Today's sentiment: Insomnia.
I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. Or rather, I’ve been having trouble staying asleep. I’ve been going to bed around 11pm, then finding myself awake two or three hours later in a panic, unable to fall back asleep. This was never a problem in the past. Before the main issue was that initial entry into slumber, which for years I couldn’t really get right. I’d feel tired, but not be able to sleep. Now, when I wake up at 2am, I’m not even tired. I feel like the world has turned dark and hideous and I have to stand up and do something about it Right Now. I try to will myself to sleep, but that doesn’t work. The more I try to resist this objectless anxiety, the more intense it feels. If I do get up and do something, that doesn’t make me tired either. I just end up awake until the morning, and only get tired once it’s too late and I have to exist in the real world, instead of the fantasy-like bedroom world I want to be in.
It is nice, in moments like these, to be the only one awake. I like sitting in the dark. The roommate at my dorm, whom I haven’t seen in two months, and Xiaoxi, my girlfriend, have one thing in common: they both love to turn every single light on when they’re awake. Lights bother me. My father mentioned once that as a kid I would cry on sunny days because it was all too bright. So maybe this is a problem with my physiology.
Sounds also bother me. Even when I wear earplugs, I can hear Xiaoxi’s perverted dog, Xiaohei, snoring. I’m not sure if I’ve written about Xiaohei before. He is the subject of so many of my nightmares. I’m not going to even try getting into all the details here, because I’m probably need a bunch of trigger warnings to preface anything I write about him. To put it as simply as possible, it’d been a long time since I’d been around any dogs, and the first time I’d really observed one closely as an adult. I hadn’t realized these creatures that are supposed to be cute have routinely display the most terrifying behaviors humans display, only there is no filter and no attempt to hide it. Whenever the humans that like dogs see any of those behaviors, all they do is laugh about it. Not that there’s anything else one could do. Ultimately dogs freak me out because they remind me of humans, and humans freak me out.
Despite the smallest sounds making it impossible for me to sleep, I do like a lot of the musical genre I sometimes refer to as “weird sound music”. I mentioned CASIO Turkey Onsen and Tanoshii Ongaku before. Sometime around the beginning of October I started listening to Doddodo, who started out life fashioning quirky breaks and hiphop samples into music you could almost play at a club at 2am, and has evolved into using much weirder samples, and actually singing and playing instruments to something resembling Minyo melodies. It’s finding music like this that makes systematically listening through every artist signed to a particular label feel worth it. (In this case, the label was Kongari Ongaku).
In other musical news, I’ve made progress at writing an overly long essay about a band I’ve liked for too long. I’ll try to shorten it and make it funnier before I post it. I’m not sure why all my writing ends up being so serious.
The particular band/musician I’m writing about isn’t exactly obscure, yet there is very little about them on the English language internet. When writing on this website, I try as hard as I can to negate any feeling of authority my writing might exude, because, well, my least favorite genre of writing is people assuming that just because they’ve never met someone in person who likes some thing they just discovered a week ago, they’re the only one who knows anything about it. In this case however, much of the English language writing about this band seems has a sort of clinical feeling to it, written by people whose job it is say a few words about every pop culture event in a certain country, listing a few facts that someone who speaks the language of said home country could figure out with a few internet searches in less than five minutes. It’s not like I’m an expert on this band, but I’ve read three books by current and former members, and engaged in a lot of the non-musical art that surrounds the band. I want to communicate how much depth there is in all this music. I want to trick people who’ve never heard of this band into caring about them. I suppose my natural inclination then is to write as much as I can about them, though I’m not sure if that’s the best approach.
It’s almost 6am now. If I stop now, by the time I post this, it’ll definitely be 6am. I have somewhere to be at 1:30pm, so I suppose I could just go back to sleep now. The issue is that once it gets light out, the cat starts freaking out. I also find it hard to sleep past 8am, even if I didn’t sleep at all during the night. I’m not sure why lying in bed, trying and failing to fall asleep is such a miserable feeling to me. Why can’t it be relaxing? Why can’t I just enjoy the pleasure of lying in bed? There have been yearlong periods of my life where I couldn’t sleep in a bed, or I could only sleep at hours and in places not conducive to sleeping. Now I have such nice warm place to lie in — why does it fill me with so much anxiety?
In case you haven't noticed, for each of these sentiments, I pick a word or phrase to make into a link back to the previous one. I haven't actually written a sentiment in two weeks, so I forgot what the previous one was about, and don't feel like rereading it. So this time only I'll put the link here at the bottom of the page. Please forgive me.