The blog of shame

I may as well get this admission over with right up front. Last night was excruciating. I wrote early in the evening about how curiously tired I found myself after having such a strong couple of days. Well, it all went downhill from there.

I spent about an hour cleaning a room down here, then went up for the 2am nap. I woke from this feeling utterly exhuasted, as if I hadn't slept a wink all week. I spent quite a bit of time in somewhat of a daze in the room, where I probably slipped in and out of sleep for seconds at a time. I finally summoned up enough energy to get moving, and came down to the kitchen. I made some raw chocolate balls (first time ever by the way, and am happy to report that even though I was so tired I barely remember making them, they taste delicious!).

I then decided to have an extra 4am nap. If you've read earlier entries you'll remember how well that worked out for me. Well this time I woke at 6:30am to a phone call from Angie, with all three alarm clocks that had been strategically placed around the room piled up neatly at the foot of the couch, like some kind of frightened offering to the gods of sleep. I almost literally had to prise my eyelids apart, as if I had fallen asleep in the snow and they had fused together with cold. Angie convinced me to go for a walk with her, and I spent a great deal of it trying to stay awake.

I have three theories at work here. Theory one is that earlier in the week when I surmised I was in the "difficult patch", I was sadly mistaken, and that was nothing but a precursor to last night's hell.  Theory two is that earlier in the week the difficult patch was indeed the difficult patch, and this is purely my body expressing it's veto power over any experimental designs I may have upon it. Theory three is that I had passed the difficult patch and was well on my way to polyphasic bliss, however a random input (such as a virus or something) has sent me off on a brief but overwhelming downward spiral.

I had a long think about it on the walk, for if Theory Two is the dominant choice, I should probably cut my losses now and either spend the next two days (which I have off) sleeping, and resume my normal schedule (or perhaps another polyphasic variant, the Everyman schedule, which I think I would take to without any trouble at all). However, if one of the other Theories are the winners, I just need to work out how to get through what may be simply a twenty four hour period of intense discomfort.

When you look at it like that, I figure my week's investment so far indicates to me that I should at least give it a shot. I sit here typing in the office with loud rock music blasting in my ear and I'm still drifting off, having to focus so intently here that my eyes are nearly itching. I keep editing as I go, finding spelling mistakes, typos and sentences that simply don't make sense, I hope I've nailed most of them. I think I need to work on what measures to take, but they might begin with:

• Getting people to physically wake me here during the day, and at night perhaps hitting up the night owl Facebook brigade who I notice sit online all night, and see if I can get anyone to ring me and yell down the line until I'm up.
• Once up, jumping straight into a really cold shower, then heading out for a walk to get the blood moving.
• Definitely staying out of the library where I've been sleeping. I love the room so much I think I now feel very safe in there, which is a little too conducive to sleeping through alarms.
• Aside from that, I'll just have to work out some better activities to keep myself occupied with.

Activities can be a strange one. On the one hand I want to be doing something reasonably physical so as to keep my body awake but on the other, it seems to me that my body still requires a certain amount of rest time, which would demand at least a few hours of seated activity. Anything less would surely just add to the fatigue. I just need to work out how to balance this and stay awake during any seated activity (even as I type now, my head is slipping forward here and there and I must blink repeatedly to stop the words from doubling when I read back over them).

Well, enough contemplation, time to get a move on with the day. I'm not sure quite where I'm headed with it, but with any luck it will be towards a much less sleepy and much more comfortable environment.