Occasionally I have a night of insomnia. Last night everyone was asleep by 9:00, except me. I lay wide awake in bed while Nick breathed peacefully next to me, his head snuggled up in my armpit. Anthony was snoring with Jesse down the hall. I tried to go to sleep, but it wouldn’t come, and the last time on the clock I remember spying before I finally went to dreamland was 3:55 am. Then Jesse woke me at 6:30. So I floated on two and a half hours of sleep today. I’m feeling a little goofy right now.

It occurred to me this morning that I wasted 7 waking hours during which no one bothered me. I knew what was going on. I could have folded laundry, worked out in the basement, done some sewing, watched a movie or pulled a sitcom marathon off Netflix… I could have written 7 blog posts or started on taxes. Instead, I peed 5 times, played all the fun games I could find on Nick’s iPad, looked up some music videos, and fumed about being awake.

The only arguably interesting music video trail I walked in the middle of the night involved “Say Something,” that song by some 2-guy group that Christina Aguilera did a descant on. I’m not ashamed to admit that I think it’s an awesome pop broken-heart song. When I first heard it on the radio, I thought it was following nicely in the footsteps of Adele, and my heart said it was about a guy leaving a profoundly depressed and addicted girlfriend because she won’t get any help. This probably speaks to my own mindset and not the actual lyrics. Anyway, I like the single voice original more than the one with the descant, and I was curious how two versions came to be. So I googled it and read the wiki entry and lyrics and all that, and then I watched the Aguilera descant video twice, because I was head-scratchy about Aguilera’s performance. Why does she dress like that, and what’s with the over-wrought drama and eye sparkles? She should take a time machine back to the 80’s and spend time training with some Chicago school reality theatre company like Steppenwolf. Do I have that reference right? I’m not sure. I haven’t slept but 2.5 hours in the last 24 hours and my head isn’t straight.

I never really know what makes me sleepless. Maybe I was mesmerized by Sylvester Stallone’s performances in Spy Kids 3, which we watched in the evening. Mmm. Unlikely. Maybe I was hypnotized by the all-star cast of that dumb movie — Salma Hayek, Elijah Wood, Cheech, Alan Cumming, Shalhoub, Buscemi, Paxton, Clooney, on and on. I guess when you’re Robert Rodriguez, you get who you want.

I’m thinking it wasn’t that. I didn’t start spinning on the cast and Mr. Stallone until around 2:30 am or so, after I had already indulged racing thoughts on my usual round table of topics — death, God, the end of the universe, my mom’s post-stroke condition, the link between technology and media and ADHD and sleep disorders, imaginary conversations with annoying people where I get the punch line right, global warming, Crimea, how many years I have left to live under conservative estimates and how old my kids will be, staring at Nick as he sleeps and pondering when he’ll learn to read, mulling over how very much I love Anthony and why, which workouts will I do in the coming week, what will I cook for dinner for the next 6 days, what jackass moves will Jesse pull tomorrow, why is Nick poking my ears with his feet even as he sleeps?

Maybe not even REM cycles and dreams are enough to work out the big kinks when my head gets too full of shit. Maybe those are the times my body decides to stay up all night until I’m in a state of delirium, sifting through the detritus of my addled brain. I have excellent training in sleep deprivation thanks to Jesse’s infancy. I survived today in one piece and I didn’t scream at anyone, so I rate an A+ for the day despite the lack of sleep. And now I’m off to bed. I hope I make a quick trip to dreamland this time.