Tales of the Fedora

This post, chosen randomly from an integer generator at http://www.random.org, suggested by regular reader and commenter, Immortal.

Sleep has been different these last few years.  I remember, way back in the dim mists of time when I was in High School, I was often barely able to stay up past 11pm, and I was completely incapable of waking up with any sort of usefulness with less than eight or nine hours of sleep.

I gradually got used to staying up later and later — though I was still useless the following day — through various movie nights and little parties with friends.

It actually took a trip two timezones away to actually damage my circadian rhythm.  In 1998 I took a trip to San Francisco, California to visit a friend who had recently moved out there.  I spent a week there, and upon my return I was unable to return to the central time zone. My internal clock had somehow gotten “stuck” on Pacific time. I started staying up later and later, it wasn’t unusual for me to get to sleep close to 1am although I’d still sleep until 9 or 10am.

As time wore on, this became normal.  I still couldn’t stay up much past 2am at the latest, but I found myself generally waking up at 9am or 10am … earlier if I had classes or other things to do that morning.   The day just sort of started at that time for me.

But things would change.  Circumstances changed.  A lot changed.  I wound up taking a job working third shift: 10pm to 6am at first, then later it changed to 11pm to 7am.   The first night was awful.  I had tried to condition myself to the schedule by staying up, but I couldn’t do it.  I kept falling asleep.

The first night of work was difficult.  I had to keep everything I was taught in mind.  The best ways to do things, how to do this, how to do that.  Where this goes, where that goes.  Then 2am hit.  It hit like a brick wall.  A brick wall with steel reinforcements, and a titanium plate on the opposite side.

For the first time, I was truly a zombie.

Somehow I made it.  By keeping moving I was able to stay up and get through that first night.  Unfortunately, it was a Sunday morning now, and I had to go to church.   That day was a blur to me, and I don’t really remember the second night of work, which was that same Sunday night.  In total, I slept maybe 2 hours in that 48 hour period.

And that’s how it began.

As time wore on with this job, I tried various techniques for sleep.  Going to sleep as soon as I got home … staying up for an hour or two, then sleeping … trying to stay awake … none of them really worked.  On top of that was the fact that I was running Overhead for five services a week at church … three on Sundays, Tuesday night college services, and Wednesday night youth services.  Most often I wouldn’t even go home from church.  I’d just  have everything I needed for work with me, and I’d sleep for an hour in the car, or in a quiet place somewhere in the church.   Unfortunately, the church gradually became a busier and busier place, and there weren’t too many quiet places left.  That, and the chairs I’d arrange to sleep on weren’t the most comfortable thing in the world.

So that’s how I got here.  What do I do now?

Now I sleep when I absolutely have to.   Since taking the job, I’ve found I can only sleep for about seven hours.  After that I just wake up.  Almost automatically.  Sure I can sleep later if it’s following a particularly rough day, or if I’ve taken an allergy pill with an antihistamine.   The shortest amount of sleep I’ve gotten in a period:  30 minutes.  The longest:  12 hours — due to the aforementioned allergy pill.  It was quite a shock to go to sleep at 9am, and wake up at 9pm …

My typical sleep schedule is basically dependent upon my daily schedule.  If it’s a Sunday, I will probably not sleep until later that night.  I tried getting a nap in right after work, and again after the second morning service … but that doesn’t always work out well.  I’ve missed my alarm a few times and showed up late.

If I don’t normally have anything scheduled in the evening, I’ll stay up until about 3pm or so, then go to bed.  I can then sleep until 10 or 10:30 pm and be up and ready for work.   That seems to work well, since I have no real social life.  It also allows me to take care of some errands like paying bills and depositing checks, since most of those places are closed when I’d normally be waking up.

If I do have something in the evenings, I’m forced to sleep during the mornings.  I don’t really like this, because it seems traffic is heavier during the morning.  Why is that an issue?  My bedroom faces a very busy intersection, and to make matters worse there’s road construction going on most of the time at this intersection, too.  Since it’s a very old house, the walls and windows aren’t soundproof, so big trucks, cars with noisy exhausts, and motorcycles all tend to disturb.

I did discover, though, that by sleeping on the couch, although not as comfortable, I’m not bothered as much.  I put some thought into trying to find the magic combination for why this is.  I think it boils down to two things.  1) Seperation from the outside walls.  The living room is more central to the house, and therefore more soundproofed.  2) More ambient noise.  I’ve got at least three computers in the living room, and while they’re not blaringly loud, the fans do make a noise.

I dismissed various such suggestions for ambient noise in the room … keep a fan going, get a device that plays sounds of a river running, or the wind blowing through trees … but in the end I figured out that it’s a computer that helps me to sleep.

For years I had my bed positioned next to my computer desk, so my head was essentially next to the computer.  It ran all the time, so I became used to the sound of the fans in it.  I didn’t have a computer in my room at this house, so I often tossed and turned and woke to even the slightest noise.

My solution was to take an old computer I’d swapped out of service from the church and plugged it in and turned it on.  It’s not connected to anything but power — I honestly don’t even know if it’s properly booted, or errored out somewhere. It doesn’t matter, the system fan, the CPU fan, and the soft whirring of the hard disk are enough to provide me an acceptable day’s sleep.  When I can actually afford to get one.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 9:59 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.