In Transit

Nights like these are always too predictable for my taste. They follow this ridiculous pattern. Step one is always me putting the lights off, convinced that I’m tired and about to slip into a long and restful sleep – and the last step, is almost always, me putting the lights back on and messing around the computer. In the middle, there’s a whole lot of lying around, a whole lot of twiddling with the air-conditioner and a whole lot of thinking about junk. 

Sometimes it’s significant too though - Maybe I'll think about my approach to jazz, my lack of discipline towards a practice-schedule. Picking up all the slack - with my masters, my japanese, with my friends. Direction Direction Direction and right, The works.

Sometimes, I figure I should cut the whole routine short. Forget all the thinking between the last and first steps – but at that rate. I never know when I’ll get any sleep at all. Looking through the family tree, it seems my maternal side is responsible. A whole line of stressed out, wound up, wake-up-at-the-whisper-of-their-name sleepers. I always think of those horror movies, where a guy (okay, it’s usually a girl) is asleep and the ghost/demon/whatever at hand whispers their name from inside their head and they just wake straight upright out of bed, with this gasp. 

It’s funny though, when I was a kid, I slept through all the major (relatively) earthquakes that happened in India. I remember this one time, when I was about 8 or 9. The walls cracked but my sleep didn’t budge. I was carried outdoors and brought back in and then told next morning of the events that transpired. Kids at school were losing the plot the next morning and I was clueless. One time, when I must've been 6 - robbers broke into my parents' old house and stole all the air-conditioners on the ground floor. Slept-right-through-it. 

Things started twisting somewhere around the time I was 15. Hm Hm Hm. The first girl I ever got close to, was a true to the bone insomniac. The kind that I’m grateful I’m still not. The kind you can’t figure out. And what you can’t figure out is what’s keeping them from keeling over and offing it.

In any case, I was young and determined – additionally because I thought it was so cool - I told her I was an insomniac too. Ofcourse, telling is simply never enough. Ha.

Fast forward more than six years. I’m really not an insomniac at all. And now - I’m inherently put off by people who love to say they are. Like many others, I’m like a self-saboteur of sleep.

I guess i do a lot of things, I wouldn’t do during the day. I end up browsing wikipaedia a lot. Google a lot of stuff I might be a little or a lot curious about. Look up jazz videos or documentaries on youtube, read weblogs, check out places I want to go on holiday, browse through comics – endless list. Clicking Curiosity to its Conclusion.

 The last thing I try do though, is get on facebook. Things can spiral out of control and you end up with an urge to figure out whether people you know, are having more fun than you are – and it’s not a hard thing for them to accomplish when you’re up at 3 am on facebook.

Conclusively speaking though : One of my favourite things to do sometimes, is to dig up stuff I did from really long ago. Tonight I found something real fun I did in San Francisco, way before I was in college. I went on it alone - when I was twelve or thirteen. My 22 year old gut still tightens like it was yesterday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlMvqmrvasc

Check it out.

(picture borrowed with love: jack by sspider baby)