(no subject)

I am SO TIRED but you know what my problem is? Firmly entrenched resistance to afternoon naps, or sleep of any sort initiated during the day. Obviously stemming from childhood. Like, when I was little and had to go to Soviet kindergarden, and boy, did I not want to--every morning I would flip over in bed, put my legs up against the wall, seizing the expensive Persian rug acquired by my aunt in "the abroad" between my toes and screamed and screamed and literally had to be dragged out of bed. That's why I only went to kindergarden for one year, as opposed to other kids, who went for 4 or 5. My parents could not deal with my sustained resistance measured in decibels that early in the morning. Once I started going to school, I went with bells and whistles. No problem. But kindergarden was the winter of my discontent. Also now I think my kindergaden stint was short because my mother refused to vaccinate me for any childhood diseases, but was also worried about me getting said diseases, so probably on some level she was not eager to let me go share germs and toys with other kids. As if! I played with no kids and no toys, I sat and read. Which brings me to the whole nap issue. Afternoon nap was mandatory for everyone; after lunch, all the kids were inserted into the little beds with Soviet-style kiddie sheets, featuring steel workers, or mushrooms, or whatever, and they had to sleep for two hours. I refused, again, very vocally, and my parents had to get special permission from the director of the kindergarden for me to be able to stay up and read while the other kids were asleep. And so it came to pass. That was a big victory for me; at the time I did not process it specifically as victory against authority, but rather fixated on the most repressive (and, to me, manageable) symbol of it, which was afternoon naps. It did not help that they were institutionalized in my obsessively overprotective family, with my father taking them every day, and my mother yearning for them more than actually taking them, but on occasion she too would dose at around 3 PM, which meant no supervision for me for the next couple of hours. I was not a troublemaker, all I wanted was to sit and read, without my mother standing over my shoulder and making me write an essay about whatever Jules Verne novel I was immersed in at the time (no, I am not exaggerating, yes, I really had to write essays on "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea," "The 15-Year Old Captain," "The Children of Captain Grant" and "Mathias Sandorf" which I was supposed to compare and contrast with "The Count of Monte cristo," and let's face it, Jules pretty much stole the plot from Alexander; I also had to write an essay on "The Neverending Story," a movie that somehow made its way through the iron curtain, and my mother made me rewrite the first sentence of the essay, "A boy named Bastian's mother has died" 12 times because she was not satisfied with my handwriting). I wanted to flip through "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and look for dirty parts. Anyway, my mother was always trying to get me to take an afternoon nap. AS IF! so I grew up, completely averse to sleeping during the day. After a certain point, I also began to correlate daytime naps with being sick. There is a phrase in "Master and Margarita" when the Master is telling his story, about how he fell asleep feeling like he was starting to get sick, but woke up with a full-blown sickness. I imagine that happenned during the day, he fell asleep in late afternoon and woke up in twilight. I hate waking up in twilight. During certain seasons, unless your clock has AM/FM distinction, you can't even tell whether it's day or night, and whether you slept 2 hours or 12. I don't love getting up in the morning, but compared to most people I know I am very functional. I like my coffee, but I can up and go without it; I'll have a headache by noon, but I'll be mobile and articulate. On the rare occasions that I do sleep during the day I wake up feeling sickly, fucked up, hazy. I do better on two hours of sleep in a night than after a two-hour nap. But then I get tired. The point of all this is, as I was reading "The Love Machine," braindead and bleary-eyed at 3.30 AM last night, unable to sleep despite having dozed off literally mid-sentence the night before that (or so I am told), and having woken up at 7.30 AM, having worked on the Wenner-Gren application all fucking evening, and knowing that I would have to be back at school by 8 this morning to get it signed and mail it off, I consoled myself with the thought that I could come back from school and take a nice, long nap. Obviously, it was a lie. The idea isn't even appealing to me, but that's how I rationalized turning the pages of the "Love Machine" opus, eagerly awaiting Robin Stone's "rosebud" moment (which came today on the G up from Greenpoint, and I had totally called it, obviously). Anyway, obviously instead of taking a nap I went to Greenpoint and got my eyebrows done, and am now fucking around on the web. And I am tired. But I will not nap. And tomorrow I will have to wake up early because 2 tickets for the morning matinee of Matrix Revolutions have been pre-ordered on line and things have to be ingested before we go. A nap would do me good. Ah well, I will eat pistachio ice-cream instead.

Why I Hated The Matrix Revolutions

Total spoilers

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