (possibly as late as present?) Gina, Wes, and I sang an epic three-part harmony version of “With or Without You” with Gina and I clustered around a single mic in a vague sketch of Springsteen and Van Zandt.

Then I slept. Until, like, seven at night on Sunday? All I know is that any time I was halfway roused during the day I would restart The Matrix and be asleep before the scene with the pills.

Um, where are we? Monday? Three or four hours of rehearsal with Gina directly after work (as we are providing some covers support TONIGHT while we await the arrival of the proper musician who will grace us, one Chris Huff), including playing an entire set live for TwitCam, followed by further rehearsal on my own.

Tuesday one of my other cover-songs leads came through in the form of my good friend and former TrebleMaker Kate, who showed up at my house with a setlist of 20 songs to bash through with me – out of which we were to craft 45 minutes of rockin’ cover music for TONIGHT (which is rapidly approaching as I continue to write this post).

Another four hours of rehearsal later and we had our set, packed with lots of stuff I had never played before, like Katy Perry, Aerosmith, and Evanescence … plus some familiar favorites.

Then, tonight, I baked. You see, somewhere in the midst of the days/paragraphs above, team #bdc decided that the best possible component to add to a benefit night at a local bar packed with acoustic music was a bake sale, and I – inexplicably and against my nature and better judgment – volunteered. (My altruism may have had something to do with wanting to play with the Kitchen Aid standing mixer my groom’s party bought us as a wedding gift.)

A dozen dozen cookies, half-a-dozen lead sheets, and half a half-dozen loads of laundry later, and it’s 4am. Music starts at our event in a mere 16 hours. I still have not had a proper rehearsal for myself, and I just hours ago realized I don’t have another set of my preferred strings (a particular issue since I just broke one).

Goodnight.

the corners of my mind

June 16, 2009 by krisis

I have a habit of dozing off on the 57 bus in the afternoon on the way home from work. I don’t think it’s because I am so tired. There’s just something about the rhythm of motion and the droning of the motor humming through my body while I listen to my headphones.

The nap is only ever about ten minutes long. It’s not even a nap, really. I’ve never slept through my stop. It’s just an extended hang right on the line between awake and asleep.

I love that line, especially when traveling in that direction rather than the opposite – being tortured by an alarm clock. Heading in to sleep is different. Your brain will rationalize outside stimuli however it sees fit. The world outside of your body takes on an arbitrary – almost hallucinatory – quality.

On the bus my favorite thing to do is turn on my own music – new demos or an Arcati Crisis rehearsal – and then drift off. My brain finds things in the songs I’ve never heard before. Sometimes I have a momentary synesthesia and my own words are painted in color. Others I am enraptured by Gina narrating an epic story, only to realize I’m not listening to her towering “Brother John” but just twenty seconds of refrain of “What’ll I Say.”

Last night when my body was finally ready to settle down my brain refused to go gently into that good night. It was raining hard, a symphony of individual droplets pattering against the roof above my head, and my mind wanted to examine every one.

I hate those nights. I’ve hated them since high school, when every night brought the possibility of seeing the subsequent dawn from the wrong side.

Last night I slipped in my earbuds and suddenly “Small & Lonely and “Gone Baby Gone” were rendered in plastic yellow totems, a wry stop-motion tribute to Yellow Submarine, awash in the white noise of the storm.

It took all of four minutes to fall asleep.

My Life Is a Joke

February 17, 2009 by krisis

Lindsay and I have an ongoing joke about my life.

Lindsay, being my primary secret squirrel, always finds a little nook of day to tuck a conversation into. Frequently we talk about all of the things that I do – work, blog, play music solo and with Arcati Crisis, Lyndzapalooza, freelance writing – &c, &c.

She, one of the more overachieving and time-conscious people I know, marvels at how I actually advance my goals in each of those areas all of the time.

The joke is that, in order to fit in all of those things, I must not do anything a normal person does. I don’t watch television, sit down for meals, or talk to people on the phone. I don’t sleep. I’m like some sort of T-1000 or Cylon. Or Madonna. I’m purely focused on achievements and achieving them, and nothing else.

That’s a slight misrepresentation. I am not a robot, and only aspire to be Madonna. I still do all of the things that human beings do.

Occasionally. And quickly.

When I graduated from college and started my career I resolved not to do any theatre or music for an entire year. No art, essentially. I would focus solely on being a good employee and a good boyfriend, because I wasn’t sure I’d be good at either. If I had free time I would sit and play video games until another opportunity to be a good employee or boyfriend presented itself.

After a year I allowed myself to get involved in a theatre project with Gina, and from there my natural inclinations for art and recklessly large personal projects took over.

I made a very elaborate chart. It included every possible thing that I could do in a given day. All of the regular human things, all of my time at work, all of my special goals, and everything else. Washing dishes. Walking from one place to another. Making out with Elise.

I tracked what I did for three months, every minute of every day.

At the end I had a beautiful graph of my life. A rainbow of lines interwove with each other to show me the relationship between work and sleep, guitar-playing and housework, or blogging and masturbation.

The area under some of the lines was the shape of my success; the area under others a dimension of dead space.

My priorities snapped me into focus. Before the chart I would have told you I was already busy enough with life. After I realized that I wasn’t writing songs because I was reading TMZ for 20 minutes a day.

The chart was almost three years ago.

Today Lindsay initiated the latest iteration of our joke, querying if I planned to sleep at all in the next few months while chipping away at my list of measurable goals for the year.

The chart was about sleep too. I tried to live on just five or six hours a night, and suddenly all the useless things expanded. The chart showed me that I need sleep to stay focused.

It was a disappointment, sure. I work and commute for almost ten hours a day, and if I have to sleep for seven that leaves just another seven hours in which I can live my life.

The punchline to our joke is that every minute counts, awake or asleep. 60 seconds to flip channels is a quick email reminder. Three minutes to set the table is rehearsing a song. A half an hour on the phone is this post.

Which would I rather look back on in December, or when I turn thirty, or when I die?

I always eat with the wrong fork, anyway.

how the Musee d’Orsay is like an unexpected vagina, and other adventures

January 24, 2009 by krisis

I know I’m still down about three Louvre posts as well as the Eiffel and Latin quarter, but if I don’t keep up with the new stuff none of it will ever get written.

So, today.

After our amazing day yesterday, which ended in giggles and me seeing how much crepe I could fit into my mouth at one time, Elise and I concur that today has been our one crappy day of the honeymoon thus far.

We woke up early and I made the best scrambled eggs ever made, with gouda, brie, chevre, and maybe manchego? It was really cheese with eggs as connective tissue. Best ever.

Afterwards, perhaps as a result of the 3000% increase in my dairy intake over the last few days, I fell back into a deep slumber from which I could not be roused. Even after I was finally dragged back out of bed at noon I was in a complete haze, and kept drifting off on the couch while Elise counted out our coins for the ticket machine. My grump had mostly lifted by the time we were off the Metro, but I was still sluggish.

Today’s big adventure was Musee d’Orsay, which is the modern art museum. With apologies to my sister-in-law and our dear friend Francesca, d’Orsay blew. In a word, Elise describes it as “ungratifying.”

Rather than a word, I choose to describe it in an illustrative allegory:

In the ground floor gallery I was looking from one room into the next, and I thought I spotted a Munch. It was pretty far away, but it was in the general shape of a Munch I recalled.

I approached the gallery, and as I neared the painting it became apparent it was not the Munch in question, but a massive, close study of a disembodied vagina.

That captures my feelings on Musee d’Orsay exactly: not the thing you thought it was, but actually some other thing, which in other settings is an awesome thing, but in this instance not awesome in the manner in which it is presented.

The main sculpture hall is magnificent to look at from afar, but the actual rooms were claustrophobic, especially on the fifth level. I realized as we jostled our way through (and on a Saturday – without any groups!) how much I really appreciated that Louvre had seating in every gallery.

Also, the collections were simply overwhelming – like, not in the sense of “the Louvre is so large; it’s overwhelming,” but in the sense of, “there is too much Degas in this room to focus on any one of them; it’s overwhelming.”

D’orsay features a lot of impressionism, including pre- and post-, and it’s not really my favorite period. There’s only so many times I can appreciate that something looks like its subject in a subjective way before it all just comes off like a torturous, never-ending labyrinth of Magic Eye (which is not meant as a dig on pointillism, which I actually do appreciate).

I was excited for Room 60, which included a Munch and a Klimt, who are two of my top artists in general, and especially from this period. All through the impressionists I was like, “it’s okay, I’m going to get to see a Munch, it will be so cool.” Lo, we arrived in 60 to find that neither painting was on display. (Thus, the vagina incident is revealed to be even more painful.)

Also, the major special exhibit at the moment is basically just about how Picasso was a twisted psychotic and spent two years copying Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe over and over again in increasingly abstract ways until he was literally creating cardboard cutouts of the deconstructed characters.

There were a few high points.

Even though the volume of Degas was tiring, I enjoyed watching the evolution of his work. I was endlessly fascinated by The Pedicure, because it has a very specific, photographic depth of field. It’s quite fascinating – Elise and I had a lengthy discussion about how he might have conceived of the technique, as it’s not something easily observed with the naked eye.

I’m sure Jenny can explain it to us.

I also loved the dance class, which has a similar specific focus along the shoulders of the girls (plus, the tutus are incredible).

I also delighted in my discoveries of Gustave Caillebotte, and I say “discoveries” because three times I found paintings that I loved and subsequently realized they were by him.

I’ll definitely be buying a book as soon as we can find one (D’orsay puzzlingly, had nothing to speak of, even though they have two of his major works on display).

The upper restaurant was fantastic, and may merit its own post. There was also an appropriately-sized section of beautiful art nouveau furnishings that I would have killed to have Francesca guide me through.

Finally, there was one room of “symbolism,” a period/style that neither of us were especially familiar with. From what I could discern on a brief pass it’s an allegorical style that casts modern situations with clear historic or mythological analogues. I loved the entire room, but my favorite was a painting that claimed to be about some sort of pastoral school yard, but that I have retitled, (and all the apostles sang) Rock Me, Sexy Jesus, for obvious reasons. Behold:

(I implore you to click through for a closer look. The allegorical only begotten son homoeroticism is unparalleled.)

Okay, one last point of suckitude: d’Orsay claims to be open until six, but shortly before five thirty they rope off many of the individual exhibits and start shooing you towards the exits.

Like I said, it blew. I’m thankful for being introduced to Caillebotte and symbolism, but otherwise would have preferred a second day in Louvre.

Afterwards we walked along the river for a bit, terminating in my ideal shot of Eiffel (it’s on Elise’s camera, so you’ll have to wait), and then we detoured past Grand & Petit Palais (which will have Warhol from March to Bastille) to get to Champs-Élysées.

Champs-Élysées was a bit of a paradox. We were expecting faire du shopping to net some of the wonderful fashions we’ve been encountering on the Metro all week. However, despite a few browses in both French and international stores, we didn’t settle on anything. I felt like we kept seeing the designer versions of indie trends, which I suppose is entirely the point of Champs-Élysées? I’m certainly happy to have walked the street, especially since I finally got to see Arc de Triomphe up close, and it was definitely a sight to be seen. I just thought I’d buy more stuff.

By the end Elise was barely standing, and we rode an assortment of Metros to get back home.

Maybe we were just predisposed to grumpiness, but today just didn’t bring the awesome of yesterday, despite a similar slate of activities. I hold out hope that we’re heading back out for a late night jaunt to the Moulin Rouge, but Elise may be down for the count – and she has all of our money.