I’ve been rather immersed, finally, in writing other people’s lives, testing out ideas, throwing things at the proverbial walls, seeing what sticks. One day I’ll turn one of the better ideas into a book, like I always said I would.

But burying myself in fictional characters has meant much less of a focus on writing about myself. I’ve pulled away from the real world an awful lot, and almost a year later, people are beginning to pop up and wonder where I am.

I’m still here. I’m just quiet.

Hooping, too, has gone a little by the wayside – dance in general has.

As much as I fought it, I admit that a nasty troll I encountered on Vimeo has done a lot to discourage me from filming my practice, from filming anything and putting it online. I know it’s ridiculous and I hate it, but it was still a bit of a damaging experience for me.

I’ve also felt like I accidentally got too public with my hooping, and I got away from just loving it for the sake of it being amazing. I’m hoping 2012 is the year I find myself again as a hoopdancer, but I think it will require a certain amount of introversion.

The discovery that I have a gluten intolerance that chose this year to spiral wildly out of control, well, that did not help at all. Coming to terms with a radical diet adjustment has…been difficult. Sometimes impossible.

And it has sucked the energy out of me.

But, you know, I don’t know! New year, new stuff. I’ll be 35 in a few weeks, that’s weird. I still have three cats and I’ve developed a new fascination with “Grey’s Anatomy”. I took up the autoharp, halfassedly. Sometimes I even manage to clean my kitchen.

But mostly, I’m alive and I keep landing on both feet and walking forward.

Still around. Still mostly on Tumblr.

My two year hoopiversary is coming up in a month. I think it’s safe to say I’ll be celebrating it in the circle.

Who would have thought two years ago that I would be where I am today? What a strange caprice is my life.

Many thanks to Kate for manning the camera and getting this shot. I think it really sort of captures exactly who I am. Colorful, gypsylike, hoop-obsessed and a person who bends but doesn’t break.

I hope everyone is well.

That’s the fun stuff out of the way.

Crazy Aunt Purl wrote a blog entry a couple of months ago about de-criminalizing food. It was a good post, talking about how we’re so diet obsessed that even carrots can be seen as diet-wreckers.

I have that problem, but I also have an issue with the sanctification of food, or congratulating yourself for being a good little girl because you ate salad for dinner.

(my relationship with my body may be better, but my relationship with food is still entirely fucked)

If I have a salad for more than two meals in a row, suddenly I feel that fucked up little switch flip in my brain. “You’re doing really well. If you keep this up, you can totally lose so much weight. Good on you for deciding to stop being a fat cow with no self-control.”

No, wait, I protest. I just really wanted salad. I like salad. Can’t I eat salad without it being such a big deal?

“You’re so good. Such a good girl. Everyone will be pleased with you.”

Then I decide I want chocolate or a cookie or something sweet. “Oh, not that. You’ve ruined everything. You can’t do anything right. You’re such a failure.”

I wanted a treat. That’s all. Can’t I have a treat?

“You’re so disappointing. You’re just going to be a fat pig forever.”

Food is both the angel and the devil on my shoulders, and it completely sucks.

I know what I would have to do to lose weight. Cut back on junk food and walk two miles a day. In nine months I would lose 45 pounds. I know this, because I have done it – I lived in Wisconsin, I was flat broke, eating beans and rice all the time, and walking to and from work.

I’ve also stopped eating just about entirely thanks to a nervous breakdown and in four months I lost 30 pounds. That was super effective, you guys! I should ALWAYS have a sociopathic lying cheating jackass of a boyfriend around, it does wonders for a waistline.

Oh, and then there was that four year period where I threw up absolutely everything I ate and worked out for two hours a day. I weighed 130 pounds – twenty pounds underweight for my height and build – and while I wasn’t dangerously thin at that point, it was heading in a very bad direction (was in a bad place already, even, with the throwing up and the laxatives and the obsessive, obsessive working out), and I STILL THOUGHT I WAS FAT. There are photos of me in jeans that are two sizes too big, and I had my belt cinched to the last hole – I think I even poked new holes in it so it would fit. My chin looks filed to a point. My arms swim out of the sleeves of my t-shirt. But I had a bit of a belly, still, so I was fat.

I am not unfamiliar with the process of losing weight. I think we could even safely say I am an expert, am intimately acquainted with the concept.

At this point I want to live my life free of internal criticism, because I cannot EVER get it right. I can’t shut that stupid voice up. I am either being very very good, or I am being horrid. There is no middle ground where I am just being a human woman in her earlyish thirties who likes food, some good and some bad. Who likes to be a bit active and pursues active hobbies just because they’re fun and only because they’re fun.

(this is why the hooping as fitness movement bugs the everloving shit out of me, I’m sorry. Everything doesn’t have to be about fitness and weight loss. “I bet you lose a lot of weight doing that.” Yes, I do, just like I’d lose weight if I went to ballet class more than once a week, but I don’t see anyone calling ballet the next fitness phenomenon, and if I ever hear it happen I will throw a bitchfit to the SKIES. Can we PLEASE let art stay art, sometimes?)

I am really tired of everything I do or eat being turned into some kind of fucked up point or fucked up deduction on a fucked up chart in my fucked up head where the fucked up endgame is to be really thin, because then I will be perfect. I don’t want to be perfect. I just want to be something a little bit closer to normal.

I just want to eat a salad and, Dr. Freud, I JUST WANT IT TO BE A SALAD.

I’ve had my hands full – no, not an excuse. Lemme ’splain.

The blog went to the back burner at first when I returned to dance class, this time with Contemporary Ballet Dallas. Which is awesome.

I was really nervous at first, what with being fat and all, but the teacher treats me like I am any other dancer – unless I specifically tell her I’m injured, she expects me to keep up to the best of my ability. It’s been two weeks – would be three if we hadn’t had our yearly snow dump paralyze the entire metro area this week – and I am chuffed to bits. It’s so much fun and I feel so good afterwards. I feel tough, which may seem odd to anyone who hasn’t taken a ballet class. All I can say is, you need to take a ballet class.

I’ve also been super busy with Hooping Dot Org. I’ve been helping to moderate the Hoop Community forum since December, and now I am also co-moderating the new Curvy Hoopers community. Serendipity bopped a bunch of us over the head and decided it was time we stepped up and joined our less fluffy brothers and sisters who make up the public face of hooping.

The response has been incredible. No real negativity to speak of, and more plus size hoopers are dancing out into the spotlight. It’s just too fabulous. Never would I have expected to take part in anything like this when I first picked up my hoop nearly two years ago. Never. It’s great.

Oh, and then there’s my goal to do one hoop video a week. This one was featured on Hooping.org and is my favorite yet –

And this one is my very first ever tutorial! Enough people asked me about this particular technique that I finally put something together to teach it.

And I have been dealing with a troll on my videos too, for the first time in the three years I’ve been on Vimeo, but whatever. They’re anonymous and I’m not. Does not even take a scientist to know who’s the better person.

AND. And and and. Some time after being spayed, Trilby picked an “I’m The Bitch Queen Of This House” fight with Callisto and Mina…and won. I’m assuming, given that a nasty bite wound on Callie turned into the most disgusting, foul smelling abscess I have ever had the misfortune to be near. Sorry, PAIR of abscesses, since bite wounds have two puncture points. We are medicating and cleaning. It’s been fun. My vet never wants me to bring Callie back again.

Oh. And I have a job, of course. That takes up some time. And I have been immersed in reading this blog from beginning to end. That is also absorbing. And my downstairs neighbor moved out so I am free to make all the thumpy dancy noise I want for a while; it turns out I want to make a LOT of that.

And I turn 34 in two and a half days.

So things are a little full.

I’ll just leave behind this really great quote I read somewhere the other day – I’ve utterly forgotten where – and be gone, because those poi aren’t going to spin themselves.

Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt — marvelous error! — that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.

–Antonio Machado

I’m tired of saying I’m going to do a video and not doing it. I keep making excuses as to why I don’t – too busy, too sick, nowhere to do it – it’s all bull. All of it. I haven’t been videoing because I haven’t been hooping a lot. And I have also not been videoing because I have put way too much pressure on myself to live up to being as awesome as everyone tells me I am. What you all see is not what I feel I am, which is pretty damn stupid, I know.

I have been terrified of putting up anything that I think makes me look stupid and galumpy and you know what? Enough. I told myself tonight I would hoop and I would film it and I would stick it right up on the internet without editing. I haven’t even watched it all the way through. I saw thirty seconds or so at the beginning and a bit less than that of the end. And you know what else? I’m BLINDFOLDED, so I can’t even do anything particularly clever.

I am getting over my stupid mental block by just PUTTING SOMETHING UP. I won’t do this every day, but by golly I believe I would like to try doing it once a week. Like a journal of how I develop. My flow is crap, my ability to focus on hooping and not on people watching me is crap, and I have had bloody blasted well ENOUGH OF THAT, thank you, so here we go.

Oh yes. The song is “Hurricane Drunk” by Florence+the Machine, and I am sure I didn’t do it anywhere near the justice that I would have liked but I will not allow myself to be hamstrung by my own fragilities and pickiness any freakin’ more.

I’ve been to two events now, and found both of them to be simultaneously life-affirming and life-changing instances, so much so that I almost don’t like to talk about them. I feel like I can’t ever do them justice, and that I’ll only come off looking wordy but insufficient.

But I WANT to talk about them, I do. So I am going to, or at least I am going to talk about taking classes from Baxter.

The backstory is, right after I was waking up and realizing that hooping was going to be a very big thing in my life, I was reading interviews with serious hoopdancers at Hooping.org. Two interviews stuck with me, one with Abby Albaum and one with Jonathan Baxter, the founder of The Hoop Path. They, too, deal with depression, and reading their interviews helped me to understand what hooping was doing for me.

Because they greatly influenced how and why I approached hooping, I wanted to meet both of them, and I did, a year later at the HP Retreat I attended this past summer. I was also fortunate enough to take classes from Baxter and other Hoop Path instructors…and that, more than anything, has shaped me as a hoopdancer in the months since.

I understand that people are confused by this. They look at Baxter, this awesome hip hop hooping ninja. Then they look at me, the contemporary dancer, and they go – huh? You are the least funky white girl ever, what can you learn from him?

If you have never taken a class from him, you couldn’t understand, but I’m going to give my best shot.

There is a Zen Master quality to Baxter’s teaching methods. He’s like a yogi of hoopdance. A badass yogi of hoopdance. He does what he does and it is what it is, and that is that. You do not get, I think, much more authentic than Baxter.

He takes no shit. I know, because I have been on the receiving end of more than one dirty look when I groan at the notion of reverse current (as in, your non dominant direction) shoulder hooping. “Don’t even start,” he says to us. “Don’t give me that. I don’t believe in one sided hoopers. Just do it.”

So you do, because “I can’t” doesn’t exist when Baxter’s your teacher.

“I know you’re tired,” he says, about two hours in. “I know you hurt. I know it’s hard. I don’t care. Do it anyway.”

I’ve heard him say that quite a lot, and I love it so much I wrote it on a notecard and stuck it on the affirmation board by my kitchen, so I see it every day. Because I know what he’s really saying is, “Don’t give up on yourself.”

And eventually you really don’t notice that your feet are killing you and sweat is running into your eyes and your shoulders are abraded from the gaffer tape on your hoop. You are swimming in the deep water, now. This is flow. This is Zen.

“I teach hoopdancers, not hoopers. I teach hoopdancers, not hoopers. I teach hoopdancers, not hoopers. Let go, let go, let go…” He repeats himself, it’s hypnotic and practical all at once. It’s the truth and it is poetry.

I have taken many dance classes, and I get the most out of the ones taught by people who know what they are doing, who love what they are doing, and who believe in what they are doing, and they believe you can do it too. You wouldn’t be there if you didn’t believe on some basic level that you could do it, they reason, and they are correct. This is what I take away from a class with Baxter.

Yes, at the end of the day I am exhausted and wrung out but I am also relaxed and I feel powerful and capable and at home in my own skin. I feel like there is nothing I can’t make the hoop do, there’s no reason I can’t make it move the way I want it to move, I just have to figure out how.

“I teach people to hoop like badasses,” he says, and he is right.

That is what he teaches me, that is what I learn. We are different styles of dancer, we have not a whole lot in common apart from a love of the hoop that helps us keep our heads above water when an unasked for chemical imbalance threatens to pull us under. But he is a badass and he believes I and all the other dancers in his workshops are badasses, and so. We are.

In Yoga, there are many different disciplines – Hatha, Bikram, Iyengar, Kundalini, Tantra. You practice the discipline that suits you best in body and spirit. It’s the same thing with hoopdance, many different disciplines.

I chose the Hoop Path as my discipline, because I wanna be a badass and I wanna be Zen and it doesn’t matter that some people lunge and stomp and some people shimmy and me, I point my toes and pirouette. It isn’t how you do it. It’s that you do it in the first place.

One that has not made the list and probably should is “to blog more often in 2011.”

We will see. I will try. But as I say so often, no news is good news. I’m living and I find it inoffensive. Sometimes I even find it fun and exciting!

It’s an hour to midnight here. I have already played some Rock Band with my friends and now I need to sit and finish my Mother’s Christmas present before she leaves in the morning. I just wanted to pop in and leave one last missive before the year is out.

Here’s to 2010! You were better than 2009 but let’s dial back on the craziness in 2011, okies?

I am still not completely sure.

See, when I dressed for work on Friday, I had no idea at all that I would end up scoring a ticket to a Dresden Dolls show. I actually didn’t even know they were playing Dallas, because I am concert ignorant to an extreme degree. Seriously. The last concert I went to was, I think, Stabbing Westward. In 2001.

And I hadn’t even listened to the Dolls much. I knew one song – “Coin Operated Boy” – which is the song that everyone who has only briefly encountered the Dolls knows. I had somehow managed to be more acquainted with Amanda Palmer’s solo work, which I liked very much. So when Amanda offered a Dresden Dolls Dallas ticket giveaway on her Twitter, I didn’t really think twice. I just reTweeted and the next thing I knew, I had one ticket to the show I hadn’t even known about until that very moment.

Serendipitously, when I had changed purses last week my digital camera had made it into the new bag. I had really contemplated leaving it out, because it hasn’t been used much. But something told me it would be good to have along, probably. Good job, me! I wasn’t going to get to go home and change out of my schoolgirlish-but-not-the-sexy-kind work clothes (really. I would come to regret the shoes. and I felt deeply underdressed in a tartan skirt and knee socks, once I was surrounded by beautiful girls and boys in crinolines, suspenders, and face paint), but by God, I had my camera with me.

Little victories. Take them where you get them.

The Granada Theater in Dallas was the venue for the show, and they had hooked up a projector to their Twitter feed. I amused myself by trying to count the number of times Amanda and her partner Brian Viglione were propositioned by the audience. I very quickly lost track.

I enjoyed the opening act, a band I’d never heard of called Girl In A Coma, who were like…punk metal gals with a sort of bluesy vein. I particularly loved their punk-Tejano cover of “Si Una Vez” by Selena. Seriously. Like nothing you have ever heard. I recommend it highly.

But what I was waiting for, with an ever-increasing sense of curiosity, was the Dresden Dolls. I knew very little about the band itself. They describe themselves as “Brechtian punk cabaret,” they’re a piano and drums pairing, they live and breathe the freedom of art and music. They had gone on hiatus in 2008 and everyone worried that that was the end of the Dolls. That’s all I knew.

But it was clear just by looking around me at all the gorgeously decked out fans that this is a band that strikes a chord with their audience. I wanted to know more.

I’m not doing a blow by blow song listing, mostly because I can’t but also because that would be boring and not at all capture even the faintest spark of what I learned.

But they made me smile the minute they walked out on stage and stood at the apron, Amanda in a military cap, bra and jodhpurs, holding a large bouquet of flowers. Brian wore a fedora, shorts, and tall socks with a vest, and he carried an acoustic guitar. They grinned out at the audience for a moment. “Hello, Dallas!” shouted Amanda, and then she launched the bouquet into the air. Blooms showered down over the cheering crowd.

They opened the show there, one guitar and one microphone, Amanda’s voice like sugar-studded whiskey caramels melting all over the theater. Everyone around me sang along, and I wished I knew enough to be able to as well.

Once finished, they seated themselves behind their respective instruments. “This,” Amanda announced with a flourish of her arm, “is Mister Brian Viglione!” Brian smiled and touched his drumstick to his hat.

“And I,” she continued, touching her fingers to her chest for a moment before sweeping her arm back out in a grandiose gesture, “am Amanda Fucking Palmer, and together we are the Dresden Dolls!”

And they were off.

I remember being delighted when they did my favorite of Amanda’s songs from her solo album “Who Killed Amanda Palmer,” a frenetic, at turns angry, at turns contemplative number called “Astronaut.” It was unexpected and completely fantastic.

I was amazed at how little they seemed to need to talk to each other. While I am sure there was a considerable amount of setlist conversation before the show…they have been doing this for YEARS. They are two halves of a musical whole. Gestures and glances seemed to be all they needed to take cues from each other and spin into another aural whirlwind.

They did “Half-Jack,” a song with many musical similarities to “Astronaut,” and it was incredible to watch Brian crawl around the stage using anything and everything as a drumming surface, ending up next to Amanda and playing keyboard alongside her.

But my camera had died long before this, much to my chagrin. And the burning agony in my feet and lower back finally forced me to kneel on the ground, uncaring how grimy the floor might be. My eyes were closed and while I could not tell you what songs I heard while my friend Jessica soothed my angry shoulders with a light massage, I can tell you that it was a transcendent moment – I was free of pain, and I was with one of the few people in the world with whom I am comfortable being cuddly, and I was immersed in the music and the moment.

Then – the encore.

This is where I really got angry at myself.

I’d gotten so many pictures, over three hundred, so many pictures and I KNEW there were good ones in there but I didn’t think any of them were the quintessential Amanda photo that I wanted. One that catches her up from behind her keyboard, because I knew that Amanda tended to spend encores strolling through the audience.

I did write this section that night, and I am just going to post it as is.

“And sure enough, there she is, climbing all over the balcony and slinking down into the floor audience, that voice like velvet rubbed a little rough smirking its way through “Mein Herr.” I’m pissed that I don’t have a backup battery, pissed that I didn’t save some juice for the encore, my lower back is on fire again and my shoes won’t go back on and here’s Amanda and she is COMING TOWARDS US, still singing, and all I have is my iPhone, so I lift it up and start clicking, despairing that none of the photos will come out but I have to try.

“She is walking along the half-wall that separates where I am from the pit area in front of the stage. When she comes to the end of it – so close I could touch her if I were impolite – she stops and turns to face Brian on the stage, she sings at him and he grins and plays the hell out of his guitar for her. When you’re next to Amanda, I think to myself, you feel and know it for truth that this is what she loves, this art, this life, this music. You can even almost see the connection between her and Brian, a pulsing vein of light and the love of performance. They’re separated by a small ocean of humanity and still are connected as if they were holding hands.

“She is riding high on the love from us, this crowd, and she is pouring everything she has into this song because she has to, it’s how she does things. At that moment she turns just a bit, she’s in profile now, and all around me flashbulbs illuminate the scene, and I CLICK.”

For all that it is just a poor quality cameraphone image, I love it. It’s exactly the photo I wanted.

After the pair performed a cover of “War Pigs,” we all meandered into the lobby for signing and photo time. Brian was utterly worn out, but Amanda put on an army green t-shirt and came out to mingle.

She is smaller than I thought she would be – on stage and in photographs she is ten feet tall and magnificently, smilingly bulletproof. But in person she is like Jessica, slender but not fragile, a little bit shorter than me in my stocking feet. And of course, she’s lovely, her face charismatic and pretty all at once.

I sat against a wall and watched her sign things and talk to her fans, clearly tired but also clearly not going to go until she had had a moment with everyone who had wanted one. She is kind and generous, and she loves her fans.

I was fading fast, holding an iPhone with three percent of battery life left in one hand and my awful shoes in the other. I wanted a photo with Amanda, but I didn’t know if I could make it. Painfully, I shifted up to my feet and reluctantly toddled out to my car. Plugging in my phone, I sat there for a bit, thinking.

I had driven through Dallas traffic (no small feat, I hate that), used up all of my camera battery, stood for six hours in shoes not meant for that sort of thing, and goddamn it, what was I doing out here in the car? I wanted to at least say hello to an artist I admired and if my phone permitted, get a photo, if I could. What was I doing out here in the car after all that?

I limped back to the theater, where the enormous crowd had dispersed more quickly than I had thought possible. Amanda stood there, hugging a pretty girl in a lime green velvet skirt, who was crying and talking about how much this had meant to her. “These are really happy tears,” the girl explained to us as she walked away. “Really!”

“I like your skirt,” called one of the other girls in the crowd. The girl in the lime green skirt smiled and waved to Amanda and the rest of us before disappearing into the night.

There were only a few people in front of me, and it went fairly quickly. Before I knew it, I was handing my phone to a girl in a grey hoodie and Amanda was hugging me. I think I gabbled an explanation for being in my stocking feet, and then the photo was taken.

“The picture came out really dark,” the girl said apologetically as she handed my phone back to me.

“Yeah, iPhones don’t do so well,” Amanda chimed in.

I grinned. “I have Photoshop. I’ll do something.” I shoved my angry feet back into my shoes and then I, too, disappeared into the chilly Dallas evening.

It had been quite a night.

(I love saying Benedict Cumberbatch over and over and over in a really plummy Received Pronunciation accent)

This bugged me, but I was sure I would remember which book I had failed to order before the evening was out, and so I put it aside and got on with my night. Sure enough, twenty minutes ago I paused mid-sentence and remembered the book. I had been triggered by something in the conversation that led me down a convoluted but blindingly quick path to my destination.

It made me sit back and take a look at the structure of my memory. Oh, I know, it’s a navel-gazey, narcissistic, other-unflattering-words-beginning-with-the-letter-n thing to do, but I do it from time to time because I find the general topic of memory and the human brain to be amazing, and mine’s the most accessible example I’ve got to study.

Have you ever just sort of looked within your own mind to try and figure out how it does things? Just sat and followed the twists and turns of your memory to see what will pop up? It’s fascinating to see what things I attach to each other, to try and figure out why I thought attaching this thing to that thing would help me to remember something else.

Sometimes I see my memory as a jungle of electric vines, and each leaf on a vine is something to remember. Every leaf on the vine is related to another leaf on the vine. It looks chaotic, but it’s actually fairly organized.

Other times my memory appears to me as a series of bricks connected by mortar. Each brick is related to the bricks immediately surrounding it. Each brick is a memory.

Still other times, but very rarely, my memory is a card catalog. Oddly, I find this method of visualization to be the least efficient. It’s actually too orderly to suit me.

I also have a peculiarly twisted sort of semi-photographic memory. It’s not eidetic – I don’t have total and perfect recall. \But I do store images and scenes in my brain when I wish to do so. A combination of selectively “photographed” things plus mnemonic devices (visual and physical) helps me to remember where I have seen that movie scene, read that sentence, heard that earworm, last saw that medical record (ESPECIALLY handy and a very cool trick when you work in a hospital medical records facility, it impresses doctors). Very handy. I think I developed it out of self defense. I loathe earworms.

It all seems complicated, but I can sift through the information fairly quickly once I’m in the right area.

When I recall that humans are supposed to only use about ten percent of their brain, it really just weirds me out. I feel like I use quite a lot more than that. How else do I keep track of all those one-hit wonders? Of all of the books I have read and my favorite lines of dialogue? How do I remember the four teams that Nolan Ryan played for in his professional career, the reasons why I love and hate Thomas Hardy, conversations I have had with ex-boyfriends, who played each of the eleven Doctors, what the periodic table symbol for gold is, all the wives of King Henry VIII and their various fates…how do I keep track of all of it and more without using more than ten percent of my brain?

It seems crazy.

I can get lost in my brain for hours, and I am not even sure I am all that fascinating a person. I just tend to remember a lot of fascinating things in a very effective but oddly structured way. When I read “Hannibal” and came across Thomas Harris’ descriptions of Lecter’s memory palace, it felt like I had been struck in the face with a pillow. I utterly understood it, the entire concept.

Memory. That interesting, captivating, flexible, capricious thing. Whatever would I do without it?

Not so nice was the resurgence of a phenomenon I have not experienced since I was eighteen – night starts.

I hate the sensation of waking up with a gasp and a flail, groping about until I realize I am not actually falling. I used to experience it every night when I was a teenager, and it was never not terrifying. The biggest relief of my life was the night I woke up experiencing the most violent falling sensation I had ever felt – and then that turned out to be the last time I would have to go through that for fifteen years.

I am not really thrilled with it coming back. On the other hand, falling awake is somehow preferable to my other nighttime plague, sleep paralysis, which is inevitably accompanied by a mild hallucination of someone or something lurking at the end of my bed.

Oh yeah. That’s not frightening at all. Ha. Ha.

I used to like sleep. Actually, I still like sleep, when I can manage it uninterrupted by insomnia (which is fortunately the most frequent awakener), sleep starts, or sleep paralysis. But I haven’t had a smooth eight hours of sleep in years, and if the sleep starts are coming back, I don’t know what I’ll do. A sudden rush of adrenaline flooding one’s body is not really conducive to quickly returning to slumber.

I have minimal stress, low caffeine intake, a pretty kick-ass bedding setup, several top of the line sleep applications, and a low tolerance for even over the counter sleep aids. You would think this would not be such a big deal.

Part of me is waiting for my own Tyler Durden to show up. Heh. Only instead of soap and nitroglycerine bombs I’d have…lord only knows. Ice cream and arsenic? Perish the thought.

Project Mayhem would be more like Project Eh, Maybe?

Yes. I am clearly very tired. I am kind of putting off bed, you see. Being allergic to being terrified is why I avoid roller coasters and horror movies. Shouldn’t have to experience it in one’s home as well…