I wake up several times a night and generally go back to sleep within minutes. There is a bit of anxiety that I won’t, but I’ve been lucky. Not tonight, I’m afraid. I saw 2:58 when I tapped my watch. It’s now 3:39. Alarm goes off at 5. Morning comes early.

I haven’t been functioning well the last few weeks, and it’s been getting harder to keep my head above water. A lot is happening, which I feel like I could push through. But I fight my way through each day.

A sticky note appeared on my side mirror on my car one afternoon. The handwriting was that of a little girl telling me that if God is for me then who can be against me. Romans. The note is on my dash now. I saw a video about telling my brain that I am doing great because the brain believes what it’s told, even lies, and the body physically responds accordingly.

I’m sleepy. I will sleep the next hour and a half (resetting my alarm), and I will feel like I had a full night’s sleep. I feel fine.

The great thing about having a blog is being able to say whatever, however, and if someone reads it, great, and if not, great, but the words are in the world, not just your head, and on the page where you put them so you can look at them from a distance. Externalize them to gain some perspective. Maybe get a little perspective from a passerby. Passersby.

It feels good to write on the screen again. I have a few word documents of unfinished stories and such, but I don’t visit them much. I have notes in my phone that I jot down when the inspiration hits. Last weekend I sat in the sunny chair while my daughter studied at the desk next to me, and I read through old journals that have collected in a basket there. Most of the entries aren’t dated, and the journals are mostly blank. They all start with a bang and then fade to doodles and to-do lists. Then a new shiny one shows up. Then another. My daughter made fun of my many mostly-empty journals, and I reminded her that someday she and her sister will fight over them. I then found a page among many empty ones that had something silly written in handwriting that is not mine. She smiled. I flipped through a “600 Things to Draw” book and saw a giraffe on the giraffe page that I didn’t draw. She smiled again. The journals are like fly traps. Leave one out and words and doodles will get stuck to a page by unsuspecting passersby (there’s that word again) who find themselves overcome by a sudden urge to write. Silly little girls are particularly susceptible. Had I realized this sooner, I would have spread cute sparkly traps out all over.

I found my one-thing journal while going through the basket. I don’t remember where I got the idea. Maybe I read about it, or maybe I came up with it (I doubt it). The idea is to write one thing down that you learned that day. Anything. After a lot of days you can see you learned a lot of things. Keep one for a year or more and you’ll see the crazy amount of things that you learned and forgot. I relearned last weekend while flipping through my one-thing journal that worms don’t crawl into apples, they crawl out. Eggs are laid in the blossoms, and the apples grow around the eggs. Then the eggs hatch and the worms eat their way out. Nice.

Today I learned that Jon Favreau is a hotshot director who acts in his own movies. I thought he was an actor who always got stuck playing the best friend. Who knew.

Guess what? Tomorrow is Saturday, and I get to sleep in.

And now it’s bedtime the night after. I could go to bed, but I’m in that weird, loopy state when the words show up.

I’ve been learning things and getting better at fooling people into thinking I know more stuff than I do. Maybe if my brain wasn’t so clouded by exhaustion I could put some truth behind the pretending. I think people would rather the people around them to know things. There is comfort in someone else having the burden of knowledge. There is envy in it, too. I’m not looking for either, I just don’t like to not know things. And I kinda like the facade. Until the pressure to prove myself arises, anyway. In any case, I’m trusted to do as I please. That alone makes the lie worth the fear of exposure.

I do a better job when left to my own devices. Maybe the powers that be have figured that out.

Boy, I’m tired.

The conundrum now is do I eat or do I go to bed? Bed, I think. I’m too tired to chew. But I’m also too tired to get up. If my fingers weren’t comfortably tapping these keys I’d be locked in a state of torpor. I’m sleep-writing. I’m Homer Simpson driving his bed-car off the road into a purpley night-night sky.

Eyes now closing. Delta waves are flooding my brain. I like those.