The Insomnia Thread

[slow west vultures]

The heating system in my bedroom is apparently very out of whack, as I've turned off the apartment's heat according to the thermostat, and yet, in there, it's being heated until it's now at 80°. I have the window open and everything too, to no avail.

If there's one single thing that guarantees my not sleeping, it's being too warm. Light, I'm fine with, noise, it depends, but heat, heat keeps me tossing and turning. I like my room to be kind of cold if anything, so I have to burrow a bit under my comforter.

So I've now moved into the much cooler main room, with one very awake cat, and am going to curl up on my couch and watch West Wing episodes until I drift off. Argh.

i read somewhere once that the optimal sleep-inducing conditions are low-light and warm, and cold and bright tend to keep you awake.  i definitely found that true in college, when my 3:30 class was in an old poorly lit classroom, and i'd always doze off somewhere in the middle ( it was Medieval Middle East history class, and the lecturer kinda droned on sometimes so that was a factor too)  i think maybe that applies more to conditions that make you sleepy when you'd otherwise normally stay awake.  80 degrees is pretty damn warm. 

[Andrew_TSKS]

yeah, comfortably warm would be like 75. 80 would have me uncomfortable and burning up also.

[jess]

75° would actually be way too warm for my taste. While I agree that being in a warm place makes me sleepy sometimes, it doesn't seem conducive to in bed, actual sleep. If I have trouble sleeping, one of the first things I do is check the thermometer on the a/c remote I keep on my bedside table (it works even when the a/c is off), and if it's much above 71°, my body registers that as too warm. I do like burrowing under blankets, so it's not like I don't keep warm, but the air temp needs to be cool. I admit to blasting the a/c in the summer to achieve that, otherwise I toss and turn all night. I perfectly ok with being a freak, heat-wise, but I have known a number of other people who feel similarly.

Luckily, my heating system was fixed, so now I can mostly keep it off or close to.

[diesel_powered]

See, my problem is that I like it colder when I'm sleeping, but if it's cold when I wake up, I never want to get out of bed.

[coldforge]

I get that a lot.

[diesel_powered]

Why am I still awake? I think it has something to do with the time change and putting on The Wire.

[Antero]

So my two closest friends in this city and I have officially abandoned anything resembling a proper sleep cycle.  Going to bed at 3 would seem early and proper.  I think we should start meeting up places at like 5 AM and having breakfast.

[Mike24]

i'm right there with you man.  I can't fall asleep before sunrise anymore.  my job keeps me up until at least 5am 2-3 nights a week.  good thing i don't have morning classes though.

[alistarr*]

i slept about 2 hours last night and then lay awake until morning. it sucks.

[Mike24]

has anyone seen the gameshow 'mad dash'?  it's got to be the best game show of all time.

[santaclaustral]

what is the food equivalent of insomnia? where you are really insanely hungry all the time but when food is actually put in front of you, you can barely taste it, let alone eat it and, when you do, it's never enough to make you full? that is where I am at right now. I keep forgetting to eat and then, when I do remember, I can't eat enough before the act of eating makes me nauseous. wtf?

that is what I have. also the insomnia quite a lot right now, except this weekend where I didn't shower or leave the house from Friday night through to Monday morning.

 

[Antero]

Oh my god.

So it's almost 6 AM, I just baked cookies for no fucking reason other than wanting to bake cookies, the toilet is stuck so I have nowhere to pee until the plumber comes hopefully any minute now, and my insomnia is being deeply entrenched by the fact that one of my best friends and I keep staying up talking to each other online, each staying up to keep the other company in our insomnia.

[das kranke Tier]

I'm going to go play some DigDug and try to drink myself into something resembling slumber...

[diesel_powered]

Iiight. I took a shower and now it's time to wait for the hair to dry before going to bed. I couldn't be happier with my spring face, though. I'm glad I didn't trim what I left on my chin which is now billy goat length after quitting trimming it after Christmas. I'm hoping that if I continue to avoid trimming it, it'll be SLAYERRRRRRRR length by the end of the summer.

[girl]

I think we should have a photographic record of this billy goat length facial hair.

[diesel_powered]

It did occur to me, but all my cameras are across town, in my studio. Which would explain why, for a photographer, I have strikingly few images up here.

[diesel_powered]

Goddammit. 

[C of heartbreak]

Man, I slept way too much today and now I can't sleep at all. I just finished reading a book about neandertals. Who wants to know about neandertals?

[Little Sixes Little Nines]

are they anything like neanderthals?

[coldforge]

same thing.

[C of heartbreak]

The writer of the book I read had this idiosyncrasy about spelling it the way it's pronounced, which makes sense to me.

[Greg Nog]

It's just that German changed, so then a bunch of scientists were like, "Well, I guess we'll change this German word in scientific writing, too."  The hominids were first found in the Neander Valley, and Valley is "thal", but then got changed to "tal" because the Germans realized they could be 25% more efficient by removing the h.

[coldforge]

It should be noted that both 'thal' and 'tal' are pronounced /tal/ in German. Doesn't stop me from pronouncing it /θal/, though.

[edison]

Does anyone know when the 'h' disappeared, btw?

[alex]

Apparently, that was decided at the second orthographic conference, which was held in 1901. (Before that, both versions were in use, so it was not so much a decision to suddenly skip the 'h' from one day to the next, but rather an effort to create standardised orthographic conventions.)