Tao of Pauly

Sluggish

By Pauly
Los Angeles,

Once I'm up... I'm up.

It's hard to fall back asleep. I crawled into bed around 4:30am late last night/early this morning. I had just won a few bucks playing online poker and I finally caught up on reading a shitload of articles that friends recommended. I was up by 6am and tossed and turned for the ensuing 60 minutes before I gave up and shuffled off into my office.

The laptop was running slower than usual so I decided to run an entire system check -- which rendered the laptop unusable for a couple of hours. I kinda wished that I did that maintenance before I went to bed. Without a specific task on my agenda, I was a bit lost and tried to take a nap in my office but that attempt failed.

My office is the darkest room in the apartment whereas the bedroom attracts the most sunlight (even with blinds). It's brutal in mid-morning for a few hours. If we can sleep through that batch of sunlight, then we're fine. If not, then trying to sleep with the glare is impossible.

I opted for a big breakfast. I was sluggish as I walked to/from the coffeeshop, sort of like a British zombie in a partial daze. I'm used to stumbling in at odd hours while I'm jacked up on pharmies, but I don't do that anymore, although I had a similar buzz that came from natural causes. Sleep deprivation.

I have a shitload of work that I'm not 100% prepared to delve into. I tend to lose all attention to detail when I'm fatigued. The screen makes my eyes even heavier and it becomes a chore to even read the screen. I end up with my head down and focused on my fingers striking the keys. The result? More misspellings and syntax errors than usual. Hence the notion of the cat nap to recharge my senses.

When the nap failed, I tried to find ways to perk myself up. A fresh batch of iced tea. Soul anf funk selections on my iPod. I played a little poker to keep my mind sharp and then wrote a bit here in order to keep my fingers moving and the words flowing. I'm doing what I can to jump start my brain so I can blaze through the lengthy list of assignments. As we used to say on Wall Street, "We're burning daylight."

The alternative is to gut it out, which I'll end up doing, but then the quality of copy suffers a bit as I reach the fourth or fifth hour into the writing session. Catch-22. I could always knock myself out with the help of Mr. Xanax and sleep all day, which is another enticing option where I can stay up all night to catch up on work, emails, and the daily grind.