The Guy Who Invented the Snooze Button was Probably Just Jetlagged

The trip to New York has really screwed with my sleeping pattern. Going there is easy. You just have to stay up a little longer and then you’re allowed to sleep way into the afternoon and it’s still morning in American time. But coming back – yuck! You have to go to bed 7 hours earlier than you’re used to, and also get up that much earlier, which is just about as fun as sticking your head into a pot of boiling water. I’ve never actually tried the head in boiling water thing, but I used to work at a place where I’d randomly get splashed with hot oil and that really sucked.

Where was I? Oh yeah, I haven’t slept properly since I got back from NY. Which is also why I can’t remember if I already ate today or not… My brain is mush. The first night after we got back I got a decent night’s sleep, but I’d been awake for 32 hours prior, so when I woke up, I was still exhausted. So exhausted, in fact, that I kept sleeping all through the morning and woke up in the afternoon. This made sleeping pretty much impossible the next night, so I fell asleep at 4am. And spent the next day napping. I’m calling it napping and not sleeping because I woke up every 30 minutes and thought to myself that I really should get up now.

The day after that I tried a new approach and got up at 6am after 3 hours of sleep and ploughed through the entire day with double vision and I think I even fell asleep standing up at one point. I thought this was a good idea, but turns out it just made me so tired that I fell into bed at 7pm. I slept until 3am and was wide awake. Again.

I’m confident that sooner or later I’ll get my body back to normal time, but in the meantime, I just hope that people who know me won’t be too pissed when I can’t remember who they are or where I am simply because I’m too tired.

I have to say, though, the trip was totally worth a few sleepless nights. I was looking through the pictures from the trip and found one of a dead cockroach. I didn’t kill it. Casey did. He’s one of my friends from North Carolina who came to see me, and also happens to be the person who gave me the name Ziva. English is not my first language, it’s not even my second language, and apparently I say some pretty stupid stuff every now and then. Stuff that isn’t English as much as it is complete and utter gibberish. So he named me after a character on NCIS, Ziva David, who knows about a million different languages but still manages to get the simplest sayings wrong when she’s speaking English. Personally I like to think he calls me Ziva cause she’s kickass and exotic, but he only does it whenever I have bad luck in my use of English… Oh well…

Anyway, that’s not what I was saying. What I was saying was that Casey killed the cockroach. He did it in the New York subway, by stepping on it. (That was never a choice when we played Clue (Cluedo) growing up, but it definitely should have been.) At first we weren’t even going to ride the subway, but then we realized we can’t come to New York and not ride the subway. So we went down there and did our very best to try to get mugged.

First we tried standing at the weird automatic ticket thingies where you were supposed to buy the tickets and tried to figure out how to buy a single ticket. I’m going to go out on a limb here and call the thingies “ticket machines.” We didn’t get mugged at the ticket machines. So we tried taking a few pictures of ourselves buying the tickets, looking as touristy and muggable as humanly possible. We still didn’t get mugged.

Next we tried standing by the big map of the subway, looking like human question marks and asking each other which way to go. It didn’t work so we went downstairs to the platforms. That’s where I saw the cockroach scurrying past us on the ground and I said “Wow, look, there’s a cockroach!” And Jenn started screaming, Muschu became paralysed with fear and Casey stepped on the cockroach. It made a very satisfying crunching sound when it died. At that point people were looking at us like they really wanted to mug us, but since they didn’t, we grabbed our cameras and took pictures of the dead cockroach and of the platforms and of the trains. Inside the subway train we again took a bunch of pictures and said stuff like “Are we sure we know where we’re going?” and “I can’t believe we’re on the subway in New York!”

Personally, I can’t believe we actually survived that ride. No one shot us and no one pushed us onto the rails and no one even mugged us. And this in the city where people make radio requests like “This is for Dana, I’m sorry I stabbed you.” I consider myself very lucky.

I have once again forgotten what I set out to write about when I started this post, but it can’t have been that important. My lovely boyfriend, whom I love dearly but whose name escapes me at the moment, will be here soon so I’m going to have to cut this short. Maybe I have time for a nap before he gets here. *

The Guy Who Invented the Snooze Button was Probably Just Jetlagged