I can't believe it

I just finished my final grant application. It's like the blinding arctic day just ended. Perhaps insomnia will end as well. I have been sleeping like shit. And when I do sleep, it's in lapses, lots of restless dreams, weird liminal between-sleep-and-wakefulness states where it's not quite SP that I am prone to, but still lend themselves to hallucinatory moments. Are the hormones released by the brain connected with sleep hallucinogens, or something? Because it seems like they alter perception, and not only on a purely visual level, but they change pathways and vectors of deduction as well. Like two nights ago, I was falling asleep and I heard a sound. Usually sounds in my apartment fall into the category of good (radiator) and bad (possible rodent). But I've never had critters in my room, and this sound was fucking weird. I kept trying to locate the source of the weird sound, then, in the darkness, I saw an outline of something vibrating along the tea cup that's been sitting on my bedside table since morning. Maybe something about the motion reminded me of the fluttering of a moth. My brain leapt into an associative progression of insect/bad/scary/fear/alive/rodent and I freaked the fuck out because a second later I no longer thought it was a big insect (scary in and of itself), but I became absolutely convinced that a mouse had somehow fallen into my half-full tea cup, and it was its tail that was beating along the side of the cut, the sound being the final paraxysms of a drowning mouse. J., awoken by my terrified "there is something there! what isthat?" looked at me like I was a big freak and said that it was just the string from the teabag fluttering around because the fan was blowing directly at it. Welcome to my mental state.

But anyway, I am blaming it all on the Fulbright, the Fulbright-Hays, the Wenner-Gren, and the most recent and final albatross, the NSF. Fini. I'm done. On the plus side, after this semester, I actually look forward to my comps; at this point spending the next semester just reading books sounds like a blast.