***SLEEP STUDY RESULTS***
Warning: this journal about my sleep study results will be
so boring that you yourself will fall asleep reading it. Hopefully, you’ll be
listening to new age music and snuggling with a kitty while you’re sleeping. If
you’re snoring loud enough to wake up the whole household, you too will want to
undergo a sleep study. Read at your own risk.
Five days after my 31st birthday, I finally had
the sleep study that I’ve been meaning to do since forever. I filled out a
questionnaire describing my symptoms (snoring, waking up drained, lack of
motivation, etc.) and the doctor said they were all consistent with sleep apnea
and being a night owl. In order to combat the night owl syndrome, I’ve been
waking up earlier in the morning with no excuses. The first week it was 10:30,
the next week it was 10:00, the next it was 9:30, and from this point forward,
it will be 9:00. It seemed like I was having more energy, but I was still
taking naps in the middle of the day that lasted hours.
A few days ago, I took a home sleep test where I wore a
heart monitor around my chest, had tubes in my nose, and a patch around my
finger. If my bed was capable of spinning, I would be able to empathize with
Crazy K from “Tales from the Hood”. All joking aside, the equipment was pretty
goddamn uncomfortable to wear to bed and I never got a good night’s sleep. I
went to bed at one in the morning and took the gear off at five. Despite only
wearing the gear for four hours, the heart monitor was still able to get a definitive
result.
Later that morning, I had a weird ass dream where Smokey was
kidnapped Final Fight style. There were grizzly bears in my backyard, but I
don’t know how they fit into the dream. I got out of bed and scoured the
neighborhood for Smokey while trying to blast a confession out of everybody
with an energy shotgun. Nobody confessed and I couldn’t find Smokey, so I wrote
a heavy metal song about this incident called “Scour”. I couldn’t remember the
lyrics when I woke up. Otherwise, I would have written and posted it to my
social media accounts. It was a damn good song if I do say so myself.
A few days later, I get a call from the doctor in charge of
my sleep study saying he has the results of the home test. Not only do I have a
bad case of sleep apnea, but it was worse than he expected. He ordered a CPAP
machine for me to use at home for thirty days. I have yet to pick up the
machine, but it’ll definitely happen. My mom’s friend from high school Sandy uses one and she
sleeps very soundly at night. Hopefully, it’ll give me the same amount of
energy.
This past Monday and Tuesday, I spent most of the day
helping my family move a bunch of heavy crap out of their storage locker and
into our garage. After both sessions of moving, I felt so exhausted that I took
a five hour nap. No creative work got done during those days, which I will talk
about in further detail in the next few sections of this journal.
***WEEKLY SHORT STORY CONTESTS AND COMPANY***
Before the contest in which I posted “Zion Heart” ended, I
told the WSS that I wanted to take a one-week vacation from the next contest so
that I could catch up on my backburner creative projects, which included
editing the shit out of Poison Tongue Tales, beta-reading for my Deviant Art
bestie Zero Urrea, building a WWE Lego set that I got for my birthday, and
catching up on watching the last few episodes of NCIS: Los Angeles. I also
planned on catching up with reading the “Final Curtain” stories and voting for
my favorite one. But like I said, the last few days have been exhausting for
me, more so than usual, so I can’t work under those tired conditions.
Hopefully, the next few days will be more productive. It’s probably best that I
opted out of this week’s contest since the topic was “Game of Thrones”. I’ve never
watched that show or read the book a day in my life, so I would be flying blind
the whole time. Plus, there aren’t any story ideas in my archives that could
take “Game of Thrones” as wordplay. A game and a throne? That’s two prompts in
one. What am I supposed to do with them? Sorry if I sound like a whiny bitch.
That wasn’t my intention. I’m just sleepy today from all the heavy lifting and
getting up early in the morning.
***LYRICS OF THE DAY***
“We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teacher, leave them kids alone. Hey! Teacher!
Leave them kids alone! All in all, you’re just another brick the wall. All in
all, you’re just another brick in the wall.”
-Pink Floyd singing “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2”
***POST-SCRIPT***
It’s funny that I should randomly select those lyrics from
my quotes archives, because “Zion Heart” is about Roger Waters and his
“controversial” statements about Israel
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