Famous Last Words

Last night over dinner, after a long weekend of birthday partying and related activities, I told the girls, "I'm beat. I'll sleep like a baby tonight." Instead, I woke up to put the cat out of the bedroom in the middle of the night and was seized by a bout of insomnia for hours.

I tried to focus my thoughts and do breathing exercises, like I've learned in yoga and meditation. I tried to do the one where you imagine that every time you exhale you're breathing out billows of black smoke that represent all the toxins and negative energy you're harboring, and on the inhale you're taking in a bounty of bright white light, which is supposed to be purifying and salubrious. But what I ended up doing was picturing this activity diagrammed as an illustration, like they do to demonstrate medicines becoming active in the body on TV commercials. And then I started thinking about those medicines, and TV, which led to other wildly unhinged chains of thought which only perpetuated the insomnia. Then I heard the cat barfing in the foyer, which made me think about how I'm going to have to clean that up in the morning, and about how I have so much else to do today, and about how maybe I overscheduled and overdefined my day, which made me feel burned out before the week even started.

Then I was thinking about seder tonight and how I'm glad I won't be the youngest at the table so I won't have to do the four questions, thank heaven. And what's so bad about the four questions, anyway? I guess I don't like to be on the spot so much anymore these days--even though I thrived on the spot when I was younger--which is probably why I try to get away with wearing cute jeans to most things I would have so enjoyed getting dressed up for years ago.

At some point it was 7:50 and the alarm went off, and I had an 8:30 meeting and the day barreled onward.