For probably the first time in three or four years, I feel like I’m getting enough sleep at night. Also for the first time in at least that amount of time, I’m starting to have problems getting to sleep at night. When I was in high school (and junior high, I’m fairly certain) I had some serious issues with insomnia. I basically had what’s happening to me now–I would fitfully roll around in bed for an hour or more before I fell asleep (and at night when you’re trying to go to sleep, that hour can feel like five) and then I would wake up at some extraordinarily late hour in the morning. Lately, I’ve been struggling to get up by ten.
So it’s the chicken versus egg thing. Do I wake up late because I’m having trouble falling asleep, or do I have trouble falling asleep because I’ve been getting up so late? In the mornings, it’s a supreme effort to even just roll out of bed when I’ve woken up naturally. If I were just living as my body dictated, I would wake up, and spend the next hour or two just deciding whether I should get up or not.
The woman from True Stories comes to mind, the one who was so rich she just decided to stay in bed for her entire life. I’ll bet there are really people like that out there. Thing is, I’d get bored staying in bed all day… even with the internet, I’ll bet. Eventually I’d want to get up and do something.
I decided this weekend that I’m going to start taking Tai-Chi again. The last time I took it was in spring of 1995, nine years ago. I was a senior, and taking classes at the UofMN for college credit. But I still needed to fulfill my high school credits too, and that meant I needed some gym classes. I took racquetball winter quarter, and Tai-Chi in the spring. Strangely enough they were some of my favorite college courses.
Anyway, I found out my friend Neon has taken some Tai-Chi at this place over on University, The Twin Cities T’ai-Chi Ch’uan Studio. We were talking this weekend about how we’d both like to get back “into” it, and she happened to mention that one of the instructors was this guy named Paul. Now, if you’d asked me if I remembered the name of my instructor from nine years ago, I would have laughed at you, and easily said no. But when she said Paul, I knew that was the name of the guy I’d been taking classes from. I didn’t know it was the same Paul, of course, but a trip to the website and we had that figured out. Anyway, I’m excited to start it up again. I won’t remember any of it, but that hardly matters. I’m hoping to get rid of some of the gut I’ve accumulated recently, and perhaps gain back some of the flexibility that I had gained when I took the original class way back when.
I got a spam earlier today that made it through my filter whose first line was a famous quote by Karl Kraus:
Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.
Then it said: “Low rates on Software”.
Tomorrow I have a ticket promised to me for the new Hellboy movie. I’m stoked.
Well, I’m hoping to maybe actually sleep now… my eyes aren’t focusing properly, and my throat is all scratchy like it sometimes gets when you’re tired. (Only problem is it’s felt like that pretty much all day. I think I’m coming down with something.)