I’m in trouble now. It’s after 10pm already, and my flight leaves tomorrow morning at 8am. I should have finished this writing earlier, but I became distracted. If you remember, yesterday I was lamenting about not playing video games tonight. After I arrived home, I logged in to run my character around to get a last feel for the video game before I went on vacation, and who should I see but Erik playing. He was supposed to be with his wife that evening, but she must have been getting ready or something, and he had “30 minutes” to kill. That 30 minutes turned into two hours, and before I knew it, it was after 10pm, and Will had logged in. I finally dragged myself away from the game when I realized how much time I needed to finish writing, get my shit together for tomorrow, finish my laundry, etc.

So, suffice to say, this will not be my best work tonight. But as I’ve promised, I’ll write my 2,000 words and call it a night. I did write about 800 words of a would-be story. I wrote it in true first draft form. I didn’t know what I was talking about or where it was going, and I haven’t (nor will I, at least tonight) edit it. I tried to figure out the story as I repeated different aspects, and tried out different angles.

Looking back, I probably should have stayed with the story and gotten another 500 words out of it so I wouldn’t find myself in this predicament, but who knew I would get dragged into the video game world on this night? It’ll all work out, I’m sure. It’s not like I have much of a problem anymore writing these worthless words, especially when I have a deadline. I don’t know what it is about deadlines, but I work much better going toward them than meandering about.

Everything is all set for this week. I entered the flight and hotel information into my calendar, so I’ll be rearing to go tomorrow. Is it rearing or raring or some other word that starts with R? Eh, who cares? I doubt anyone, after skimming the first couple of paragraphs and seeing where I’m not going today, will care enough to get this far down the page. That’s another thing about posting online: most people like short two to three paragraph entries that are sweet, polished, and get to the point quickly. My entries are anything but that. I’m long-winded, annoyingly vague and obtuse, and, my best part, I tend to get nowhere after spending along time walking around, poking at the bushes, and just lying down to stare at the sun and describe my blindness for a bit.

I’m moving along splendidly tonight. I again woke up with a headache this morning, which is lending more evidence to my sleep apnea theory. I went to sleep at a very reasonable (especially compared to tonight) of around 10pm, and woke up at the equally reasonable hour (especially compared to tomorrow morning—look at me milking these paragraphs for all possible words) of after 8am. When I woke up, however, my head was pounding and I was pathologically yawning. I don’t think I’ve described pathological yawning before.

(Improper paragraph break to make it easier on your eyes if not your brains in putting the ideas together.) My pathological yawning (or PY) is when I haven’t had enough sleep and I continuously yawn. PY is usually attended with headaches of varying degrees of intensity brought about by the aforementioned lack of sleep. (I don’t think attended is the right word either, but I was trying to force a medical term, and without Doolies helping out, I obviously found the wrong one.) I can usually tell what type of headache I have by the availability (another wrong word that I’m going to ignore in my fast pace) of PYs. As a side note (not that any of this is not a side note), my caffeine-related headaches are also easy to identify by daydreaming about drinking yummy caffeine. If I get momentarily relief, then it’s probably a caffeine-induced (or actually a caffeine-lacking) headache. Getting back to PYs, the headaches that accompany PYs are curable by sleeping or even closing my eyes for micro-naps. Anyway, I had a headache this morning and a bad case of PYs. After my 10:30am meeting, however, the headache went away, and the PY had cut down dramatically. I don’t know if it was the walk outside or the excitement of the meeting, but something pushed me over the edge.

Throughout the day, people commented that I looked tired, even after the PY and headache had gone away. This brings me back to the point of these last three pointless paragraphs: somehow, even though I, on paper, got around 10 hours of sleep, I did not have high-quality sleep. This brings me back to sleep apnea, the snoring and occasional failure to breath that can cause bad nights of sleep, with the sufferer not even knowing that it’s going on. My family doctor (the one I visited last year but never ran blood tests because I don’t like needles, and he forgot to tell me to fast), told me about sleep apnea when I described my headaches. He suffered from it as well and even wrote me a prescription for a sleep clinic. I never made it to the clinic because, well, I’m not good at following doctor’s instructions (just as Doolies about that), but I’ve been self-diagnosing myself for the past few months, and I’m beginning to believe these diagnoses more and more.

Enough about sleeping diseases. I’m almost on the homestretch, and I’ve been writing for barely 15 minutes. I should do more of these explosion writing to a deadline. It seems less painful, if, probably, less articulate or meaningful. I guess any writing is better than none. I should create a mantra like that and put it on t-shirts and sell it on the website. Did you know that blogs make the most money from selling t-shirts? Well, at least the good ones with content do, like the web comics, or too-cool-for-a-t-shirt type websites. I’ll come up with a business model for sewcrates as soon as I get more than 5 visitors in a day. It’s possible, you know. Unlikely, but possible. The first step is probably to cut down the 2k entries into 12 manageable and readable entries, better polished and actually saying something. Oh. On second thought, that’s probably just not possible with my writing.

I’m at the last 100 words in this paragraph, so I’ll leave it at this. Doolies and I fly out at 8am tomorrow morning, and meet up in Newark airport at 4:30pm (with the change in time, it’s only a five or so hour flight). I’ll post the unedited writing experiment I did much earlier about a story that didn’t end up going anywhere. It’s a bit morbid, and probably based on a few too many bad movies (not that there’s a story—I’m talking about the premise because, like usual, I didn’t get much beyond the premise to make things happen. I have to work on that), but there you have it. Word count: 2,020. Caffeine: yummy tall mocha.