Me vs. Sleep

Sometimes I stay up way too late. I can’t help it. There’s no good reason. Nothing good on TV. No one to talk to. No work to do. And, in all truth, I’m actually pretty tired. I just hate giving in. I’m a competitive guy and I don’t like losing.

For example, once in a while I’ll be awake at some late hour (say, 1:00am). It’s already later than I normally go to sleep. But instead of just going to sleep, I’ll log into my email and refresh the page every few minutes, just to see if anyone emailed me. But it’s not that I’m expecting anyone to. I didn’t just send an email that needs replying. I literally just refresh my email in spite of sleep.

After not getting any emails for about 45 minutes, I’ll start to look for the next sleep-evading activity. More often than not, it’s TV.

If you’ve ever been awake and in front of a television after 12:00am then you know that ninety percent of the shows (or “programs” if you’re over 60) are infomercials. To most of you, that’s bad. But if you’ve just been refreshing your email for an hour, it’s actually quite refreshing.

There’s something utopian about infomercials. Infomercial people are much sprightlier than real-life people. Everything always works just how it’s supposed to work. Grown men can have ponytails and no one thinks they need to be punched in the face for it. And everything is always on sale.

But even infomercials begin to bore me after about an hour (usually it’s around 2:45am), which is around the same time my eyes start to burn from eighteen hours of air-contact. It’s a sign that I should go to sleep. But so was sunset. And so was the TV show Cheaters. But I obviously have trouble taking hints. All my eyes need aree a little knuckle-rub and they’ll be good to go for at least another half-hour.

By this time I’m yawning every thirty-nine seconds. They’re deep and slow. They feel good, relieving. I desperately think for something else to do — anything but sleep. The strange thing is, I’m so tired. But I’ve fought so hard to stay up and I’m not going to give up now.

I continue to fight it for another fifteen minutes. But sleep is a tough foe for even the feistiest fellow. My eyelids start to sag; the lashes almost touch. My head tips forward. Just before my chin reaches my sternum, I jerk it back and widen my eyes. It happens a few more times and next thing I know, it’s sunrise.

I get up from the couch, turn off the TV, mutter to myself, “we’ll call it a draw” and wobble up the stairs to my room so I can get a few hours of sleep in my warm, cozy bed. Soon consciousness will try to wake me up. But it won’t be easy. After all, I hate losing.

Wind, wind, go away!

I have a secret I want to share: I hate the wind. Always have. Always will.

If you know me, you know I’m a friendly guy. I’m easygoing and pretty careless about most things (maybe about too many things, at least according to my wife). So my pure hatred may come as a shock to you. But it’s true. I really hate the wind with all my being.

I hate the wind so bad I want to rip out it’s high-pressure and shove it down it’s low-pressure and seal it all up in a glass jar so it could never rustleanother leaf again. Then I would blow on the jar and scream, “Hey, Wind, how does it feel? Not too pleasant, is it? Ya jerk!” Boy, would that be sweet revenge.

I bet you want to know why I hate the wind so much? It’s a fair question. Let me address it:

The wind makes everything worse. It turns beautiful morning snowfall into hazardous blizzard. It makes fun afternoon Frisbee toss-arounds into degrading games of fetch. It makes slight winter chill bite with a bitter pinch (“It’s 25 degrees outside today with a wind-chill of 3 below”). It ushers clouds to shroud the sun. It waters eyes. It runs noses. Topples trees. Scatters shrubs. It does everything it can to make being outdoors unpleasant.

But do you know the worst part? It does it all while whistling. As if we’re not supposed care. As if a soft unrecognizable melody makes it all ok.

Imagine if you were outside setting up your lemonade stand and some guy came by and kicked over your stand and threw your sign (the one you spent two hours drawing with an assorted combination of markers) across the street into a puddle. You would be pretty pissed at the guy. Now imagine he did the same thing but he was whistling (perhaps “Amazing Grace”). There would be a special place in hell for an A-hole like that.

That guy is the wind.

Now, I’m not hate-monger or anything like that. But let’s get real. It’s time we stand up to such thuggish actions. I propose we build a dome around the country to keep the wind out. We’ll put up big signs like “No wind allowed!” and “Hell no, we wont blow!” In fact, we should put up giant fans on the outside of the dome that blow the opposite direction, just to keep the wind away.

I’m starting to think this idea could really go somewhere. Perhaps there is some money available for it in the “Economic stimulus package.” I’ll think I’ll write the president…

How to speak like a 14 month old

After hours of searching the Rosetta Stone catalog for a course on how to speak 14-month-old, I realized the odds of finding such a product were slim. And since I’m not good with languages (15 years of Hebrew class and I can barely speak a word of it), I knew I had a lot of work ahead of me.

So I came up with a scientific research strategy: write down all the syllables I heard Caley say, and then write down all the objects in the room that contained that sound.

After a few calculations I narrowed it down that, on average, each syllable could mean any one of fifteen things. For example, the syllable “Ba” could mean any of the following:

Bottle
Ball
Balloon
Basket
Break dance
ScooBa
Burp
Blanket
Boy
Baby
Book
Backpack
Broken glass
Booze
Bank statement

I began to map the possibilities together. I ended up with the following graph:

I was getting somewhere. But I needed a way to narrow down the options. So I started observing physical cues Caley gave when she made her sounds. She pointed, smiled, drooled, snotted, patted her belly, cried, flopped, and clapped. She also farted once.

I mapped out the new data over the original data and got the following graph:

After studying this graph for a few hours, I began to understand what Caley was trying to tell me, and, after a while, I became fluent in her language. We started to communicate in ways I never thought possible.

Here are bunch of  things she says and what they mean:

“Shh shh ba” (while clapping)
Translation: “Tell mommy I need a diaper change.”

“Ba eeh shh ya” (While pointing at the ceiling)
Translation: “Tell mommy I want a bath.”

“Che see ka bay ap” (smiling)
Translation “Tell mommy to get you a beer.”

It’s really pretty amazing what a little research and observation can help you understand. It’s like we have a whole new relationship. I never thought she was so aware of what’s going on. For example, she’s already reminded me twice this month to pay off our bank statement. I told her to tell her mommy. She handles that stuff.

Poppa’s got a brand-new bag. And it’s called The Shully Mully…

Welcome to the blog formerly know as The Variety Blog of Freshness. I decided to revive my very first blog, partly for sentimentality and partly to force myself to start writing more often.

A lot has changed since I started The Variety Blog of Freshness. I missed out on many good opportunities to post. And hopefully, over time, I will be able to write about those events in detail. But here’s a quick list of things that have changed since my last post (written 1/22/07):

- I got a job as a project manager at a company called Arc Worldwide.
- My wife and I had a daughter. Her name is Michaela Belle. We call her Caley.
- My brother had a daughter. Her name is Chana Shira. We call her Chanshi.
- I switched from being a project manager to being a copywriter, and loved it.
- I bought and sold a few guitars. My current guitar is an Eastman El-rey 3 (the one on bottom).
- Lots of my friends got married.
- I had my 3rd ankle surgery in 3.5 years.
- I quit my job at Arc WW to start my own interactive advertising agency: Tribe9 Interactive. It’s going great and it was one of the best moves of my life.
- My dad’s cat died. He just got a dog (Golden Retriever).
- My heart was broken by Jason Meznik (The Bachelor) when he dumped Melissa for Mollie in front of millions of people. What a D-bag move.
- My wife sold a Panasonic 3DO with 48 games on eBay for $208.50 and nothing has ever made her so happy.

That’s pretty much every single thing that’s happened in my life since my last post. So now that we’re all caught up, subscribe to my feed on the right and stay tuned.

Oh, and read through some of my old posts to get a feel for what life with The Shully Mully is all about.