My brother is coming to town!!  I’m very happy.

Where do you think I should take him and his girlfriend to experience America and the Great North West?

Leave a comment! With your ideas!

I decided to change the subtitle of my blog to “Diary of an Insomniac“ after realizing that most of my posts were written between 11:30 at night and 3:00 in the morning.  I always had been in love with the sound of the world “Insomnia”, maybe because I heard it so many times in so many languages all throughout my life.

When I was a kind my brother and I used to sleep in the same room. We played games to fall asleep and count sheeps  (what the hell is the plural of a sheep in English?) and, in the morning, we used to tell each other how many we counted.  My brothers usually stopped at 7-10.  I counted 2,734 every night before losing it and get out of bed!  One of the games I used to do was walking around the house in the dark while everybody was asleep.  I could find my way to any place without touching the walls. A few times I even sleepwalked, proving that even when I’m asleep I don’t rest.  Today, the fact that I’m always awake at night is well know among my friends.  They call me regularly after midnight.  Generally normal people that call other normal people late, start the conversation with something like: “is this too late to call?” or “were you sleeping?” but not with me, they all resume conversations we had a few hours earlier like nothing happened.  Messenger doesn’t help either.  It’s past midnight and I’m on the phone with somebody while IMing 2 more people and writing a blog.  I’m almost on shifts.  When the friends on the West coast go to sleep, the friends in Europe wake up, then the people from Argentina, East coast, central time, Costa Rica…  

The best part of being an insomniac is the night itself.  If you cannot be an insomniac if you don’t love the dark, the shades, the dim lights, the grays, the unknown, the mystery behind corners, the black, the distant lights, the fog, fresh air, the fear and loathing of the morning, the unrealized potential of the next day that is actually just started for you, but mostly, if you are an insomniac, you love loud sounds… every sound is loud in the night.  You can spot an insomniac during the day not from the circles around their eyes, not from the slower pace, not from the lost look but from the way they react to florescent light.  Florescent light is to an insomniac what sunlight is to a vampire.  Don’t expose an insomniac to the flickering bleach of a tube lamp for more then a few minutes a day or you might get a crisis on your hands.  If you want to be friend with an insomniac think red hues and soft browns.    

The worst part of being an insomniac is being an insomniac.  Let’s face it, if you are an insomniac, you are not normal.  Would you say “do you suffer of <blank>” of anything that is not some sort of a disease?  Insomniacs grow up with this feeling of leprosy that needs to be kept secret, an incurable way of life.  I heard “do you suffer of insomnia?”  so many times that I started to believe it was an illness .  I always reply: “I don’t suffer” but often I say it to convince myself.  Well, it’s not an illness but it does make you not normal… but only normal people want to be normal. 

They have many ways of dealing with us the insomniacs, pity is the most common way.  I pity right back at them just because they have to deal with me in the morning ; ) I already feel the pity eyes of the people that will read this blog on me.  Some are annoyed by us because we are late for something we don’t care or because we don’t care to be late for something.  Most of them envy us when they feel their lives being taken away by the Sandman while we are partying with him.  All of them try to cure us with a simple truth, something so simple that obviously none of us have tried before: “go to bed earlier”.

- Do you suffer of insomnia?

- Go to bed earlier

I don’t suffer and the bed is the last place I go to.

Out