Velvet Verbosity

Yes, I said a bad word. In the title even! Sue me. It’s 4:00 a.m. and I’m not amused. There was a time in my life when I was oddly proud of being a “night owl”, but those days are gone and I’m ready to call it what it is. Insomnia. When I was at Smith, insomnia came in handy for all those papers I waited til the last minute to write. Back then it was ok to show up for my first class in yoga pants and a t-shirt sporting 5 lb bags under each eye. It helped that I spent hours planning my class schedule around my sleep schedule as much as around my degree requirements. This meant that once I booted the kids out the front door to catch the school bus, I could go back to sleep for an hour or two before I had to roll out of bed, throw on shoes, and head to class.

Now? Now I have a teenager that I have to wake up two hours earlier for, just so I can lean up against her door trying to catch snippets of sleep in between banging on her door and responding to her muffles with, “Alba, it’s not hard, just drag yourself out of that bed before I do.” I’m such a liar. It IS hard to drag yourself out of bed in the morning when saddled with my genes, and no way I’m dragging her out of bed for real because I’M TOO TIRED.

Now? Now I’m supposed to be at work at a normal work time. In theory. Truth is, I plan my career around my sleep schedule the same way I used to plan my classes around it. My dream job has nothing to do with pay scale, benefits, or wanting to be part of a dynamic team. My dream job offers “flexibility”, aka the possibility of sleeping during daylight hours while everyone else is working because during normal sleeping hours, I’m laying in bed wide awake.

Now? Now I’m getting really tired of the insomnia game. I want to sleep like regular folk. I want to wake up at a decent hour like regular folk. I don’t want the only people I can call up when I’m awake to be halfway across the world because apparently my brain thinks I live in a different time zone.

And you know what’s responsible for this whole mess? My suprachiasmatic nucleus, that’s what. If any one of you can figure out how to reset my clock, I’ll let you use that term at cocktail parties. It’s fun to say and people will think you’re totally smart. You can thank me later.

So Woman Remodeled and I were talking on the phone last night and I was on one of my usual spiels about something frightening, maddening, and even depressing. In this case, it was our tanking economy. She was firm in her optimism, and I firm in my resolve to get her to understand the situation we’re facing.  Not that WR is one to keep her head in the sand about important issues (just read her blog and you will see she is a woman of depth and carries concern for the world), just that this was an issue that she couldn’t do anything about.  Finally she asked, “Why do you read about this depressing stuff?” I don’t remember what I said, something off the cuff and vaguely humorous. Then she emailed me today with an article on the Federal Reserve stepping in that she had been reading, and I thought, “Oh, this is not good. What have I done to the cheery sprite?”

So I started thinking about why I DO read the things I read. Why does it seem I’m always looking for the problems? The answer to that is more complex than I can tease out, but I do know some of the core reasons. It is not that I am looking for problems. One reason is my untiring quest to see life as it really is, without the sugar coating. I do this with people too. A friend told me recently that I have a way of walking in a room and looking like I’m seeing right into people. Another person told me essentially the same thing, and then added, “not everyone wants to be seen that clearly”. It’s not that I’m looking for the bad or the negative, it’s just that I can’t really know anyone, truly, without seeing all of them, and it’s only the bad bits that anyone or any institution doesn’t readily reveal. I’m just always looking for the authentic person.

I carry this into my interpretation of the world too. I want to know the truth about what is going on. I’ve been this way since I was a child. It just seems to be part of my nature. The thing is, it doesn’t really depress me the way it depresses others. It just motivates me to do something, or say something, or write something so that others can be willing to see through to the truth of things, and make decisions for themselves about what they’re going to do about it. I realize that sometimes this makes me seem too serious for my own good. Sometimes people just don’t want to hear about it, much less talk about it. But I can’t change who I am. I’m passionate about all things generally. Whatever I become passionate about in any given moment, is usually either a truth I’ve myself recently discovered, something I’ve come up against in my own pursuit of personal freedom, or what people most don’t want to hear.

Yesterday, I was driving home from work and there were two police cruisers in front of a house. The officers were walking from the house with a man between them, cuffed, and obviously being arrested. Some people would see this and feel a sense of relief. Ah, score another one for the good guys, right? Another criminal sniffed out and taken care of. I can’t see it that way, I just can’t. I see this event, and I see the whole picture. It makes me a little sad. I know all too well, for example, from my studies in Neuroscience, that it is highly likely that this “criminal” they are arresting suffers from a frontal lobe disorder. I also know from my studies of Neuroscience and genetics that it is highly likely that a frontal lobe disorder can be attributable to a chaotic and “dangerous” environment during the early years of development. I know that we, as a society, actually breed criminals by our failure to address poverty and violence, and that our punitive institutions as well as our social services (arguable part of the punitive system) do little to help, and much more to harm. I know that it is likely this man will be released in a short amount of time, that our tax dollars will go into housing him, but not into reforming him, or getting him treatment that might help. I know that we cannot allow him to be free because we didn’t take the steps for preventing it in the first place, nor will we take the steps now to reform him. I know that the police arresting him may very well have their own dirty secrets but they are protected because they are on “the right side of the law”. I know they’ve been trained to think in terms of black and white, and I don’t just mean race, but it is probably not a coincidence that both arresting officers were white and the arrestee was black.

I find it a dangerous state of affairs when people don’t want to face truths, in themselves especially. It’s not that I fancy myself as some crusader of truth, or that I think I’ve got myself and everything else nailed down, it’s actually more innocent than that. I’m trying to make sense of things, and then vocalizing it to further help me make more sense. People don’t want to talk about things they can’t do anything about. While I know that I can’t fix all these problems with a magic wand, it still inspires me and gives fuel to creative forces within me. I’m a “big picture” person, and I can’t talk about the environment without talking about sociology, and I can’t talk about sociology without talking about evolutionary psychology, and I can’t…well, you get the picture.

So, if I sometimes seem the bearer of bad news, look a little deeper and you will see that I am struggling to make sense of it all, so that when the time comes in each little moment everyday, that I will make the best choices. The choices that will cause the least harm and do the most good. I’m far from getting it all right, but I aspire to at at least try.

Oh, and I also temper all of my media input with less violence on television and my daily dose of Gimundo, all good news all the time.