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07.22.03 ~ Bonsai!

Prince Alarming, the one-man earthquake

Bill has finally discovered the fact that it is possible to get into bed at night without waking me up in the process. This is quite a relief, as said waking had become something of a chronic problem recently. Apparently despite sharing a room with one or more brothers all his life, Bill never really realized until now that when one is trying to sleep, it is very frustrating to be suddenly jarred back to wakefulness by, say, the bathroom light suddenly hitting one full in the face or the force of another person jumping (not in the metaphorical sense) into the bed at Mach 3, sending 8.5 Richters through every spring in the mattress upon landing.  

Perhaps this is partly my fault, as I have always tried to be very considerate about not disturbing other people in the room who might be sleeping. As a life-long sufferer of insomnia, I realize that sleep is a very important thing that can be difficult to attain, so I always close the bathroom door before turning on the light and slide into bed and under the covers and carefully as I can if Bill is already asleep. 

At one point our schedules were arranged so that most of the time Bill went to bed and got up before I did and so we had no problems with him waking me up at night. However, our schedules have now swapped, and I am the one usually in bed first. So now I go through all my bedtime rituals and turn off the lights before he even starts to think it might be time to mosey towards bed. 

This has been the pattern for the past month or two of week-day evenings:

I turn off the lights by 10:00 pm and start the Enya CD. I lie in bed trying to go to sleep, a process which usually involves trying to relax all my muscles and reciting poetry in my head to keep my brain from thinking of anything that will make me want to stay awake and think about it some more. Usually I am somewhere between "The Way Through the Woods" by Kipling and "Lament for Eorl the Young" by Tolkien when the bathroom lights suddenly come on, bathing my room with a harsh light. I listen to the sounds of the bathroom fan and Bill brushing his teeth for a moment and then erupt from under the covers and beg to have the door closed. 

Once the door is closed I go back to the business of going to sleep, and have usually relaxed most of my muscles and gotten to one of three short Millay poems when Bill vaults into bed, connecting with the force of several mid-to-large-ish-sized skydiving hippopotami, and pulling the covers off almost the entire bed so that he can get under them, thereby rendering me not only awake but also cold. 

Then--then!--does Prince Alarming deign to actually go to sleep once he has gotten in bed, the location most associated with blissful slumber? Nay, perish the thought! For Prince Alarming does not get in bed to sleep! He gets in bed to

          a. Eat snacks
          b. Do homework
          c. Read Get Fuzzy and the Far Side
          d. Read gratuitously huge math and physics books for no reason other than he likes them
          e. Read segments aloud from said ponderous tomes to his wife who is not even remotely close 
              to caring about anything books with imaginative titles like Calculus: Fourth Edition and 
              Magnetism have to say and is moreover TRYING TO SLEEP!!!!!!!!

Answer: F: all of the above! 

The purchase of a "Mighty Bright" book light has helped to some degree, but it is still difficult to drift into oblivion when 25 Watts of mighty-brightness are reflecting off the glossy pages of some cyclopean textbook and into one's eyes. 

Still, I've been getting pretty good at blocking out the book light and ignoring the random exclamation of "This is so cool!" or "Hey, babe, listen to this!" and continuing my dogged pilgrimage out of the waking world. So I will usually do just that until I have reached that delicate place just between sleeping and waking when one has only the most tenuous control of one's own thoughts and one must do nothing but simply wait to fall blissfully into a full-on snooze. At this point, my spousal unit will inevitably decide to go to bed in earnest, turn off his light, wriggled down into a prone position, sit back up, grab two handfuls of his cat and lift her up to snuggle on his chest, and wriggle some more to get comfy, all the while causing tremors that can be felt in Japan. At some point Mo will decide that he is moving too much to snuggle with and vacate her position on his chest. He will then roll over to set his alarm clock, taking all seventy nautical miles of sheets and covers with him, then roll back over and try to snuggle with me. 

Now don't get me wrong. I love my husband. He is a sweet, sweet man and does all kinds of nice things for me all the time and I love snuggling with him and talking to him and being around him. But when I have just been roused from near-sleep for the third time in the same half-hour I am not a beautiful person and I am not thinking of any of those wonderful things he does for me, I am not, in fact, thinking anything very coherent at all. I am merely filled with the dire need to sleep and a strong impulse to kick whoever is responsible for keeping me from fulfilling that need. Every fiber of my being is screaming for slumber, and he wants to snuggle!

I finally said something the other night. I waited for a long time before I complained because I didn't want him to take it the wrong way and feel bad or offended, and I knew that if I didn't say it the right way and at the right time he would probably be both.

So last night before I went to bed I came and snuggled on his la while he did stuff at his desk for a few minutes and then announced that I was going to bed. Then I said in my sweetest-possible tones "And please remember when you come to bed not to do this." Whereupon I bounced his chair so hard I think I may have damaged the little hydraulic base a little. 

And I went to bed, and was asleep before I even got to Millay, and I did not wake up until 1:00 am this morning when one of the cats knocked over Bill's glass of water and the following sounds ensued:

Thump-splash!
Bill: -snorf, cough- Uh? Oh, Sniper! Stupid cat!

After that I fell back asleep and dreamt that I had somehow acquired Gandalf's sword Glamdring, and was using it to kill a Mordicant like the one in Sabriel. I then lost Glamdring, sent Bill to go try and find it, and while he was gone I had to fight off an Aracumantula from Harry Potter (though I also remember referring to it as Shelob, though I guess it doesn't make much difference)  and since I no longer had the Foe Hammer, I used Bill's meat cleaver that he got at the Chinese market so that he could cut up the beef for bell-peppers-and-beef with it and feel all macho. It was quite exciting. Also very odd once I woke up and thought about it a little.

+++++

Two things have been brought to my attention about the previous entry:

Dad: 

Bill: 
"Jennifer Garner plays Elektra, not Jennifer Love-Hewitt."

To Dad's I say: Curses! Foiled again! The English language is conniving to make me look stupid and fail as a writer.

To Bill's I say: Whatever

Green Tea did not correct anything but approved the use of the phrase "vitamin K deprived people with bolts up their spines" in a sentence.

Green Tea is way cooler than either Dad, who is nitpicking my innocent misuse of intentionally confusing synonyms or Bill who has no business knowing or caring which of the many Jennifers currently infesting Hollywood plays Elektra. She wins the Least Constructive But Most Complimentary Response to an Entry Between July 20th and July 22nd, 2003 Award. Ha! Take that, you guys! Nyah!