the Drowning Mulligan

Hi, Internet.  I apologize for my recent absences, and the future absences that are probably safe to bet on, but once again, I’m drowning.

I haven’t written much because my whole life is consumed with fixing up a fixer-upper, moving two households into it (once it’s fixed), smoothing things over with the city and the neighborhood, oh yeah, and doing crazy lots at work and starting school again this week.

Interjection:  I hate my month off of school.  I get one in August and one in January, and they’re awful.  They give me just enough time to build up a huge pile of Stuff I Wanna Do, get barely started on some of it, and then have it ripped away under a flood of new schoolwork.  So yeah, today, the last day before school again, I’m kind of sitting around mourning all the things I’d gathered about to interest and occupy me, and which I’m now going to have next to no time for.  (These are things that even polyphasic sleep won’t give me time for, because they all involve reading/computer time, and as several of us have discovered, you can have all the time in the world but you can only spend so much of it straining your eyes/neck/etc. being geeky.  I can’t use my extra time for these things, at least not consistently, because by the time I finish work and schoolwork, I can’t bear to see the computer anymore, and my eyes are usually killing me so I can’t read either!)

Anyway, here’s a short requiem for Things Almost Done:

*  Planned out five new T-shirts to design

*  Sketched 2 new paintings (note:  There’s no room to paint in my current hovel, but after I move—maybe I can use my extra time for this–?)

*  Bought 5 new fun-books

*  Re-opened one of my old Favorite Study Topics For Fun (and got very excited about it before I realized that school starts Monday!)

*  Started two new short stories, a poem and a song

*  And also a note for all the cleaning/organizing plans, and random ideas for fun things, that came and went before they ever reached the fetus stage.  *sigh*  So sad….

BUT.  I shall buck up.  Only a year of school left now, and then I get a year off before tackling more of it.  (I hate that I already have far more plans for this one year than could possibly fit!)

When I was younger and talked about college with my dad, at some point he always made this face like a squashed pumpkin and said, "School!  I’ve had plenty of school, thank you.  If I never go to school again, that’ll be fine!"

I never understood the old man until now…  ;)

Oh yes.

And polyphasically, I’m in shambles.  I even suffered some napinsomnia over the last couple days, whacking things out even further than they were already due to missed and mis-timed naps from the insane flurry of tasks and appointments and whatnot.

I’m not "giving up" in the sense of going back to monophase — eek, I can’t even really consider that without flinching — but I am admitting that life-the-way-it-is-now is anything but conducive to the kind of careful schedule that’s required to get the most out of polyphase.  Besides, the missed naps and sloppy schedule are really exacerbated by where I live now — try missing a nap, then getting up after your 3-hour core sleep and convincing yourself that you’d rather "work off" the exhaustion you feel and get back on track, when doing so involves sitting quietly in a dark room, as opposed to going back to sleep!

I’m telling you, when I can wake up and turn some lights on, I’m gonna be unstoppable!

Anyway, until after this moving crap — should be over by the end of next month, hopefully — I’m just accepting that my schedule is permanently whacked out.  Some days it’s perfect, others it’s less so, others it’s more of an extended  crash-and-run session than a schedule.  One day a week it’s almost monophasic (plus naps), because you’d better believe I’m building a sleep-debt with such a random schedule during the week, so one weekend day is always a crash-session (which I just woke up from — seven hours and LORD am I sore, I can’t wait to not do that anymore).

In short, it’s a mess.  It’s gonna stay a mess for another month, probably.  And hey, let me answer a question I sometimes get:  If it’s such a mess, why not be monophasic instead until things straighten out? 

And the answer to this is simple, because the question contains the false assumption that monophase right now would be somehow neater.  Hooo no it wouldn’t.  Oversleeping, undersleeping, bouts of insomnia, and schedule screw-ups are JUST as common on monophase than polyphase, and on a monophasic schedule there are a lot fewer opportunities to make up for mistakes.  In fact, maybe polyphasic sleep has made me wussy in a way, because I can’t imagine being "stuck with" the results of a single sleep for an entire day.  I still love and need my naps, even if their regularity and effeciency is in the toilet.  ;)

Oh, now I feel bad.  You guys deserve better posts than this, but here I have nothing interesting to write about and the only polyphasic news is On the Nature of A Mulligan. 

Oo!  Wait!  I know!

Have some bunnies!  (pictures of reader ‘stine’s bunny Annabelle.  who doesn’t like a bunny picture, right?  …I only wish she’d put a pancake on Annabelle’s head, but, yeah, oh well…)