Sleep Deprivation: The New Martini

For some reason I've had difficulty sleeping over the past few nights. I really can't say why. I'm mostly comfortable but it has been taking me over an hour to fall asleep all week, and if I slept last night, I couldn't prove it. I saw every hour pass from 12-4. At a quarter to five I had had enough of the nonsense and decided I might as well get up or I would be more or less useless for the entire day.

One neat side effect to my insomnia is that I have discovered that sleep deprivation has roughly the same effect on me as a couple of stiff drinks, with an added twist that I will discuss in just a moment. Granted, I am having to go from memory on most of this. I have never been a big drinker.

Like many people, I got drunk a couple of times as a Freshman in college, but pretty well decided that drunkenness wasn't something that I enjoyed enough to continue. Back when I used to drink more, I only enjoyed being drunk for about 15-30 minutes and then I was ready to be sober again. The only problem was that I was still drunk. I found this very negative effect to be sufficient reason to help me to curtail my consumption of alcoholic beverages - at least until I was of legal age. While I still have an occasional drink, I never push it past the "loose in the hips" stage of intoxication. Thus my liver and brain cells have been granted a reprieve and are very grateful to me.

Generally speaking, a drunk falls into one of a few categories (in addition to falling down on the ground):

1) Your Friendly Drunk
2) Your Mean Drunk
3) Your Mellow Drunk
4) Your Talkative Drunk
5) Your Sleepy Drunk
6) Your Sad Drunk
7) Your Fun Drunk

Now it is pretty unusual for a drunk to cross the lines into more than one of these groups, but I have found that sleep deprivation allows me to enjoy all of these alter egos simultaneously.

Another neat similarity that I have noticed between sleep deprivation and inebriation is the fact that you really shouldn't be operating power tools or heavy equipment. You are definitely not the most stable nor are you very capable of coherent thought... at least not anything that involves things more complicated than monosyllabic musings. You can absolutely forget multitasking! When I'm extremely tired any question more involved than "What is your name?" is enough to set me pondering what the inquisitor's definition of the word "is" is.

The final similarity between getting schknockered and staying up all night is you get this cool sense of euphoria. It is like you are on this different plane. I am sure this is why people think that they drive better drunk. You feel kind of indestructible - at least until some dingle berry pulls out in front of you in traffic making you go through stages 2 and 4 at something approaching the speed of sound (using lots of very short words with some hand gestures thrown in for good measure). Problem is, when you're in that state, the fine tune controls for motor movement are totally shot and you end up wrapped around a telephone pole, at which point, if you are still alive, you go straight to drunk personality #6.

I just thought of one more similarity between sleep deprivation and inebriation: the cure - SLEEP! Here’s wishing you (and especially me) 8 hours of good solid REM! Cheers!