I think I realize what I was trying to get at in my last post.
Insomnia.
It’s 5 AM here now, which is the worst time for me. I wish I could sleep, but I just can’t. I laid down for 30 minutes, and it just didn’t happen. I need to go back to my old regimen of not eating after midnight and trying to get up at the same time each day.
That’s not really it… I could’ve gone to sleep earlier but I had to do this project for my friend. Work keeps me awake too. I just can’t peel myself away from the Internet most of the time. I need to stop this and do some real reading: I have a stack of New Yorkers two inches high.
I think I’m just mad that I have to go fix my aunt’s computer tomorrow. That’s going end up being two days of round-the-clock work (which will cost me two full days of pay) supervising the kids and such (which is fun, but I’m losing a ton of money doing it). Fuck it, I’m fixing the computer and then I’m out of there the next morning. I love my family, but I’ve got to pay the bills. And I’m spending money much faster than I’m making it these days.
I’m re-installing MacSpeech Dictate right now. It has been slow as molasses lately, and this annoying problem where it switches the last two letters in words is so damn annoying—I can’t do any editing to make my sentences sound more natural when I have to be on the hunt for those syntactic bungles.
Okay, the reinstall is complete. And it’s still Inverting the last two letters of anything I type. Maybe I need to create a new profile? okay, new profile completino complete. It’s still doing ti. I don’t even care to fix it anymoer.
Okay, I’ve discovered that it only does this when I’m dictating directly into Chrome. Well, I better put a stop to that. I guess it’s good that I did a reinstall anyway, the software was getting so bloated and slow. I remember when I was using Dragon NaturallySpeaking with my old microphone I used to get so involved in what I was dictating that I would pace around the room in a sort of fervent trance.
It was a wonderful luxury to be able to dictate whatever I wanted when I was at home. Now three days a week I’m with those idiots and their gangsta rap music.
Insomnia. I was going to talk about insomnia. I think that my most poignant posts were always one I absolutely couldn’t sleep and was obsessed with discovering truth. Some kind of truth… I don’t know if the me of those years even knew. These days, I feel like I’ve given up my commitment to capital-t Truth. A few days ago I went back and flipped through some of my older posts. I wasn’t quite sure what I would find, but I didn’t quite like the writing style.
I looked at some from 2008, and although the writing style seems very similar to how I write now I just couldn’t relate to all of these things that I cared about. The desperate grind to get all my work done… my endless math classes that year. Now it all just seems like a joke. My life in California seems less than real, just as my looming existence in New York seemed nothing but a vesper back then.
Besides waxing prosaic about my life, this journal serves as a sort of auxiliary memory, since I can never remember anything about my life. I’m jumping around and I happened upon the post where I listed everyone I’d ever slept with.
I’m lonely in my big bed with my fluffy comforter.
It’s 4 a.m.
It’s been many years but that always stays the same. I suppose I’ve also built a lot of my identity around my insomnia. I remember all those nights where I would be driving my Vespa back home at two o’clock in the morning and loving it. My favorite thing was to take a 3 a.m. drive down Fair Oaks Blvd on a hot summer night. I felt like I was a member of a clan of people that saw the city when it was dead and were uniquely prepared in case something went down in those dying hours.
I remember the thrill of getting home and writing about some amazing event. But as I said before, twitter has for the most part destroyed my absolute need to write something out in prose as soon as I get home.
Instead of this it would be one twitter post of “Just got into a car-crash with some Jehovah’s witnesses! In the ambulance now!”
As much as I glorify my insomnia, it’s this never-ending curse. I can’t work a single week full-time because I can’t get up in the morning and I can’t work all the way through the day. If I do work a full eight hours a start at 2 PM and then by the time I’m done I’m so worked up on caffeine that I really can’t get to sleep at a reasonable hour.
I feel like I accomplished everything and nothing today. I spent hours cleaning all the papers off of my desk that had accumulated in the past few months. I also cleaned off the big table downstairs loaded with all of my unopened letters, unread magazines, and castoff papers from school.
But still, I didn’t do anything that I could actually be paid money for. True, I guess I did work on Josh’s site for a little bit, but that’s because I’ve been putting off doing that for ages.
I have the distinct feeling that by the end of the break I will have done no work either on my papers or for the office. Going to Gail’s always wastes three days or more. I’m going to bring my bike, and when I’m done I’m riding back to the train station and going straight home. I wanted to see Matt today, not waste my morning on the hellish orgy of Hudson-Bergen light rail, PATH, and NJT rail.
I’ve always said that New Jersey should be evacuated and turned into a museum for bad urban planning.
Now it’s six o’clock in the morning. For what it’s worth, I’m going to say that the reinstall really helped my dictation software. Everything appears almost instantly and with very good accuracy. The program even crashed and it kept my document saved somehow.
I can hear my family upstairs. My mom is getting ready for work. If I went upstairs, there would probably be fresh coffee brewed. At this hour I don’t think there’s even a point to going to sleep. Wow! The first yawn of the night, and at 6 AM!
I think my alarm is still set for 10 o’clock in the morning. What a joke. The real tragedy is if I actually do get up in the morning then I’m just too tired to do anything and make all sorts of mistakes. I just need to not get into this habit again.
No food after midnight. Computer gets turned off at 2 AM. Enough of this.
Categories: Ennui