You are not getting very sleeeeppyyy

By my calculations in the past 72 hours I have had six hours sleep. Admittedly I was always a bit crap at maths but, even accounting for an odd hour at either end, things are not looking great. My body hates me and I hate my body.

Four of those hours are all but a distant memory, having been taken more than 48 hours ago while on a couch in London, while the other two were picked up on a plane and, last night, in my own bed. At least I think so: I remember looking at the clock at 4.48am and the next time I looked at it it was six o'clock so I assume that time went somewhere. All this is fascinating stuff I know. Shall I give you a blow-by-blow of the nine hours I spent lying awake in bed last night? Perhaps not.

Lack of sleep does funny things to you. I'm not tired, not exactly. Oh I'm sort of bone weary, my eyes hurt and every so often my legs go a bit funny but if I snuggled up beneath the doona right now I don't think I could drop off. This ridiculous situation has been described to me as the equivalent of the over-tired child who won't stop screaming and go to sleep. I am that over-tired child.

As a result I have been drifting about in a haze when I should have been seeing the people I have missed or beefing up for a new job I'm still not convinced I'm qualified to do. I could be achieving things and enjoying myself but instead I am stressed about not being able to sleep and even more stressed about the likelihood of this additional stress making sleep even less likely.

More than that, lying in bed and being unable to sleep is very depressing. I'm paraphrasing someone else there, someone good. In fact I'm pretty sure it was F.Scott Fitzgerald and what he said was that the worst thing in the world was to try to sleep and not be able to. Looking at those words from beneath bleary eyelids I think he had a point. You think about everything you don't want to think about when you can't sleep. Or at least I do. And there's a reason I don't think about those particular things.

Johnsy may also have had a point when he suggested, in the comments field of the previous post, that I needed more sleep before I got back on the blogging horse. Well, yes, that is true. But I don't care. I need to share my pain. I need to explain why I have barely talked to anyone since my return and why, when I do eventually see you, I may look like a puddle of death. Most importantly I need some sleep.

NOTE: I have aquired a hardcore sleeping tablet to ensure sleep tonight and get me back on schedule. Hopefully. However, apparently this lovely little pellet of joy has been known to cause people to sleepwalk, talk in their sleep and even make phonecalls they later don't remember making. Of course there will be no witnesses to the first two but, er, just a little warning: if anyone out there receives a weird call from me at two in the morning blathering about the aliens under my bed or the three children I've just dismembered in my bathroom... er, you don't need to be alarmed. Probably.