Sleep Deprivation

I don’t sleep as well as I used to when I was younger. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m old or if there’s some other reason. It’s annoying though. Little noises wake me up when they shouldn’t. But not regularly enough that I can say I’m a “light sleeper”. One night I fell asleep on the couch and The Husband came in through the noisy, squeaky back door, wandered around for a while before finally going to bed...and I slept through it all. If he’d been a serial killer, I’d be dead without even having put up a fight. That actually made me feel a little creepy...the fact that someone could be walking around me while I slept and I was completely oblivious to it. I can only pray that he didn’t take photos of me drooling while I slept and is waiting to put them on some kind of Xmas or Birthday card as a “surprise”....please God, say it ain’t so.

Here’s a weird thing that wakes me up. When the electricity goes off in the middle of the night, the sudden silence wakes me up. What’s up with that? How does no noise wake a person up? I can see enormous thunder claps waking a person up, but insta-quiet? Does this happen to everyone or is it just me?

Sleeping with another person adds countless trials and tribulations to getting a good night’s sleep. Snoring interferes with my sleep...not my snoring...The Husband’s...duh...even his breathing can make me lose sleep.

It’s not so bad if I fall asleep first, but if The Husband manages to conk out before me I’m doomed. Unfortunately for me, The Husband can lay his head on a pillow and be out in twenty seconds. I lay there for a while, toss & turn a little, then finally drift off. Not him....he lays down and sleeps like a baby...and it annoys me to no end that he can go to sleep so easily. I know it’s really immature of me to get so irritated by the fact that he falls asleep before me, but when I’m laying there, trying to fall asleep, I just want to reach over and hit him... because even the sound of his breathing annoys me. Have you ever tried to synchronize your breathing with the other person you’re sleeping with? Well, let me tell you, it doesn’t work. You think it’s all going well, you think you have the rhythm of the breaths down and then suddenly they move or shift a little and their whole rhythm changes rendering your feeble attempt at breathing synchronization useless.  I know I’m fighting a losing battle but I still keep trying to make the whole synchronization thing work. (And,yes, I’m aware of the definition of “insanity”.)

Snoring is another obstacle to overcome when you have to sleep with someone. Sometimes The Husband snores like people in cartoons snore. Like Brutus in the old Popeye cartoons... I swear I’d see his lips flapping every time he exhales if I suddenly turned on the lights. I’m ashamed to admit it but when I’m really tired and he wakes me up because his snoring is so loud I elbow him viciously in the ribs. Okay, viciously is probably too strong a word. I don't intentionally break ribs or anything like that..sometimes he does let out a little grunt of pain though. What’s even worse, and I know this is wrong on so many levels, is I get an intense feeling of satisfaction just knowing I’ve cause him some discomfort. The sad part is, it only stops the snoring for a few seconds then we’re right back where we started.

Every time I see one of those commercials on TV advertising a miracle product that cures snoring I beg The Husband to buy it. “I don’t snore that much” he always says, or “I only snore when I’m really tired”. Well I’m really tired too, but I don’t fucking snore...in fact, I can’t even get to sleep because someone else’s snoring is a major contributing factor to my sleep deprivation. Why do people who snore never believe they do?

Gas is another thing that can send me into orbit...figuratively speaking, of course. And we’re talking The Husband’s gas...not mine. If you go to sleep all fat, dumb, and happy, and the stench of another persons flatulence is so putrid that it wakes you out of a sound sleep...your only recourse is to leave the room and go sleep on the couch. I know whereof I speak...Oh, sure, you could try the vicious elbow trick, but when they grunt in pain, they’ll only squeeze out more putrid farts. There’s been more than one occasion when The Husband has gone to bed before me and when I finally decide to go to bed, I open the bedroom door only to become engulfed in a cloud of fart stink so foul I’m sure there’s some kind of dead animal in our room. He thinks this is funny when I tell him about it the next morning...really. I, of course, don’t see the humor in it like he does...but then I’m the one suffering from sleep deprivation...not him.

I have to admit, under normal circumstances I can’t help but laugh when someone farts. Just last week at work, The Princess and I were talking to one of the men we work with, I’ll call him “D”, when all of a sudden he let a little popper slip out. D walked away from us really fast...maybe there were lots more where that one came from, I don’t know, but he definitely am-scrayed into his office pronto. D’s the sort of guy who’s usually really proper and would never dream of farting in front of us deliberately so I’m sure he was mortified. The Princess and I looked at each other and tried not to laugh because we didn’t want to embarrass him, but you know how it is when you try not to laugh and you start making all kinds of weird snorting noises through your nose??? We intentionally turned our backs to each other hoping that would stifle the laughter, but then one of those nose noises would happen and we’d start laughing again.

Things are always funnier when you’re trying not to laugh at them, aren’t’ they? Why is that?

It’s the stoopidist thing...