Insomnia: Truths and Technicalities

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Almost everyone experiences the occasional sleepless night, and the average adult American carries a bit of sleep debt. These experiences, while exhausting and of concern, are nothing compared to chronic insomnia.

There are three broad types of true insomnia: sleep-onset insomnia, in which sleep takes an inordinate amount of time to arrive; sleep-maintenance insomnia, in which the sleeper wakes repeatedly throughout the night or has difficulty falling back to sleep after a waking; and early-wake insomnia, in which morning sometimes comes for the sleeper before the clock has acknowledged it. Each of these types can be transient (lasting just a few nights), short-term (lasting a couple of weeks), long-term (lasting months or years), or idiopathic (permanent, beginning in early childhood).

It’s hard to imagine the depths of exhaustion and stress experienced by the true insomniac. People who have experienced a sleepless night or two are prone to recommending the same few things. “Have you tried a good sleep routine?” they’ll ask. “Avoid screens in bed,” they’ll say. Journalling and tea are often recommended to those who haven’t slept in weeks. It can make an insomniac want to scream — if he or she had the energy to do so, anyway. Most insomniacs know the expert advice which works for average bad sleepers isn’t as helpful for chronic insomnia.

Many insomniacs discover that nothing works reliably to bring about consistent sleep. What works one night, or even one month, may abruptly stop working. Drugs are habituating and can become less effective over time; herbs are almost laughably useless to someone who can’t fall asleep even after five nights awake. Sleep science is in its infancy; the newest research suggests that sleep variations such as insomnia have so many determinant factors that the true cure may be unique to each sufferer.

If you experience insomnia, the best thing you can do is discuss it with a medical professional as soon as possible. Sleep deprivation is dangerous in myriad ways, from long-term health effects to simple dangers such as driving while sleep-deprived. Medical advice can help you find the best way to treat your insomnia and mitigate the factors causing it. And in the meantime, try not to scream when your friends suggest a hot cup of tea.

Roosevelt Brewing Company Continually in Progress

You can find a lively crowd at The Roosevelt Brewing Company any night it’s open. The brewpub, open since 2012, is a popular place in Portales. Justin Cole’s ever-changing roster of small-batch beers, combined with chef Tyne Sansom’s innovative menu, beguile residents of our small town. The addition of local musicians, comedians, and artists doesn’t hurt, either.

The brewery has faced challenges, though you wouldn’t know it to read the first report of its opening in the Portales News-Tribune. Community leaders in that article spoke specifically and excitedly of the economic benefits the brewery would bring to Portales. Just two years later, however, those same community leaders would vote to deny Cole’s request to sell his brews at the annual Peanut Valley Festival.

In the time since that vote, the brewing company has overcome a citywide water outage that temporarily shuttered other local businesses, turned down the potential benefits of a new state law allowing home delivery of alcohol — which seems to somehow balance the Peanut Valley Festival disappointment – and become the center of Portales’s nightlife.

The brewpub is particularly packed on holidays, when it’s often impossible even to make a reservation. Patrons call to book their tables weeks in advance, thanks in large part to Sansom’s one-of-a-kind holiday menus and specialty cupcakes. A hallmark of the brewpub is its constant innovation; beers, menus, cupcakes, and promotions rotate quickly, so that customers are always returning for the next big thing.

“You just get what I call FOMO,” Jessica Anders, a 24-year-old administrative assistant, told me. “Fear of missing out. I try to get in to the pub every week just so I can taste every cupcake!”

This innovative spirit is likely the driving force behind Roosevelt Brewing Company’s rapid rise to success, despite the difficulty Cole experienced in establishing it. The same flexibility and willingness to think creatively that creates the pub’s novel atmosphere is seen in the ways Cole has responded to challenges during its establishment. Water’s out? That’s fine – he’ll use distilled. No seller’s permit at a festival? That’s great – but don’t expect him to pay for delivery privileges later!

Hidden Costs of Returning to School

Amie Griffith takes a break from her 10-hour day of work and classes on ENMU’s Portales campus.

What happens when a college student takes a long break from post-secondary education? Amie Griffith, a 2009 ENMU graduate, is finding out the hard way. Griffith, a 32-year-old Development Director at ENMU’s affiliated broadcast center, KENW, returned to Eastern last year in pursuit of her Master’s degree in Communication. She is part of a groundswell of students who interrupt tertiary education to focus on life in the “real world” — students who may find their return to formal schooling contains unpleasant surprises.

Griffith speaks with irritation of these surprises, which often come in the form of hidden financial burdens. “Even though my tuition is covered by KENW, I still end up spending all kinds of money I hadn’t expected to,” she told me. “You have to pay a fee for internet classes — and that’s another surprise, now all the classes are online — and books cost so much more than they used to. A lot of teachers make you buy directly from the bookstore, too, so you can’t really save money by going to Amazon.” Were these costs not explained to her when she applied to the graduate school? “No, not at all,” she says. “I was just told to fill out a tuition waiver, then next thing I knew, I got a bill!” This experience is something to consider for students who are confident that their employers will foot the bill for continued education.

For traditional, first-time undergraduates, the first (and biggest) hurdle is financing. The U.S. Department of Education estimates 80-85% of first-time undergraduate students now receive some form of financial aid, which means this hurdle is often cleared by scholarships and loans. A returning student like Griffith may find this is no longer the case — as an independent adult, the means test by which financial aid is awarded now applies solely to the student (rather than the student’s parents), and a working student may find her income is too high to receive much aid.

Although Griffith’s focus was on the financial aspects of returning to school, other changes to the landscape confront students who have taken a lengthy hiatus. The rising popularity of distance learning is one such change; while online classes offer unprecedented flexibility, they can also strand students in the educational weeds, with no way out when they get stuck. Kirsten Peterson, a recent graduate of ENMU’s Master’s of Communication program, told me frankly that she felt lost in many of her classes. “If I emailed a question I never knew when, or if, my professor would answer,” she said. “I have a hard time learning by just reading along, so I had a lot of questions, and I was just stuck. I was used to going to class every day and interacting with everyone in person, so it was really surprising to me that now everything is on the computer.” This question of timely interaction and assistance is compounded when both professor and student have external obligations pressing on their time.

There are solutions to these and other problems, of course. In next week’s installment we’ll take advice for nontraditional students from college advising departments, examine post-graduate financial aid options, and consider ways to arrange a full life to create room for education. While you consider the information here, you may find the following links helpful:

 

“Is an MBA Right for Me?”

“My Experience Going Back to School, 10 Years Later”

“Why I Went Back to College”

Your mama warned you there’d be days like these.*

Hello! It has been 69 hours since my last cigarette! Excuse my one-track mind, but I am going nuts!

Day one was easy. Day two was okay. Today has been hellish. I might even smoke a cigarette tonight while we barbecue, because look, I am only human. A cigarette every three days — or after dinner every night, even — is not that bad.

Right?

I’m kind of afraid that if I smoke one, I will go right back to smoking a pack or more a day, even though that is in no way logical. I think I have Chantix, AA, and Puritanism all mixed up in my head. Ugh! I caught myself sniffing at Michael furtively this evening, gathering the residue of his cigarette into my poor deprived brain like some sort of lunatic. (Yes, I have mandated that nobody smoke around me, which means Michael is sneaking cigarettes at the mailbox and I am ignoring it so I can sneak whiffs of stale smoke from his clothes. Quitting may turn out to be a filthier habit than smoking ever was.)

Anyway, that fear is the only thing that’s kept me from smoking today. Well, that fear and BubbleShooter, which I have played for something like 10 hours since 8:00 this morning. Also, I think I ate everything in the house, and can only be relieved that most of it was vegetables.

Help! Alternatively, reassure my week and feeble brain that it’s all right if I have a cigarette tonight, but only one. And say that last part really, really sternly.

* The Rembrandts

It’s a good morning beautiful day.

Hello, lovelies! Today is a good day, would you like to know why? It started out with gorgeous weather (70F and sunny before 10:00AM). My seedlings are… well, they’re still not visible, but I sense that they’re happy. And when I checked my email, I discovered a press release from the lovely folks at eBeanstalk, who make lovely and exceptionally fun toys for kids.

My tendency is to ignore these sorts of things — I receive them occasionally, and they’re almost always either lame or irrelevant — but the difference here is that I like eBeanstalk. I’ve actually bought things from them before, things that Connor loved (for example, this most excellent smart phone). I know them well enough to feel comfortable telling you to go have a look. Also, they were kind enough to include a 15% off coupon for my readers (… hah), and I know that like a bajillion of you either just had kids or have had kids for a while and might need to jazz them up a little. (What? It’s okay to admit it.)

So, if you want to buy some awesome, fun, developmentally rockin’ toys, you can use coupon code TGS345 at the site, anytime between now and June 30th.

Tomorrow we resume our regular, non-commercial-shilling updates. I feel like kind of a doofus right now. (HAY GUYZ BUY THIS KEWL PRODUKT!) Catch you then!

(But seriously, I really do whole-heartedly encourage you to at least go look at the site. Great stuff, excellent service, and a discount! What could it hurt?)

*Keith Urban, oh God.

Sold: One soul, slightly worn.

I gave in and got a Flickr account. I plan to use it as a kind of photo-journal of whatever crosses my mind, is picture-worthy, but is not deserving of a full entry.

Will I keep up with it, you ask? Well, who the hell knows. It’s fun right now, though, even though all I’ve done is upload pictures of what I wore today. You should come play with me.

By request.

Whoopsie! It’s been a while, I see. Where does the time go? Oh, wait, I know where it goes — it goes into resetting my entire computer back to factory standards on the advice of a tech support idiot who told me that the connection problems I was having were “in no way caused by my ISP” and that they “must be registry issues caused by Service Pack 1” and… well, it turned out to be my ISP after all, but by the time I found that out my computer had already been wiped.

So! I spent a day and a night doing that, and another day and night re-downloading necessary programs, and another day and night installing those programs (along with the approximately 8 billion Windows updates from the past year), and then a day and night working at a frantic pace to make up for missing three days, and then… then I briefly embodied total lunacy and stayed up all night watching Titus, an early-millenium sitcom that’s kind of dumb at first but by the time the exhaustion sets in you realize that the show is actually much smarter than it seems on the surface and it goes deeply into the emotional ramifications of being a screwed-up person (Titus’s words, not mine) and in fact, this little show is the best thing to have ever been on television!

Of course, then you go to bed for three hours and have really weird dreams, but it’s just part of the process. And when you get up, you have apparently forgotten how to write paragraphs comprised of more than one sentence. Moving on.

What I’m trying to say is — hey, sing it with me — I’m very tired. I am likely to spend the day sitting in a stupor on our porch while Connor runs happily wild in the yard, because I can’t muster the energy or interest in anything else. At some point I’m going to have to work, but I’ll worry about that after my second pot of coffee, thank you very much.

In lieu of a real, substance-y update, let me redirect you. There are many new posts up at Schizodigestive, and I even wrote some of them! (Well, okay. Two of them. Shush.) Whatever is a lot of fun — it’s a well-written, funny blog by a very good science fiction writer who dips into politics, cats, family life, and all kinds of interesting stuff. You should go watch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, if you aren’t already. And, uh… here is a picture of a scary cat.

There! Go forth and click links, my children. The internet won’t just expand itself, you know.

All that exposition for one lousy picture.

When I was pregnant, I made many carefully reasoned parenting choices, most of which flew right out the window as soon as Connor went external. One of the big ones was that I wasn’t going to let him watch TV, play video games, or use a computer until he was 7. I thought that was a good age, a solid age — old enough to understand time limits and content restrictions, but young enough to avoid porn; old enough to have established the habit of playing outside, but young enough to benefit from all that hand-eye coordination stuff; old enough to operate these devices safely and sanely, but young enough that he wouldn’t mind a ten-year-old Compaq.

Then he was born, and Michael’s mom started him with TV pretty much instantly. At first it was Baby Einstein, of which I grudgingly approved. He didn’t care about the tube much when he was very small, but as he got older he started taking more notice — and he became able to verbalize his wishes. “Doo-da-box!” he’d crow, 18 months old and already asking to watch these horrifying creatures. At two, he insisted on “Lil’ Einsseins, puh-lee-zuh,” emphasizing the please until it was almost unrecognizable (as if that alone would break my iron will). Now he’s well-acquainted with a wide variety of shows even though we don’t have a TV, corrupted by his grandmother’s love of the tube and my eventual lack of caring.

ADD, schmay-DD, I shrug. He has to have something to distract him from the smack withdrawals his tragic Louboutin addiction making gigantic messes while Mama’s trying to get paid, right? I’ve held firm on the no-computers and no-video games rules, though. I figured that this was the sort of compromise most rational adults make when they butt heads with reality. I mean, I’m not heartless — okay, kid, have all the TV you want at Momo’s house, but at home all you get is the occasional DVD and you certainly don’t need other screens. Play with toys! Here’s some Play-Doh! Let’s go outside! All well and good, and he’s never had a problem with this system.

Until.

Until I started working, at home, on the computer. He is now fascinated by what I might be doing on here at any given moment, and he will interrogate me mercilessly, a tiny Torquemada: “Whatcha doin’, Mommy? Are you doin’ ShaSha? Are you doin’ your work, or are you doin’ somethin’ else? What page can you click on to see somethin’ else? Are you going to play some music? Do you have any games on that computer?” On and on it goes, and the precision of some of his questions makes me suspect that he is having computer time at his grandparents’ house.

Tonight we had a lot of fun before bed. He sat in my lap and said, “I will be cold, I will be cold!” at which point I was to cross my eyes, make duck lips, and produce the weirdest sound I could. We did this over and over, laughing like loons, my little Inquisitor and me — him covered in hydrocortisone-smeared bug bites, me with sloppy hair and bleachy hands from a day of cleaning. After a while he started casting flirtatious glances at the computer. “What… well… don’t you think you need to do ShaSha right now?” he asked. “I could watch you, right here on your lap. I will be very quiet, and you can do some more ShaSha work. That’s a great idea!”

He needs to work on his subtlety a little. I got the hint loud and clear, and right then? I gave up. The kid is interested, the kid is bright, and damnit, the kid is not going to learn about computers from his grandparents. That’s my area, thank you very much. I opened up Checkbox-a-Sketch, shook the mouse around a little, and Connor’s eyes lit up. He me to draw numbers, he asked me to write his name, he had me draw every single member of the Cars cast, and finally… he asked to do it himself.

Kid’s a natural. What the hell was I worried about, again?

Somebody smack me.

Today, I need to be smug. Today it is 84 degrees, sunny, with a gentle cooling breeze. I have completed the first half of my day’s work, and settled in with coffee, a bagel, and a cigarette. I have the rest of my day pleasantly mapped out — it includes picking a couple of gorgeous garden tomatoes, getting some more work done, and ordering some DVDs and books from Amazon.

There are flies in the ointment: My husband is going away in a couple of weeks to take his first-ever paid vacation. Well… that’s not entirely accurate. He has had paid vacations before, but they consisted of sitting at home, bored, because we could not afford to go anywhere or do anything. This year he’s going to a gaming convention in Albuquerque for three days, and it will be awesome for him, and it’ll even be okay for me. (See above, re: buying DVDs and books. I’m prepared and shit.)

Also, I have developed pulsatile tinnitus, and it’s just as irritating as it sounds. (How it sounds: whoosh WHOOSH whoosh WHOOSH whoosh WHOOSHWHOOSHWHOOSHWHOOSH!… Whoosh!) I’ve had it for about a month, but I only thought to Google “whooshing noise in ears” two days ago. I thought it would go away. I was, apparently, wrong. I am going to have to call the clinic, find out how much an appointment is for people on the low end of the sliding scale, and get it checked out. In the meantime, it is driving me batshit insane and I should probably give up caffeine and nicotine very, very annoying, and I hope the doctor finds an easily fixed cause.

So, yes. Flies in the ointment for sure, but the ointment itself is pretty awesome. (That metaphor? Kind of disturbing.) I feel like my life is under control for the first time in forever; I feel regulated. I feel as if it’s finally all right to enjoy things like coffee and bagels on a sunny day, like it’s no longer my duty to be always aware that rent is due! And the electricity bill is too high! And we’ve got to figure out how to get Connor’s fall clothes! And the living room needs new blinds! This stuff has been figured out. I can handle it, now, and I can take breaks — every day! — wherein I just kick back and focus on the good stuff. It makes for a boring blog, this crisis-less state of being, but it also makes for an awesome late summer.

The garden. The advent of fall. Onion bagels. The fancy-pants coffee maker I’ve had for months and barely used. New books. Fully paid, in-no-way-delinquent bills. I am one smug motherfucker right now.

CRASH. Bang. Etc.

Why hello, there! I was going to post some more garden pictures and address some non-work stuff and ask for reading recommendations, wasn’t I? Yes, I was! But then! Internet Explorer started crashing and also deleting my entire desktop! I spent many of yesterday’s hours staring at a totally black screen with a Windows 3.1-style gigantic useless mouse pointer and after that particular psychodrama (OMG MY COMPUTER IS DEAD AND I WILL LOSE MY JOB AND I WILL NEVER GET TO READ ANOTHER BLOG) I don’t really know what to say. I have been zombified, and all I can do is stare at my sweet, precious IE window.

(It turned out that AVG was making me crash because it was running, like, twelve different versions of itself in my processes and somehow causing svchost.exe to run multiple versions of itself and HA HA HA, my computer is not built to run twelve versions of AVG and seven versions of svchost and also IE and also MSN and also AIM and also WinAmp and also Google Notifier and also? GAH.)

So! I am using McAfee now, and all is well. To be honest, I don’t even know why I have a full-size anti-virus program on here, because I run everything out of Sandboxie and it catches everything without me having to lift a finger. I think I run these gargantuan anti-virus programs because I know approximately jack and shit about keeping computers healthy (man, what ever happened to DOS? I could rock the DOS all day long) and so hitting “scan” is my default troubleshooting method. Also, I use — eek — Vista, because it came with the computer and I had every intention of getting rid of it and going back to XP, but THEN! Then I kind of liked Vista, and it had some cool features, and Sandboxie takes care of its security issues, so here I am with the most persnickety, temperamental OS on the planet and absolutely no knowledge of how to coax it into submission.

Why am I rambling on about computers? I don’t know. It’s not even eight o’clock yet, people, and I have already worked for a couple of hours WITHOUT ANY COFFEE. I think now would be a good time to ask for those reading recommendations! Yes! Tell me what books I should buy. I like funny things, I am not so much a sci-fi/fantasy fan although I do love Heinlein and also Terry Goodkind, I get kind of pissy when a book goes on and on about the lessons learned at a dying parents’ bedside, and I don’t like pat “I’m aiming for Oprah’s book list” authors.

(Alice Sebold and Amy Tan, I’m looking at YOU.)

Also, I love historical fiction, but it has to be really accurate historical fiction. I tried Philippa Gregory and hated her, but I love Margaret George. So what should I read, given those particular preferences? Help a sister out.