the insomniac speaketh

21May09

i have this organizer application on my iphone that shows this annoying number at the corner of the application icon, indicating the number of unfinished tasks i have for that day. annoying to people like me, who like everything clean and uncluttered, who make sure there are no unread mails in her email inbox. all i have to do, really, is to turn the checkbox i have next to each task into a bullet so that it will not be registered as an undone task. but again, i am anal that way; i do not want to lie to myself, and it does feel good to be able to check off your tasks.

i slaved the whole of yesterday to complete my tasks and went to bed with a roaring headache. meaning to sleep in, i set no alarms but woke up at half-past seven, thinking it must be past ten. disappointed at my inability to sleep in and the headache that refused to go away, i returned to bed past eleven and spent the next three hours dreaming about days back in the civil service and and an intray i could never clear. woke up, and here i am, getting ready to start on my two tasks for the day. this is good – i have stopped procrastinating; but perhaps i need to set more realistic deadlines for myself.

but here’s the earth-shattering realization for the day – how much i had taken the silences that surrounded me back home for granted. it hit me earlier that my sleep problems were probably compounded by all the incessant noises that crowd into my little room here. the trains start running at about five in the morning and stop only past midnight. students start making their way to the high school past seven in the morning and sometimes stay till night. high school girls, incidentally, are a different breed of creature altogether in japan. they are well-respected as a very important consumer group with their own unique subculture and living habits. but their voices! that sharp, nasal tone – at times whiney, at times excited – truly grates on my nerves. and those cheerleaders. urgh. i do believe they are doing something to permanently damage their voices, so that they may be quiet, submissive wives when the time comes.

but that’s not all. last night, there was a group of drunk bikers who took it into their mind to keep the engines of their bikes on for an hour while announcing their drunken-ness through shouts and laughter. some kind of drilling work started this morning, giving a good, steady bass tone to all those other noises. and to cap it all off, the crows inject their dose of cheerful daytime music at frequent intervals. and above all these, i faithfully sit through three hours of primetime television every night.

the more i  hear these sounds, the more sensitive i become to them, and the more they seem to taunt me deliberately. like how the train chooses to go by with a long blast of the horn at the exact point my senses reach that thin line between waking and sleeping. or how my neighbor decides to speak on the phone in angry bursts of korean at two in the morning.

i thought of stepping out to get some earplugs but i truly dislike sticking things in my ears. perhaps i should just get some pills. or  get roaring drunk. i would just really like to get some deep, undisturbed sleep for once in a while tonight. no dreams, no waking up suddenly, no befuddled confusion about being awake or asleep.

Filed under: health, japan, whining, work   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: headache, insomnia, noises, work