You’re not supposed to take your laptop into bed with you at night, so compromise by bringing a book or a magazine in addition to your laptop this time. At some hazy, ill-defined point, decide you are “done” using your laptop “for the day” and put it away somewhere.
Reading at night is so quiet. You used to do this all the time in junior high, reading books in bed until you fell asleep. You can do it again. It’s weird that nothing’s burning the tops of your legs right now. And reading is so slow. And turning the pages are so loud. This feels made up.
Wait, though, you need your computer back for a thing.
Do the thing.
Real fast, look at pictures of food. Any pictures, doesn’t matter.
More specific than that, though.
Enter the name of the last movie you saw on TVTropes.
Are there any episodes of Futurama you haven’t seen?
No, but you’ve only seen the one with Flexo like twice, so basically yes. Watch that one.
Aren’t there recaps of classic Futurama episodes on The AV Club you could be reading while you watch? Yes. Open them up.
Oh man, remember Slingo? Find Slingo and play that for a while until your arms hurt from too much T-Rexing on your keyboard.
Your cat is meowing. Your whole apartment is just one room, it’s not even an apartment, it’s one room with a door on it and also a shower cubicle, so there’s nowhere to put him. Put him in the bathroom.
Being in the bathroom reminds of you of how every afternoon you can hear your neighbor playing video games through your bathroom window. It sounds like classic Sonic, but that can’t be what they’re playing all the time. Think about video games.
The bathroom doesn’t have a door on it, so you can’t lock him in there. You should have made more money, so that you could have multiple rooms to live in.
Search “how long do cats live”
It’s forever.
Especially if they don’t go outside, which he never does anymore.
Open the front door a little, to see if he’ll go into the hallway and leave you alone.
He won’t, but he’ll sit right in front of the door and look out the bit you’ve cracked open.
He’s so close to leaving you alone. Nudge him with your foot.
Close your door after your neighbor who is just getting home looks into your apartment room. It’s awfully messy, considering you only have the one room to take care of.
Do you still have Jeeves in the Springtime, or did you lend that out to someone? Check all your bookcases.
Pick up your cat and put him in the hallway and shut the door to see what happens.
He’s sitting right outside the door, meowing, like the majestic and solitary creature he isn’t.
Open the door.
Get up and feed him again because that usually shuts him up for a little while, even though he eats too much already and does nothing all day and cat diabetes is probably inevitable.
Someday you will own multiple rooms to live in.
Search “how long do cats live diabetes”
How many kinds of cats are there?
What’s that one kind of cat?
Oh yeah, it’s a Maine Coon.
What’s that kind of cat that likes water? From Mongolia or somewhere. That water cat. Look that cat up.
What do you think you could learn about Ba’hai in twenty minutes? Find out.
What are the differences between being Ba’hai and Sikh again? Find that out too.
This is ridiculous. Too many tabs open. Just close your laptop and turn the light out.
Remember that thing you did that one time? That was terrible. Think about it now, real hard.
Pick your laptop back up off the floor. What could you learn about Anglo-Saxon paganism right now?
Learn as much as you can about Anglo-Saxon paganism, right now.
What’s a “corpse path”?
Which president is the one who still has two grandsons alive? It’s Tyler, right? Is it Tippecanoe and Tyler too, or Tippecanoe and Taylor too? It has to be Tyler, because Taylor was after Lincoln and Tippecanoe was before.
Taylor was actually before Lincoln but you were still right about Tyler.
What are some different opinions people have had on Lincoln? Find out.
Maybe Dear Prudence has updated since this afternoon. Go check.
What do you think has happened to everyone you have ever dated? Look them all up.
Think of all the places you’ve fallen asleep in. Apparently you’ve done it pretty much every night before this one, hard as that may be to believe. What was your secret? Think.
Just shut your computer. Just decide, arbitrarily, to be done for the day, and decide to not be anything for a while, somehow. Put your laptop on the floor again in that weird sliding technique where it doesn’t quite fall but you don’t actually have to quite sit up, either.
Think about dying, and how once you’ve died, you’ll be dead forever. Think of the entire planet as an ocean liner constantly heaving itself up higher and higher towards a blazing furnace, and each top layer is incinerated neatly as each successive generation is scythed from the surface of the earth, and how this will happen to you.
Think about how quickly your skin would sear off if someone peeled back the entire ozone layer and let the sun really get at you.
Your cat is on your ankles. Kick him off. Bring your laptop back up into the bed.
Search “fall asleep meditation”
That doesn’t sound like the ocean at all. Find another one.
Think about a forest, or something.
That’s not enough to think about. That still leaves a lot of your brain to be bored. Just wait to sleep to come pick you up, like you’re at soccer practice.
It’s taking forever. Open TVTropes again instead. And that old “Negroni Season” piece on the Awl. And find out how Raise the Red Lantern ended again. Did she die, or just go crazy? I think she might have died, but she might have just gone crazy.
Wait for it to be tomorrow.
Tags: advice, how to fall asleep, sleep
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My morning:
Receive email from boss with 4 attachments he needs printed.
As those are printing, receive a call from boss asking you to pick up the document on the printer that he just printed.
Pick up document and deliver to boss, then wait for the previous 4 documents to finish printing.
Staple and organize documents and hand them to boss.
When you get back to desk, see another email from boss asking you to print another document.
Rend garments and run screaming from your life.
why is your boss incapable of printing and stapling his own goddamn documents
I have a theory that once a person receives multiple degrees from multiple Ivy League universities, they become incapable of deciphering complex printer commands. Or of walking to a supply closet and procuring the items they are in want of.
It’s a sad existence.
“HOW DOES THIS APPARATUS FUNCTION”
“That’s an eraser, sir.”
Ugh ugh ugh your morning sounds like all of my days. I feel you.
It is well known that Ivy education will wipe all technical knowledge learning area neurons from the brain to make room for useless things like fight songs, WASP etiquette rules, and hostess gift tips for luncheons at yacht clubs. That’s the reason why Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard
Like one of those purebred dogs so thoroughly refined it can’t breathe or screw without medical assistance.
Hahaha! That is such an apt description of this guy, you don’t even know!
I had a very kind, very intelligent boss who was always amazed at my ability to discover information/answers to questions like “How much would an Acela Amtrak fare from Boston to DC be for X date?” I literally was just Googling things.
At 4AM, it’s always Negroni Season.
why do people even have cats ughhhhhh
[meowing]
[meowing intensifies]
[[meowing intensifies]]
WHAT DO YOU WANT I DON’T SPEAK YOUR LANGUAGE WHAAAAAAT
Klaas-Jan sits in the doorway and meows at me in this very intense, kind of wavery meow. I have no idea what he wants and I have never known what he wants. This is unlikely to change.
the one that lives in my house meowed incessantly at the front and back doors for a period of four hours, in which I thought I was going to be driven to some kind of elegant, Telltale Heart-esque insanity.
i’m just waiting for him to die at this point honestly
wait
how long DO cats live
inherited parents’ cat who could not be taken across the sea is currently at 16 and a half (ish??? he was adopted foster, so maybe older). dude weighs 22 pounds and his brother/lifepartner died earlier than him which made no sense because this cat doesn’t understand that food is not something to be swallowed all the time.
i really didn’t think he’d make it over three ish moves, but here we are. however! I will probably miss him when the time comes. also lol Chicago summers, three flats and will we get a window unit? poor kitty.
That is up to the cat to decide.
I just lost a cat at 12 years old to cancer. Makes me nervous because my other cat is 17 (-ish) . Sure, she’s annoying as hell and needy as all get out (and yes – CONSTANTLY MEOWING. And demanding to be with me always. CAN I NOT BATHE ALONE?) but I also got her when I got my first apartment/job, and I don’t like the idea of losing her and losing that connection to my youth. So I will state it here – my annoying cat will never die.
My BIL’s cat predates him meeting my sister. They have been together for 21 years. I think CordeliaFitz has it right.
my cat bites me awake. every morning. usually on the shoulder. I heard somewhere on some dumb comedian podcast thing that what people say to pets is always what they mean to say to themselves and even though this is a dumb comedian thing it is obviously true, so I had to stop telling her she is the worst and a failure at life and nobody will ever love her and she should stop howling for food all the time because nobody cares if she starves to death and she is not as attractive as she thinks she is. but now I am out of things to say to her in the morning.
wait.
so when I say things to the cat like “no one likes you, literally no one in the house right now likes you at all, I can’t even express to you how much I don’t like you, stop meowing at the door, shut the fuck up, no you can’t go outside, you can never go outside, you will die in this house alone”…
oh
My cat curled up and slept next to my pillow and didn’t bother me until the alarm went off in the morning. I miss my cat. (She is not dead, she is just staying with friends because I am in China for a year).
Variations on thinking about that awful thing you did:
Positive – get brilliant idea of what you need to do to fix work things. Forget the idea the next morning; remember it the next night.
Negative – think of “what if…” for every decision you have to make. Realize you can’t control some of them, plus it’s 2 AM Saturday. Toss and turn Saturday and Sunday nights and obsessively think about the ones you can’t control and what you are going to do about them on Monday. Forget it all Monday morning.
“Remember that thing you did that one time? That was terrible. Think about it now, real hard.”
Oh god. Mallory, get out of my head.
yeah, that one really hit home for me (relatedly, I do not have a cat).
see also, in the subcategory of How to Fall Asleep After Having Attended a Party: Remember how you had all those conversations with everyone? You were probably being incredibly annoying and/or offensive. Think about that now, real hard.
I’m really glad this is not just me.
Yeah but is it just you for whom it’s actually correct?
I mean, if everyone worries about that kind of thing, so that means those kinds of people must too, right? And they’d be exactly the ones who’d just blow it off as a pointless anxiety everyone has instead of a terrible half-conscious realization of their own awkwardness!
(return to step 1, continue until dead)
PRECISELY.
AGH THOSE TYPOS WHAT THE HELL EDIT BUTTON EDIT BUTTON
What was that noise? No, not that one. That’s just the train. No, that’s the downstairs neighbors. Have the walls always been this thin?
Think about unpleasant confrontations that could happen at work tomorrow. Make sure you have your side of the argument completely planned out.
You set your alarm, right? Yeah. Definitely. Let’s check it just to be sure, though.
She’s snoring again. Not really snoring, just breathing loudly. It might develop into snoring. You’re already awake, though, so it’s not like she’s disturbing you. Okay, that one counts as snoring. That is a definite snore. How long until you elbow her? Maybe five snores. Five consecutive real snores.
What’s that noise?
I’m just going to say it: the inability to fall asleep anywhere and instantly is a side effect of MORAL LAXITY.
DAMN THAT’S MEAN
Stop, you’ll make me blush!
AUGH, this HURTS.
(What if it’s true??)
According to my mother it is true (likewise moral laxity is the cause of head colds and other illnesses, major and minor—but if it’s your illness it’s minor).
I tell her that I refuse to take the word of someone who snores like Swampthing strangling a duck.
hi literally every night. but you forgot “have imaginary conversations with everyone you ever knew,” that one kept me for a while last night.
I do that while I’m doing the dishes. I don’t know why, and once I realized I was rehashing conversations that had been irrelevant literally for years or decades, I started listening to podcasts or movies while I do dishes; it keeps me from imaginary conversations, which keeps my blood pressure from shooting up.
Same thing, but in the shower. Forever.
I have imaginary arguments with strangers on Twitter. Which I never ever ever attempt in real life, but I get all the stress anyway!
If I had a dollar for every time I thought “You should have made more money, so that you could have multiple rooms to live in”, I’d… have more rooms to live in.
I think you are forgetting one common activity: “I wonder if anyone else has liked my post or commented on it? No? Maybe if I refresh. What about that other site that I comment on? Oh look – someone commented. Oh, it’s a troll. I should respond. No, I shouldn’t. But why is he saying those things about me, he doesn’t even know me! But am I right about my opinion? I should Google it. Eh. I’m not that invested. But has anyone else commented?”
C’mon, I can’t be the only one…
no one likes my post
i have no friends, the things I say are not as witty as they seem to me, maybe they just scrolled past it real fast, my life is meaningless, I’m garbage, total trash
Yeah. You’re not the only one.
Also: “I am the only person whose comments on friends’ posts aren’t being replied to. Have I done something wrong? Does everyone just secretly hate me?”
I am usually one of those horrible people who falls asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow (to the point that I suspect I might have narcolepsy), but for the past week, it’s taken me an hour to fall asleep. I BLAME YOU, MALLORY. You’re contagious!
Last night:
come home from work, repeatedly mention personal exhaustion. Finally lie on the bed two hours after returning home.
Read. Decide you will finish the last 100 pages of Left Hand of Darkness because even though it was for book club LAST month, you don’t want to be a quitter.
Finish book, lie in the dark contemplating if the sexism in the book really is a feminist commentary or if LeGuin has it right.
Pee.
Pee again.
FUCK IT LET’S JUST PEE ALL THE GODDAMN TIME NOW.
Fetus is moving, apparently attending some sort of inner screamcore concert.
oh YAY 1am
Is it weird to invite the cat outside inside if it’s not your cat?
Wait, no, my cat is trying to put her butthole on my face for the 200th day in a row, do not need another cat butthole in the equation.
Sleep.
4am: child falls out of bed, requests “ice water” and “Rainbow Connection”, recieves only one.
4:15: screamcore concert continues. Check Facebook on phone.
for 45 minutes.
5am: throw pregnancy pillow off of bed in fit of pique, steal all available pillows to wedge under gut and knees.
6am: alarm goes off, husband leaves bed.
6:15: sleep deeply in middle of bed until child wakes up at 6:45 yelling “I’M ALL DONE SLEEPING, MOMMY!”
7am: text sitter asking her to show up 15 minutes early so coffee can be procured before work.
all day: wish for sweet relief, swear bedtime will come as soon as toddler falls asleep. Know this isn’t the case as there’s stuff to catch up on on Hulu.
Why our parents didn’t abandon us in the woods one predawn morning I’ll never understand. Something in the tapwater.
‘inner screamcore’ LOL
For me:
During pregnancy: Pee. Pee again. Pee like 8 more times.
Post-pregnancy: Wow, I don’t have to pee a dozen times before bed! Or wait, do I? Maybe my bladder isn’t totally empty. Better go, just in case. [10 minutes later] Ok. I’m not asleep. Maybe I subconsciously need to pee again? [Goes to bathroom. Falls asleep for 10 minutes. Wakes up.] Why am I awake? I’d better go the bathroom … [repeat]
But then again, this gives me something to do other than staring at the ceiling and cataloguing the various ways I and my loved ones could die, so … silver lining?
First child= months of worrying about an earthquake and things falling on him while he slept. Second child= zoloft.
This is in reply to the least topical part of your comment, but if you are having ambiguous feelings about Left Hand of Darkness, I recommend tracking down the follow-up short story “Coming of Age in Karhide” in Le Guin’s collection The Birthday of the World. It was written much later, from a different point of view, and with consideration of feminist critiques of LHoD.
Okay, Toasties, I’ll share with you my secret. If you want to fall asleep, get yourself some sort of Nintendo DS with an Animal Crossing game. Doesn’t matter which one, they’re all the same. Every night when you get in bed, just start playing it. It gives you something to focus on, so your mind isn’t idly wandering, and there’s something about the exact mixture of enjoyability and tedium of the game that will have you nodding off in no time.
That sounds so peaceful. I do anagrams in my head until I fall asleep, which keeps my brain busy and not wandering, and not coincidentally I am a killer Words with Friends player.
When I was unemployed I divided my time between job-searching and playing Animal Crossing while listening to documentaries on Netflix to “learn” and it was so soothing and calm and gentle that sometimes I almost miss those days.
Except for fucking diving for sea creatures in New Leaf, that shit is fucking stressful.
the jELLYFISH AHHH
A week ago I bought Animal Crossing New Leaf, and this is just so true.
Playing solitaire, reading 19th century poetry and listening to Baroque music are my tried and true shut off the monkey brain methods. YMMV of course
But every time I boot up Animal Crossing, I think to myself, “This is the time I’ll finally get all the weeds out of my town!” I start pulling them up, and then 15 minutes later I’ve only weeded like 2% of the town, and I start to think about how this is kind of a depressing metaphor for lots of things in real life. And then every character I encounter remarks that they haven’t heard from me in months, which is also true to life. Then I think that maybe I should move to a new town, but then I’d lose the conveniences I have in my current town…
Animal Crossing, the most laid-back game ever, has somehow become this weird existential minefield for me.
A couple months ago I played it again for the first time in like ten years and it hurts a lot more than I remember.
Yes, absolutely this. Or just download HayDay if you don’t have a DS.
My wristband tracks my sleep and tells me how long it takes to fall asleep and how deeply I sleep and how often I wake up and every morning I check and it MOCKS ME MERCILESSLY. Jerk.
Ok. At first I read “wristband” as “husband” and I was like, WHO DOES THAT? HE SOUNDS TERRIBLE. Good to know it was just a piece of snooty technology.
Over the past few years I’ve developed a SYSTEM which involves cold air conditioning and three pillows propping my limbs in just the right positions and a sleep mask and, frequently, benadryl. I still get up to pee about 2,000 times and it doesn’t work at all if someone else is in my bed.
In other words, there’s no way that our pre-air conditioning ancestors slept at all, especially since they had all that tuberculosis and witchcraft to lie awake worrying about.
Clearly you’re just working the wrong angle, and our ancestors had the right of it: stop getting up to pee.
Add earplugs and melatonin and you have my sleep recipe. It still takes at least an hour to fall asleep, but now at least I do.
The main point of the melatonin is that my doctor told me it doesn’t work unless I stop staring at a bright screen an hour before I want to fall asleep, so now I can’t take my laptop to bed. (If this isn’t true, DON’T TELL ME).
Think about how much debt you’re in. Think about how you’ll never be able to pay off the debt. Think maybe you could if you got an inheritance. Think about people you love dying. Feel horrible for thinking about them dying. Think about your parents dying. Cry. Think about how you’ll never have an apartment to yourself because you’ll never make enough money. Think about how you’ve been stuck at the same job for 6 years. Think about how many jobs you’ve applied for. Think about how many interviews you’ve had with no success. Think about how you might be stuck in the same job with no love prospects forever. Think about how on earth you can handle that.
I mean, this never happens to me, and I fall asleep so easily.
Think about what you’d do if you won the lottery. Scale back, think about just how much you’d need to pay off your debt. Bargain with the universe, you don’t need millions, just enough to pay off Sallie Mae and make a down payment on a house. Think about how much disposable income you’d have if you didn’t have bills. Maybe if you weren’t so stressed about money you’d lose weight. And get a promotion. Everyone knows only people who don’t need more money get more money. But what if you won the lottery…
Hello me. I would also like to add: Think jealously about your friend who lives in the same city but is buying a house! You make $20k more than him but his parents paid for his college. Dwell over the deep unfairness. Or maybe your friend is just a better person that deserves it? Feel ashamed.
Start to get really angry at your mother, who didn’t pay for your college, and doesn’t seem to be planning on giving you any money but instead endlessly renovate her kitchen and go on month-long trips to India, Africa, and Italy, and likes to say “I’m so sorry for your generation. You just feel like you have to SPEND so much. In my day we were frugal hippies, and of COURSE we had a hard time finding jobs, we just managed” like that explains the difference between her and you, when the reality is that your parents bought their first house (after college was paid for, before student loans were a thing) with GICs that made TWENTY PERCENT RETURN and a gift from your dad’s parents that represented a 1/4 down payment, which today would equal, no fucking joke, $300,000.00, and that house appreciated something like 400% in 8 years, and the next one appreciated even faster, which of course means that you cannot afford to buy property in your home city, ever, never ever.
Yes mom, it’s our fault my entire generation is poor. We just spend so much. Very glad to contribute to the Canada Pension Plan, enjoy the money, I’ll never see it. ENJOY NOT HAVING GRANDCHILDREN BECAUSE WE CAN’T AFFORD IT.
(CAVEAT: I love and adore my mother, and she deserves all the trips she gets, and it’s not her fault she’s a boomer, and I have a good job, and so what if I’m 30 and owe $80,000.00 in student debt, I’ll still have kids and she knows it, that amazing old crone.)
How will I ever have enough money to retire? But wait, what will the world even be like then? Probably a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Then everyone will be just as screwed as me. But what if it isn’t?
Rinse, repeat.
…are you me
Honestly just glad I’m not the only one.
Here is how to fall asleep. Lie in bed and try and remember the plot events of a TV show or a movie in order. Start with what the opening credits looked like. You should be asleep in no time.
1. Booze
2. You’re not passed out yet? There might be a tall boy in the fridge while you re-watch another episode of Archer.
alas, I do not booze; that way is closed to me
I haven’t boozed since Sunday (not for any particular reason, I just didn’t feel like it) and I fell asleep so fast yesterday. Which I am going to treat as a VERY STRANGE coincidence and not evidence that being responsible has positive consequences, because don’t wanna.
My bedtime habits:
-Open Tumblr app. Scroll and reblog the prettiest things.
-Open Twitter app. Scroll. Favorite favorite favorite. Retweet. Favorite favorite. Retweet. Favorite. (For some reason I rarely actually TWEET when it’s this late, I just become a favoriting/retweeting machine).
-Open Facebook app. Scroll. Sneer at that one guy who’s always complaining about the friend zone.
-Open Twitter app again ’cause what if someone tweeted while I was on Facebook?
-Open Candy Crush. Exhaust all 5 lives.
-Words with Friends.
-Hanging with Friends.
-Jeopardy App. Play many rounds.
-Open Twitter app again. Scroll scroll scroll.
-Dismiss 20% battery warning while opening Candy Crush again and deciding to use some of those saved up lives other people sent me.
-Open Tumblr app. Scroll scroll reblog reblog HEY WHAT WAS THAT ONE MOVIE WITH THAT ONE GUY
-Go to imdB. Begin trivia page spiral of doom.
-Dismiss 10% battery warning.
-Open Twitter. Scroll scroll scroll.
-Find way to Wikipedia to read about serial killers.
-Read until battery dies.
-Try to sleep. Can’t sleep, because of serial killers.
-Turn on TV and watch whatever’s in the DVD player.
-Get engrossed in whatever’s playing.
-Pass out at some point.
-Wake up tired and cursing self for having done all the above.
-Open Candy Crush instead of getting in shower.
oh my GOD I *said* I was sorry for texting you so late jesus christ Mallory
BRENDAN IT WAS THE WORST THING THAT’S EVER HAPPENED TO ME
attn Toasters here is a moral dilemma for you
say someone who lives in California doesn’t put her phone on silent or turn it off at night
is it necessary for a friend in New York her sleep schedule with his response to her text messages?
cc: Chuck Klosterman
YES
sometimes people don’t turn their phone off/put it on silent at night because what if there was an emergency
That T-rex arm pain is brutal. Been there, but my drug of choice is spider solitaire.
-What if I can figure out this immigration conundrum by staying awake all night [on tumblr]?
-What if by going to sleep right now I suddenly lose the ability to take care of job applications [on tumblr]?
-Should I read in bed until I fall asleep? Which book should I read? What book am I most guilty about not finishing?
-Should I read comics instead? Will I need more light for comics or for a “real book”?
-If I am going to read comics I might as well watch cartoons. DAMN, we can’t afford Netflix right now.
-What about that résumé? Could I be finishing that right now? Could I be [on tumblr]?
-What if I stay awake so long that when I fall asleep finally, my body stays comatose until I miss my train, am late to work, and then no longer even have an UNPAID internship?
-What if this immigration problem becomes a fixed reality and I’m left alone with this cat and no job to pay all the rent?
-It’s not even our cat!
-Damn, I hope I don’t have a dream about those people or that place. Maybe if I stay awake [on tumblr] for another hour that will keep them away.
-Ira Glass will help me sleep. Damn, This American Life is mildly traumatizing this week. Damn you, Ira Glass.
[tumblr]
{anxiety dream}
[late night songbirds]
-THE SUN.
I play handheld video games in bed, and if I’m not doing much reading in-game then the most it takes is 30 minutes for me to nod off. Thank god for handhelds that go to sleep automatically (in the old times, I’d wake up 3 hours later with a light in my face and realize my dreams had included the game soundtrack).
Sometimes, though, I say “no, we’re going to sleep early tonight, no vidya allowed, it’s time to be responsible.” That’s when I reproduce these steps almost verbatim.
Wait, did you nod off? How long were you asleep? Long enough to give yourself a neck cramp, apparently. Wait, is it just a neck cramp from sleeping with your head at a weird angle, or is it the first symptom of some vague but horrible disease?
Then down the rabbithole at webmd.
BTW if you want someone to blame for your insomnia, note that searching corpse paths reveals that those monsters at Wikipedia just casually drop the concept of documented evidence for bioluminescent fungal barn owls hanging around the corpse road in there and then just drop it, never to bring it up again.
A Manhattan phone directory’s worth on the exploits of Goku but not one word on whether softly glowing mushroom owls wait along the corpse path to steal away the souls of the dead like so many field mice.
Wikipedia you are useless.
1. Read oceans and oceans of Destiel fic.
2. Lie awake thinking about how IT COULD HAPPEN, RIGHT? WOULDN’T THAT BE GREAT?
3. Become acutely embarrassed that I care so much about TV characters kissing.
4. Decide I’m wasting my talent writing fic when I should be doing Real Writing.
5. Decide I probably wasn’t that talented to begin with, so why bother?
6. Feel sad.
7. Go read more fanfic.
I can’t bear the fact that after Negroni Season, after Foxwoods, after the Hank debacle, we STILL DON’T KNOW what caused them to break up for good.
Like, if it wasn’t the dog, what could it possibly have been. Who did he murder? What substances was he trafficking? PLEASE TELL ME SHE WAS NOT THE DUMPEE.
This is what keeps me awake at night.
Maaan if I could just get rid of this one: “Think about dying, and how once you’ve died, you’ll be dead forever.” I’m pretty sure I could handle everything else.
I mean, you could try to think instead about how, before you were born, you were presumably also dead forever. Then you could think about how the timeline of the world consists of an eternity where you’re not alive, followed by a brief interval where you are, followed by another eternity where you’re not alive. Then you could think about how insanely lucky it is that the present moment happens to be during your relatively infinitesimal lifespan. In fact, if the present moment were determined randomly (which it might as well be, as I can’t think of any good reason why today happens to be 5/14/2014 as opposed to, say, 11/17/6543210 BCE, or any other day), then the chance that you’d be alive at the randomly selected moment would be 0%. So… are you actually infinitely lucky? Or are you secretly immortal somehow and you just don’t know it??? I mean, you’d still have to be pretty lucky to be secretly immortal. But not infinitely lucky.
(This is what I think about when trying to fall asleep. There’s probably a flaw in this insane troll logic somewhere, but I like thinking that I’m either infinitely lucky or secretly immortal.)
I’m pretty sure she just went crazy at the end? She took her place in the great Mistress Circle of Life as the new crazy one.
Edit: Yeah, because Third Mistress was taken up to the little shack and killed, which drove her crazy at the end.
12:23 am Should I set an alarm? No, it’s fine; I’ll wake up.
6:31 am: SHIT WHAT TIME IS IT oh it’s only 6:30. I can sleep for another hour.
7:16 am: SHIT WHAT TIME IS IT oh it’s only 7:16. I can sleep for another 15 minutes
7:21 am: SHIT WHAT TIME IS IT oh it’s only 7:21. I can sleep for another 9 minutes.
7:24 am: SHIT WHAT TIME IS IT oh it’s only 7:24. I can sleep for five more minutes.
7:42 am: SHIT WHAT TIME IS IT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT *is late for work*
When I was a kid and knew I would have trouble falling asleep, my mom would walk me through this process by which I would contract and relax every single set of muscles in my body, starting at the feet and working my way to the head (“squeeze your ears!”), and then I would be sleepy from “working out”/figuring out how to contract my hip muscles and I would pass out. It still works!/is weird.
I do this sometimes! Even if it doesn’t always put me to sleep my muscles feel better afterward.
Watch asmr video on your laptop, get a bit sleepy, wake up a bit, and go WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING WATCHING THIS WOMEN FOLD TOWELS.
I’m glad I’m not the only person who watches those. There’s something so soothing and restful about a mock ear/nose/throat exam.
Don’t forget checking the SPCA website to pick the cutest dog this week 🙁
“Remember that thing you did that one time? That was terrible. Think about it now, real hard.”
Ooh, yes, that works. And the thinking about death. Or not just thinking about your own death, but the potential death of any of your children. And how terrible that would be. And how sad you’ll be… or wait! How sad they’d be if YOU died anytime soon!
Begin to cry, because the whole thing is just so very sad, then go and check on them all to make sure they’re all breathing, and then feel foolish because everyone is FINE and now not only can you still not sleep but you’re sad, too.
–> eat a tub of vanilla flavoured yoghurt.
"Remember that thing you did that one time? That was terrible. Think about it now, real hard."
Ooh, yes, that works. And the thinking about death. Or not just thinking about your own death, but the potential death of any of your children. And how terrible that would be. And how sad you'll be… or wait! How sad they'd be if YOU died anytime soon!
Begin to cry, because the whole thing is just so very sad, then go and check on them all to make sure they're all breathing, and then feel foolish because everyone is FINE and now not only can you still not sleep but you're sad, too.
–> eat a tub of vanilla flavoured yoghurt.
“Think about dying, and how once you’ve died, you’ll be dead forever.”
ALL THE TIME. And by that I mean only when I’m thisclose to falling asleep, and then panic jolts me awake and I scramble to think of anything else which usually is an alphabetic list of breakfast cereals. Which usually leads to pulling out my phone and Googling “discontinued breakfast cereals.” Dino Pebbles were good.
"Think about dying, and how once you’ve died, you’ll be dead forever."
ALL THE TIME. And by that I mean only when I'm thisclose to falling asleep, and then panic jolts me awake and I scramble to think of anything else which usually is an alphabetic list of breakfast cereals. Which usually leads to pulling out my phone and Googling "discontinued breakfast cereals." Dino Pebbles were good.
Being an INTJ, I am a fantastic multitasker, I get all of those thoughts through my system well before bedtime, upon bedtime, I’m asleep before my head hit the pillow… Unless of course I need to finish just ONE more chapter of the book I’m reading… Oh look! 4AM! Ok, I’ll put it down… 2 hrs of sleep is enough… 8hrs later… “*cough cough* I’m not well, I can’t make it in”
Maaan if I could just get rid of this one: “Think about dying, and how once you’ve died, you’ll be dead forever.” I’m pretty sure I could handle everything else.