land of nod

i've noticed that i sleep less than normal. i considered 6 hours to be a great accomplishment, and the past 2 weeks i've been getting about 4. i wake up at 5:45 on weekdays, 5 on saturdays, and 7 on sundays, and for whatever reason i can never seem to make it to bed before midnight. the weird thing is, though, that i never thought it was a weird thing until recently. it's been coming up in conversation, people saying they need at least 7 or 8 or even 9 hours of sleep in order to function during the day. i can't even imagine getting 9 hours of sleep a night. that means i would have to sleep at 8:45 on weeknights. i think i'm usually eating something around that hour. or drinking. or maybe sitting around in my underwear contemplating how the fuck my ac could be so slow about cooling my tiny apartment, but definitely not sleeping. but since i am now aware that my sleeping standards are hazardously low, i've started to notice differences on the rare occasions that i do get extra sleep. bright lights seem softer and less glaring, i don't have this strange inflated feeling in my skull, my shoulders feel loose, i'm more focused, i remember things better, i have better balance, my eyeballs feel lighter, and i don't yawn as much. that last part isn't necessarily a positive since i rely on my constant yawning to remoisten my contacts. on the other hand, i have also noticed that sleeping more causes my contacts to feel less dry. so i guess there are some benefits to sleeping more. i've just gone through life thinking that "normal" actually meant "sleep-deprived and utterly crazed," and confusing the feeling of being well rested with being high. i could never figure out where or how i could have gotten high, but my bets were on second hand inhalation of Raid or my diabolical sister drugging my skincare products. now i know its just sleep. how anticlimactic.

so the conclusion i've come to from all this is twofold:

1. sleep is a mind-altering drug. say no to drugs. therefore i say no to sleep.

2. i feel that i must debunk this myth that any certain amount of sleep is required to function in life. believe me, you are fully capable of functioning with under 9 hours or whatever ridiculous amount of time you like to spend prostrate, unresponsive, and drooling with your eyes rolled back in your head. you might feel a bit sleepy, but you can definitely function, and when you run into things, you don't even feel the bruises, which is probably the reason why i'm constantly covered in them with no recollection of how i got them. so while sleep is a mind-altering drug, lack of sleep is a pain reliever. like vicodin. and who doesn't like vicodin.

3. lack of sleep creates a grating urge to ramble idiotically in blogs. it also sometimes messes with mathematical skill.