Nonsense Verse

Insomniac Sketches #2

I was sitting in bed writing at, oh, 2 in the morning. I'd let the cat in to cuddle, and he was sort of doing slow laps around the bed, sniffing about, looking for a comfy spot. So there I am, tapping away, and he's scrunched himself up at the foot of the bed, where the comforter is in a heap, just beyond my feet. I hear a trickle of something. Figure it's the vent on the floor to my right, adjusting itself. But then it continues, and it sounds even more ominously like liquid. Then it hits me. The cat's got his butt facing me, and it looks rather…poised. I lean forward, pull the comforter back, and see that he's pissing on it, in a puddle, right there at the foot of the bed in which I am sitting. The nerve!

The cat is ejected from the room, the comforter bunched into the laundry bag, a replacement comforter (thank goodness there is one) laid out on the bed. I don't really sleep.

Cut to this morning. I'm barely conscious. But I need to do laundry, now, so I decide to do all the bedding, too — make an event of it. There's a laundry room and a gym in the basement, so I can do what needs to be done to the sheets while I do what needs to be done to my body. Perhaps working out will help wake me up.

While the wash is running, I get on one of the human hamster wheels. Twenty-eight minutes later, I dismount, sweaty, not really any more awake than I was when I started. Ray Barretto is doing "Indestructible" on my iPod, and I'm distracted by the salsa beat. I exit the gym, walk in the direction of the laundry room, go to push open the door, and BAM!

Have I mentioned before that I'm a big klutz?

I hear a crack in my nose. Things go a little blank, then swirly. It takes a few seconds before I realize I have hit, at full speed, a glass wall. With my face. I look around quickly to see if anyone's noticed, but the one girl in the laundry room has her iPod on as well, and the one girl in the gym couldn't have seen because the blinds are drawn. I run my tongue across my front teeth, checking to make sure they're all there. They are. I swallow, testing for blood. There's none. But I can feel a rapidly increasing pressure at the bridge of my nose, and I reach up and can tell that it's already swollen. I do a gentle little dab, dab, squeeze, squeeze with my fingertips, to test whether things feel…broken. It seems not. But there's definitely a lump, as well as a strange, tingly numbness to go with the rising headache.

My brain is now on a haywire form of autopilot. My first concern is the laundry, not my nose. I need to get the bedding into the drier as quickly as possible so that if my nose has swelled into a globby mass, I can scurry away without anyone noticing, but still be assured of toasty sheets. The rational thing would have been to go back into the gym, do a nose check in the mirror, and then, if things seemed amiss, to have covered my face in an ice pack and perhaps gone to the hospital, laundry be damned. But even if it did appear that I needed treatment, I reasoned, I couldn't leave the laundry, the down comforter, sopping wet. A potentially broken nose could wait half an hour. Right?

The laundry dried. Because I'm stupid that way, I did some yoga stuff while I waited that made my face throb even harder as all the blood rushed to my head. Luckily for my nose, it wasn't broken. At least, I'm pretty sure. It's got a dime-size pink bump that may turn purple or some other groovy pastel in the coming days. But thanks to the miracle of Vitamins (ahem), left over from my recent foot surgery, I'm now happily blank and swirly, without the pain. And my sheets are so fresh and so clean, I may actually be enticed to sleep tonight.

Insomniac Sketches #1

Two days in a row, tired at 1 in the morning, I haven't been able to sleep until 4 or 5 a.m. Both those bleary nights I have set an alarm for 10 a.m. because I've had a telephone date with a friend on the West Coast, for 11 a.m. his time.

Let's recap: I have set my alarm for 10 a.m. to give myself plenty of time to wake up before calling him. At 11 a.m. HIS time. As in 2 p.m. my time. I am a genius.

Yesterday I woke up and found I couldn't make the phone call anyway because of a last-minute conflict in scheduling. Today I woke up and actually started to call the poor dude before realizing it was 11 a.m. my time, 8 a.m. his time. I remember him as being the kind of guy who's probably up at 8 anyway, but there was the potential that I would be his wakeup call, and that being an unspeakably hideous prospect, I promptly slammed shut my cell phone.

And that was just the last two days.

A few days ago, after another late-late night followed by a too-early waking, I was doing my daily breakfast ritual -- OJ, Americano, oatmeal -- which is usually an example of stunningly choreographed efficiency. To wit:

I flip on the espresso machine to allow it to heat up.

I put an espresso pod in its espresso-pod holder and shimmy it into the machine.

While that sits, I pour water into my kettle and set it on the stove to boil.

I take out my glass, my mug, my bowl.

I empty a packet of oatmeal into my bowl.

I open the fridge, take out the OJ, pour it into my glass.

I replace the OJ in the fridge, take out the creamer, pour a glug's worth into the bottom of my mug, replace it in the fridge and close the fridge door.

If the water hasn't boiled by now, I empty whatever dishes are in the dish drier and may even do a few dishes while I wait.

Once the water has boiled, I flip the espresso switch and watch my caffeine gurgle into the little espresso cup below.

As that water gurgles, I pour my hot kettle water over my oatmeal. Then, I grab the finished espresso, pour it into the mug, and top it off with the hot water.

With the same spoon I'm going to use for my coffee and my oatmeal, I stir -- the coffee drink first, so as not to get any floaty oatmeal bits into my drink -- and then I transport my various breakfast receptacles to either the coffee table or my desk, depending on whether I want to check e-mail and read news or watch an episode of Weeds (or Entourage or Sex and the City or whatever) while I eat.

This usually works out great for everyone.

But as I was saying, the other day, after another late night, I woke up to begin this ritual. As you can imagine, I can practically do it in my sleep. In fact, the other day it probably would have gone more smoothly had I done it in my sleep. Because this time, half awake and eyes three-quarters closed, I did my usual flipping on of things and heating up of things and taking out of things. But then I reached for the creamer and poured -- and realized I'd drowned my dry oatmeal in cinnamon-hazelnut International Delight®.

So I had creamier oatmeal that day. With a bit more artificial flavoring.

I suppose things could have been worse. I could have been holding the orange juice.