Showing posts with label sleep. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sleep. Show all posts

Sunday, May 24, 2015

morning duties

Oddly sane morning. Broke out of the spell of work and code. Went out for a ride, it was a fast one, where I averaged over 26, and surely hit 30 many in those cadence-peak moments. It is hard to do so with a bike with slipping gear-shifts (thanks to a worn out rear cassette that has been calling for replacement since the last year), and a phone the dimensions of a brick in your backpocket that felt gone on any bumps (and Delhi roads have many). Here's to a bit more tuning to the days. I've been on tuning for the past month, but in the past week the force seems strong.

Well, I keep breaking my routines, and then having these resurgent phases where the first few outings induce striking reflections, a commoner's beginnings - idealistic, sometimes-lofty, over-indulgent, over-promising. I guess that doesn't just apply to cycling. Indulgence should keep to action, only then will it be tolerated. Indulgent traits in me continue well into home, like right now. I might not be projecting lofty futures, but surely appealing for some.

So what do I do on a morning where things have started with a fix to a nagging code issue and a full hour of cycling? Sleep.

Friday, September 28, 2012

Coffee and early hours

Coffee is a scam, I'm pretty convinced now. Now wonder why I've adopted it as a comfort beverage, often in the hours preceding sleep. Don't jump on me, "but you're talking about milk coffee, it doesn't count" coz I've tried the black one as well (from time to time, with great hope), and besides causing facial distortion - that resembles the look when one is trying to ward off an Indian beggar, - it didn't help with the sleep. Its coffee that I had trying to fend off a sleepy morning, which then escalated into total sleep (on the desk itself) for almost an hour. Productivity must be sneering at me from some corner right now.

The day didn't begin so bad as I entered the complex really early - early enough to justify my continued possession of the sole set of office keys. No, really, past few days of past coupla weeks, my routine resonated with Dylan Moran's (see: Black Books S1E02): "Half ten! I've never been up at half ten. What happens?" - I, too, know that nothing happens. Nobody does anything productive, this time is filled with mundane stuff.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Maxing out on sleep

Oh boy, sure am having the best of sleeps in this new place that I've moved into (and that I'm now supposed to move out of - but that's for another narrative). I've occupied the innermost room, or the "pimp room" as I call it 1. This room sees no light, which is fabulous for my purpose. I could not tell day from night unless I steal a peek at the watch on the Windows 7 dashboard; I could not even tell whether it was 12:58PM (with a coupla' hours either side) without having performed the aforementioned. It is this kind of place I find myself comfy in, and the body is as the body does - it makes the best of everything. No wonder why I'm rousing into wakefulness at 12:58PM writing this blogpost, while I should be out there either working or pwning CISF jawans.

The sleep is so good that I'm not dreaming anymore. That kinda worries me, as I've always found my dreams - as weird as they get - to give me really fun analysis to do through the day. There have been no french girls piggybacking me lately, no dogs with oversized jaws chasing, no murders to investigate, no hanging out with dead friends, no sorceresses making out, no deaths, no snakes. If Freud had me under observation, he'd pull me out on the grounds of sleeping too peacefully. Maybe the weird part of me stems from this interface between my conscious and subconscious, breaking which might just make me less abnormal, which I dread! Freaky is good sometimes.

At a more worldly evaluation, I've already expressed how it affects my professional life (which I'm expecting to terminate soon - but that's for another narrative as well). Besides that, now my "regimen" also bears a fractured look - I didn't go out this morn as well, much like yesterday, which means that my sub-90-minute half-marathon ambitions will not be realized this Sunday; I'll probably be running like the other gazillion who show up in the name of validation.

*1 with an ulterior vision to convert it into a base for the debauched (okay, exaggerated word usage), so that friends come expecting a death, and really do find it here. Death, here, means an overnight re-appropriation of one's worldly (and otherworldly) concerns - and the modes of death being an assortment of alco, (evil) music, (evil) conversations, flavored hookah, tobacco, cannabis indica, bob hope, and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche readings. Note the emphasis on evil - yes, it has to be, so none of your Justin Bieber, or Arcade Fire, or Coldplay, or T20 cricket get involved.

Friday, October 07, 2011

Gorakhdham Express

Being slim(mer) - not as paunch-ridden as the average humanity - brings its own advantages to travel. Firstly, I can (figuratively) lounge on my modest berth, with all my paraphernalia in the vicinity - to stand a testimony to that is this present moment of me scribbling away on my upper berth in the train at 1240 AM under the dim glow of berth locator lamplight that peeks through the curtained wall (yes, some elite philosophy, this, to have curtains in all A/C coaches). Let me not get into my inability to catch sleep either coz of a creeping insomnia (as of late) or due to a light stomach.

Much of the past couple of hours of sleepless restlessness have gone into imagining shallow-DoF scenes of me doing random awesomeness, and of Grecian love tragedies.

Am involuntarily exercising my olfactory senses into identifying several puzzling and a few right unpleasant human smells in this A/C coach - unclean railway linen, stomachs stuffed with aloo-gobhi-bhindi-palak-roti about me, and my own need of a bath, round up the possible causes. Aurally, there's the occasional muffle of my own head scratching against the railways-provided towelette that makes something like a beatbox effect, ruffle of some surrounding passenger's sheets, a tinkle of bangles as some married woman twists in her un-husbanded sleep, whirring of overhead fan 2ft from my head, rattling of panes, hooks, and bottle holders. There's also the great metal fatigue of the rolling trains that we have adapted to relegating as background noise. Gorakhdham Express shivers through the night and often breaks to stop dead in its track to allow me this moment of cursive writing.

Now things smell of Hydrogen Sulphate. Nostrils hurt.

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Nonconformist head lead to insomnia

So much for an attempt to coerce myself into sleep; I'm still up at 0320. The conditions ideal to a proper sleep - darkness, A/C, a double layer of mattress, and a glass of milk a short while back - all failed, owing to the head that doesn't agree to send the body into a state of paralysis.
Says Mr. Lee: "Nonconformist head lead to insomnia very soon."
Hence here I am at my chair again, with a spinal column unhappy working extra hours, trying to hate this aspect of me, and also to scoop out all thoughts, process them into words for consumption in leisure time along with a cup of coffee.

Deep musings into the following events:
Kissed by a prostitute. Evading charging elephants. Held hostage by militants. Slapped by a prostitute. Making a movie. Mt. Everest. Bhutan.
Fucken neurons had to start right when I was at the crucial junction of sleep; return flight to reality. Will somebody please compensate for my missed hours of sleep?

From the deductive process of a nerd: Life is nothing but a robust API. Its all about having suitable Event handlers in place, preferably as compiled code rather than interpreted code.

Saturday, October 01, 2011

balcony sleep

So many of my posts lately been including some aspect of my sleep. Well, then, this one goes no different. Its weird that the most talk-worthy moments in my urban living are when I'm just a motionless bag, an example of mere respiratory processes, of hibernation, of out-of-consciousness existence. But sleep does become a quest, at times, like yesterday when I had to manage a midnight basecamp shift to my balcony, owing to a really long power outage that not only had me restless and fringe-perspiring in the bed, but got worse when even the inverter backup turned cold after some hours.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

keep waking me up

Coerced my eager-to-be-out-and-about self back into sleep at the 0515 alarm. I was entangled in some dream again, but now this 'Venus in Furs' track has conditioned a sure-shot wake-up response in me, as I fumble about in a dazed state, often in a more-aware-than-expected fashion, since locating my cellphone is often difficult. Body clock is screwed - either my body feels humbled at any period of rest extending 4 hours, or has some 3AM circadian trigger which has me often find myself awake around this time. [leaving the environmental factors - mosquitoes that come uninvited, or an overzealous temperature setting on the Air Conditioner, or the neighbor's guitar&keyboard sessions - aside].
So in effect, I wake up to 4 alarms -
  • 2 artificial ones at 0500, 0910;
  • 2 inbuilt (body factory settings) around 0300, 1035.
Maybe my mind has become so scared of drifting away from the physical dimension that it routinely knocks to check if things are right.