"Keep Writing."

I have chronic sleeping problems in general. In October 2006, I didn't sleep basically at all because I was over the moon about my new guy. In December, I didn't sleep because I traveled so much and ate and drank in excess. On Friday night, I had a nightmare about An Inconvenient Truth, after I had just seen it, and that was wrapped up together with a work nightmare (glacial melting was threatening to drown all the attendees at a conference my magazine was hosting, and forcing us to cancel the remainder of it). Saturday night/Sunday morning I dreamed I was writing a story for the Web site, and it was particularly tricky because I was trying to come up with smart headlines and decks, and, worse, I was linking and formatting the document, and it was really exhausting. I have dreams about work a lot, and this is troubling because I'm not curing cancer, but rather I'm writing about parties, and that shouldn't be particularly nightmarish, except that I work so much and the buck generally stops with me which stresses me out constantly.

Last night, I was having a work dream--about writing or assigning some story. This caused me to wake up before 7 with no alarm, so I lounged in bed reading the book I'd started last night with such optimism. This is a book written by a woman whom I'd seen speak at UCLA, and who had signed her memoir, "Keep writing!" which always tickles me. (I have a lot of those in my bookshelves.) The basic premise is that the author is having an affair with the dance teacher she'd started going to for lessons to impress this other guy she'd started dating, who was big into dancing. (This topic is particularly close to me these days, since I'd had mini panic attacks related to the fact that my guy is so into dancing, and that's not my area. See also "not sleeping well in October.") The girl is a yoga-going, horse-riding, self-proclaimed unfashionable tomboyish divorcee, so I was just enjoying her story although not particularly relating as I was reading last night. But this morning, I kept reading after I'd woken up from my nightmare, and she was talking about being a journalist covering the Golden Globes and the Oscars and other galas that are "supposed to be great but never are" and about never feeling thin or young or insidery enough at those things, and that that in small part contributed to making her feel like she's drifting around, living her life on an iceberg with a camp stove, subsisting, and seeing the mainland on the horizon where people are really living. This has got me in a mood, all day long. Thank heaven for one particular friend in L.A., the bioinformatician-slash-reformed-party-girl, who indulges all these moods and gratifies me with commiseration and empathy.