No Insomnia for Old Men

I know I haven't posted in a while (weep, my servants), but there is a valid reason: I've been sleeping. It has become all too apparant that I am waist-deep in an addiction to sleep. I don't think there is much of a deep psychological reason for it (I could be wrong, but if there is one I wouldn't broadcast over the entire interweb. I have some decency.); rather, I'm just really lazy and sleeping is genuinely fun.

The best part about it all is the whole ritual of it. It gives me a warm, cozy feeling. Kind of like when I'm eating a corndog, or petting a cat. It's calming and gives me a sense of normalcy. The first part of the ritual is to put on pajamas. I'm kind of a pajama freak. When I was a kid and I'd go to the mall with my mom, I'd beg every time we were at Kohl's (we Morrison/Gabins are a classy bunch) to get me cool pajamas. But my mother, being the Mussolini dictator of shopping, would almost ALWAYS say no. Except once I got these blue lepoard print cotton PJ pants that I still wear today. But through the years I've accumulated two giant bins of pajama pants and shirts. Actually, most of the shirts are wildlife teeshirts my parents would get me from the zoo or school catalogs. The one I'm wearing right now has an intense tiger peering through the grass and the phrase "EYE ON SURVIVAL" sprawled across at the bottom in a pseudo-African font.

So ANYWAY, I love selecting my pajamas. Then I get in bed and get on my laptop and mindlessly surf through emo kid Myspaces and Perez Hilton entries. This really kind of gets my mind ready for sleep, because whatever dreams I have, they have to be more interesting than Amy Winehouse's latest 4 AM shirtless, drug-addled rampage through London.

So after that I go to sleep. And my requirements for sleep are pretty ridgid. I HAVE to wear earplugs. I absolutely cannot sleep without them. I started wearing them when my older brother still lived at home and I had to listen to him and his friends discussing the philosophies of time's paradigm of protracted space (or whatever) and Bob Marley pulsing across the hallway into my room at all hours of the night. Since then, it's become a habit. I also cocoon myself into my blankets, and then as I'm going to sleep I try to think of names for every letter of the alphabet for guys and girls, 2 syllable words that start with "W", etc. etc. It's always good to make sure I'm not suffering from early onset Alzheimer's as I'm drifting off into sleep (it's probably not a good sign that it took me about 10 minutes and Google's assistance to figure out how to spell "Alzheimer's").

And then, for hours upon hours (I can snooze for 12 hours at a time), I'm utterly content. Unless I'm having a dream that Javier Bardem from No Country for Old Men is trying to kill me. But that's another story.