Happy Perfect Day!

Ah, the sweet scentlessness of perfection.

The 24 hours commencing yesterday at 9 a.m. marks my first perfect sleep day in, well, far too long.  It feels very, very good.  ;) 

In very short summary, what I learned here, more than anything, was that there are many factors involved in desiring to go to bed, and all of them must be managed in order to maintain a polyphasic schedule.  For some people and situations, this is fairly automatic — if your lifestyle is "friendly to polyphasic", as we tend to say, then you may not have to work at all on anything except sticking to your naps and not drinking a pot of coffee right before bed.  If your situation is more difficult, though, you have to consider other things as well, such as muscle wearout, eye strain, and boredom.

Here’s how I addressed those yesterday, well enough that, in spite of this being my first day back on a "perfect" three-hour-three-nap schedule, I’m not tired at ALL today, and haven’t been tired at all for the whole 24 hours.

1.  Did my homework early, between 9-10:30, when I was still wide awake, and did it in bed, giving my body something of a breather.  I’m figuring out that, at least for now, if I try to keep moving for all 20 hours that I’m awake, I rapidly get achy and sore, which contributes to my wanting to go to bed (tired or not).  So after waking up from my 8:30 nap, I spent an hour and a half reclining in bed, reading about the conditions of a sufficient object-language definition of truth.  *ouch*  (Note:  I also went "to bed" a half hour early for this nap and read some fun stuff to wind down.  I don’t know about you guys, but if I don’t wind down before that evening nap, I can never fall asleep for it!  But I fell asleep fine yesterday.)

1.5  Then I did some writing, but quit in time to — importantly — rest my eyes, which get horribly scratchy and dry from too much reading and computering…again, contributing to bed-desires, independently of actual tiredness.

2.  Saved my most interesting slack-off activity — currently Final Fantasy XII — until midnight, thus giving me something to fill that last, rather boring hour, when nobody’s awake but me and I can’t turn on any lights or make any noise.  (Thankfully video games work fine on mute.)

3.  Set both alarms, correctly this time (night before last, I accidentally set one for three instead of four, which resulted in my turning them both off and sleeping until five!).

4.  Balanced a sheet of paper on top of the loudest alarm with "HAVE A PERFECT DAY!" written on it as a reminder that it would be really nice to not screw up at all for once.  Underneath that, I scrawled some ideas for things that I could do if the morning got boring (again, because nobody’s awake).  There are things I probably should have done, such as organizing paperwork, working on the book, etc., but I declared "perfect day" a mini-holiday and did whatever i wanted.  (Which was to beat the boss fight I got to in FFXII before I went to bed.) 

One thing at a time, right?  I can get the rest of my routine together once my sleep schedule is repaired.  And anyway, never underestimate the power of having a few hours to play video games in the middle of the week — I feel quite a bit saner today than I did yesterday.  Yay Slacker Therapy!

…However, I did make my smoothie.  Put a little too much algae in it, wihch is not the best taste you’re ever going to encounter, but still, it was very good and definitely an improvement to have fruit and yogurt for breakfast rather than nothing or some variety of bread product.  Here’s my smoothie recipe, for the curious:

-  About 1/2 cup (several big sloppy spoonfulls or one "glarp" right out of the container) of organic yogurt.  Yes, it has to be organic.  There is no point to eating yogurt that doesn’t have all the beneficial bacteria in it.
-  About the same amount of frozen fruit, or fresh if there’s any lying around (if using fresh fruit, add some ice)
-  About twice that amount of whatever juice is around
-  One small spoonful Aquazon.  Overdoing it makes for a slightly bitter, salty taste to the smoothie — a little too much isn’t bad, but way too much is amazingly gross, so be careful
-  One larger spoonful ground flax seed.  Good source of Omega-3 fatty acids, which all people with brain problems should be taking lots of, and it’s utterly tasteless and keeps for years.  I add it to damn near everything.  ;)

Anyway, as you probably know, I’m VERY well acclimated to napping during the day, so once I managed to not go to bed early, and to get up on time this morning, there have unsurprisingly been no problems.  I do find it funny that, even if I oversleep at some point during my day, I still get tired right at "naptime" (about 8:30 a.m., 2:00 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.) — and I still fall asleep easily and sleep like a brick.  (I’m just markedly less rested when I wake up, if I’ve overslept.)  I guess once you learn to nap, you just know how!

…So, that’s my, slighly oversimplified, Perfect Day post.  It’s oversimplified because I’ve noticed a lot of things about my sleep schedule this last week, as I’ve been poking and preparing to fix it, but I’m going to wait and post those when I’ve had it *back* to perfect for a week (including weekends! –That’s my next big task, to plan for how to survive the weekend.  If only the freaking weather would be nice, I bet it would be easy, but we’re still mired in 30-degree-snowy-hell here in the midwest.).

I also wrote this last night — an essay / short story / thingy that some people seem to really like and one person really hates (though he admits that he’s allergic to anything with the word "metaphysical" in it).  I wasn’t sure about posting it here, because…well, why would be obvious if you read it.  So feel free to imbibe, if you’re not yet drunk on such things.  ;)

-PD