Sleepless Nights

So a couple nights ago, I went to bed late, around three o'clock, and somehow never ended up falling asleep. That's right, I'd somehow managed to pull off one of the most boring all-nighters ever. It got me thinking, particularly now that I am still trying to catch up on the sleep I lost (due to a stupid cold that has been floating about at the moment), what exactly do people do when they can't sleep? It's not a difficult question to answer, and there's practically a never ending stream of solutions that rank from obvious to just outright idiotic. Personally I like to picture most people as developing multi-personality disorder, working weird night shifts at various jobs and starting underground fight clubs (like the film Fight Club (Fincher 1999)).

In the instance of the other night, what I ended up doing is not really too different to what other people do, I scrolled through Facebook for what felt like hours (but turned out to be only about 40 minutes) and ended up discovering all the weird nooks and crannies that the sight still has (like the poke button that still exists), not to mention digging up old and embarrassing posts from when I first joined Facebook. Now most people, I assume (in order to make myself fell less crazy), probably do something along these lines, or they watch a bit of tv, or read. Usually I knock off a few chapters of some book I'm currently working my way through (The Lord of the Rings at the moment*), but I found that the Facebook experience was oddly quite nostalgic and entertaining and also probably contributed to the fact that I couldn't fall asleep. Yes, I found that going through old messages sent to friends, right back to the first message ever sent, can be quite interesting and that the game can also be played with old messages on your phone. One game I invented for myself, whenever I'm feeling homesick (or can't sleep), is to go through all the old messages that are still on my phone from before I left home, that no longer have a name to them due to my international sim card, and try to guess who the conversation was with. I played this game the other night on Facebook for quite a while until I felt that I needed reassurance that I wasn't crazy. According to the people who answered my post that I left on the main facebook wall, you're only crazy when you accidentally start liking photos of old exes.

Moving on, I like to believe that some more interesting activities to do while you can't sleep include saying "f**k it" and leaving the house on some massive bender, where you track down an all-night nightclub, take lots of cocaine and end up waking up at some stranger's house, two days later, beside three prostitutes you're not sure you've paid yet, with a tattoo of a Lemur on your back and a message on your phone from Liam Neeson asking you politely for his daughter back, lest you suffer the consequences. But alas, this is not always what ends up happening and what you do instead is simply lie there, in the dark, like a fool, after you've given up on facebook, waiting for the dawn to come so you can float through the next day, ever so grumpily, until the sweet release of sleep comes the next night. Or so you hope, as the thought of becoming an actual insomniac terrifies you.

What I ended up doing, when dawn did come, was get up, walk my girlfriend to work and breathe in the fresh morning air, something that I haven't done for a while as I'm constantly waking up at midday and spending most of my time typing up these blog posts or finishing my novel. On the way home, I couldn't help myself and had to stop and be one of those wanky people that take photos of the place they are in so that they can add a fancy filter to it an post it on Instagram in order to boost their ego. You can see, attached to this post, that I have done a pretty good job and my ego is sufficiently boosted as a result.

I'm going to go have a nap now, God knows I need it, and until the next time I'm lying awake at night with nothing to do I bid thee farewell. Have a good one!