What's the Best Part of Being an Insomniac?

Every now and then, I like to peep my traffic sources (Whaddup, Germany and Russia?! Thanks for reading!) and keyword searches that lead people to Ask An Insomniac (AAI). (Whatever--it's not a book, but I wanted to add the italics for DRAMATIZATION. Plus, I'm that not-tired tired that is sadly familiar to many of us. The proud, the few, the AWAKE ALL THE FUCKING TIME, DEAR SLEEP WAVES ALPHA THROUGH DELTA AND PHARMA, PLEASE HELP US .)

I came upon this today:

This is a sampling of some of the things that people search to get to this weird, weird blog. Big up all the real insomniacs who were too tired to spell or use proper punctuation (boxed in green). "Tounge," ". o," "insomniax," and "comborbities," I salute you. (Also hoping there isn't a Club Insomniax that I haven't been to yet.) Especially you, comborbities. Because--ask your doctor--but you may have comorbid insomnia and dyslexia. But this is a safe place, especially if you bring up Cuban sandwiches (!!!!!).

But this leads to today's question, "What's the best part of being an insomniac?"
I would like to assume that this is from a fellow insomniac, as I imagine him/her/ze crawling Grudge-style to the computer after days without sleep and hallucinating patterns the likes of which Tim Gunn is probably telling you suck, whilst secretly plotting to sell them to the sleeping masses (My longest stretch with NO sleep was 36 hours--the patterns are real, son. Well, in that they're not real, but they are).

OK, so perhaps I've already given you one idea for what the best part of being an insomniac is...if you work in fashion. Please send me freebies if I have inspired you, thanks.

So that's my assumption, worst-case scenario is that we're like in the danger hours during which shingles or encephalitis or IFIDONTFINDMYPILLOWINTHISROOMFULLOF...PILLOWS? occur. Equally bad is if it's someone who doesn't really have insomnia but is trying to coopt the struggle. That's right guys, there are insomnia hipsters out there, and they aim to diminish our experience.

People think it's cool to have insomnia. People think insomnia is not a real thing. Put these two widespread thoughts about insomnia out there, and you have a trendy, non-illness illness. :/

To the people who want to co-opt "productive insomnia" as an identity/struggle, your real struggle is not sounding full of shit to actual insomniacs while having to hope that a pack of insomniacs doesn't come for dat ass at 5:30am while you're "not sleeping productively" in your fucking den of lies.  

I've mentioned "productive insomnia" before and how anyone who tells you they have it is mid-manic episode (altho it could easily be drug-induced insomnia), but I've heard it again from people I know damn well have no trouble sleeping. No one has productive diabetes, no one has productive chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and no one has productive insomnia. 

(Who curses Sir Walter Raleigh aside from someone who hasn't slept?! Think about it)

This begs the question, "What illnesses have productive aspects?" Going back to diabetes, perhaps being in studies for medications that work or being in focus groups to better quality of life may be productive. Same goes for COPD. So, as we can see the "productive" aspects are merely byproducts of an illness with which one has to contend and to treat. Insomnia is also an illness. If I happen to draw something during an hour I can't sleep, it doesn't mean I'm being productive--it means I'm avoiding the effects of the illness. But chances are I have work the next day. So if you think that one hour of shitty drawing at 4 am is productive, just wait till the next 18 hours of my not doing shieeettt.

Wait till the very productive discussion that goes like this:

Coworker (in slow motion, from my perspective): "Gooooood mornnnnning, how are yoooouuuuu?"

Me: "Is. it. the. morning? I ju--"

Coworker (I'm catching on, her voice has picked up in speed): "Haha, you're so funny. It's only Tuesday, silly!"

Me: "Tuesday? Wait, were we here yesterday?"

Coworker: "No, you called me and asked me to tell the boss to tell her you were gonna be out. Something about the couch was talking to you and you couldn't 'handle it right now' and also you think you should use 2B pencils on Oscar Wilde, but maybe markers could give you the flexibility in color that you were looking for; you read me a hypothetical to-do list for city council members and asked me if there was anything I should add; you told me that Jimmy Fallon should stop frowning at all his guests and read me your letter to NBC; and you asked if I'd be interested in a coup d'etat."

Me: "Thanks. Do you want something from Starbucks?"

That's how productive my insomnia gets, people. It's all fun and games until you have to explain the coup situation to human resources.

One of my brands of insomnia means that I cannot get to sleep. Think "I'm So Tired" by The Beatles. Or "How Soon Is Now" (if I'm listening to it while I'm tired...I am human and I need to be REM'd...just like everybody else sleeps...)

Every insomniac is different, so any positives you can find are just that--positives. Let me know what some of yours are! Sometimes there's pleasure in knowing I'm the only person awake, but if I have to do a cost-benefit ratio, it never looks so good on the benefit side.

"See, I've already waited too long...and my hope is gone...." (=some nights. Once it hits 4 am, I know that night is a wrap)

Do You Ask All These Questions Yourself?

OK, full disclosure, it is before 7am and I have been up for hours. I have not had Ambien in a couple days because I've been trying to get my tolerance down, but that also means that Benadryl is basically the only other option left in the cards for me. FYI if I have not already mentioned this, the active ingredient in Benadryl is the same active ingredient in like Unisom and all that other OTC shit they try to tell you will help you sleep. It's called diphenhydramine. I just saved you tens of dollars just now.

Also, why did Blogspot tell me that Benadryl is not a word but that Ambien is? Is it psychic or some shit? Because I was just about to say how Benadryl is not the truth. Like if p>q, then Benadryl is false and we reject the null hypothesis and by transitive property of made-this-whole-tautology-up, Benadryl is nonsignificant and stupid. (Guys, I hope you know I'm being ironic here. I actually is good at math and know both logic and statistics, which I hope was evident by the use of the word "tautology." Like honestly, when's the last time you heard that? I'm gonna try to integrate [oh shit, another math word!] "tautology" in my vocabulary more frequently. Except that I'm rarely logical unless...nope, I'm just rarely logical. Actually, that's all a lie. I USED to be good at math...you know I went to the Stuyvesantz and shit, so I had to know something. And BTW I never cheated there, because I know that's what you're thinking after all these cheating scandals...For the tests I knew I was going to fail, I just walked in with failure on my face and left with failure on my Scantrons. Which is what real students should do (fail? Again, the logic thing is lacking at the moment [read: always].) Anyway, the point is that I peaked at 13 in terms of basically all intelligence and it's been downhill since then. But don't tell my colleagues because people consider me one of the few people who can actually legit read scientific studies and understand confidence intervals and shit like that, so if they saw this, it could hurt my reputation.

OK, I may be lying again, but I think this could also be difference of opinion as follows...So chemistry kind of eluded me because I couldn't really decipher the accents of the teachers who taught it and I wasn't about to go HAM on linguistic nuances and shit because that would be rude, but I literally never understood what my teachers were saying. Anyway, I had this deal with my lab partner where he was the Master of Ceremonies for the Bunsen Burner and I would do the lab reports because I was afraid of fire. I always had this feeling of imminent burn victim in Chem lab. Is that cheating?

I still fear flames not excluding the Waka Flocka sort. People come to my house sometimes and they're like "is pasta burning?" And I have to tell them yes, because I have devised a system of lighting candles that involves me taking a strand of Barilla spaghetti (when I can afford Barilla...otherwise I have to settle for Ronzoni...which is not as good but has a hilarious name to make up for it...oh shit, I'm being culturally insensitive. I'll apologize for that later, but back to fire) and lighting it at the end (I JUST got over my fear of lighters like 4 years ago) so that I can light candles. Recap: sometimes my house smells like burnt pasta because I use long strands of spaghetti with a low risk of burning myself because spaghetti is long so that I can light candles.

Also, fuck a physics. None of that shit made sense ever. I almost didn't get like the special diploma "smart people" are sposed to get from my HS because I failed the Physics Regents by 2 points. TWO POINTS. Who the fuck else would that happen to? But then some physics geniuses were like "this test was flawed" and my diploma was saved. Except for the part where they spelled my name wrong. There were mad Korean kids in my HS so they put "Park" on my diploma and I thought it was so funny that I kept it. The DMV did not agree. Anyway, thank you physics geniuses...even tho we can never be friends, I am grateful for your wisdom of a pseudoscience.

Oh shit, there was a question at the beginning because AAI is "Ask An Insomniac" and that means it is based in questions. But the whole thing about not sleeping is that then I have thoughts that keep running and basically my bad. I'm actually a decent writer, but this blog is like my run-on sentence playground. I had a limited childhood, so please just let me have this. Thanks. So yeah, I do in fact ask a lot of these questions myself. But I also ask a lot of questions. That's why I have Dostoevsky and shit in my bookcase. I'm very proud of my book collection. Which is to say there is no Jane Austen in it.

This post is getting unnecessarily long, so thank you for reading it and obviously enjoying it. xoxo unless you have TB. Sorry, some of that shit is transmitted via spores and I am Irish so based on all history, I am OD susceptible to the consumption (yes, that is what they called it. They call alcoholism "the drink," since you were wondering). And also that shit doesn't go away; it's like pulmonary herpes. And I am lacking in the health insurance dept at the moment so like don't give me the consumption.