Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

sleep

my weighted blanket is hungry

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E gave me a weighted blanket as a holiday gift.

I am the kind of person who likes to burrow under a mountain of blankets to go to sleep. Maybe with some other stuff piled on top – like my laptop on my chest and the contents of several laundry baskets scattered on top of the blankets. That’s a difficult sleep tableau to maintain – it’s given to tangles and things falling off the bed.

(It also means I like to sleep where it is COLD, because I’m going to pull something across my body regardless of the temperature.)

Enter the relatively-recent trend of weighted blankets. They went from a niche product for people with anxiety or serious sleeping problems to something you can find in every home goods store. Sometimes you can even choose between multiple brands and weights!

I’m not sure how exactly they went from nice treatment to retail seller, but every time I’d see or hear about them I’d think, “Huh, maybe I’m piling all of that stuff on top of me not for warmth but for the weight of it.”

Thus, my holiday gift. It is 10 kilograms – 22 pounds! That’s much more than the recommended amount for my size and weight, but I believe my request was, “I want to feel crushed as flat as a pancake and E really delivered. And, let me tell you, 10kg isn’t necessarily a heavy weight to lift as a barbell or even a wriggling baby, but 10kg spread out across a queen-sized blanket? That is hard to wrangle. Think of all the ways you casually toss or fold a blanket over the course of making your bed or slipping beneath it to go to sleep.

Not with this fat mama. It ain’t going anywhere it doesn’t want to go.

When I emerged from my first night of sound sleep with it, I declared that I felt well-rested and “completely flattened.”

All seemed to be well and good for the first few weeks of our relationship. Then, I noticed that I wasn’t getting up as early in the morning, despite it being the height of summer here in New Zealand. I’m used to popping up before my alarm goes off, especially if I leave my curtains cracked. Now, I was sleeping right up to my alarm – and, if I somehow managed to turn it off or it came unplugged I could sleep the whole morning away. I lost that ability when I became a parent nearly a decade ago!

You see, my weighted blanket is hungry. Hungry to do its job. Hungry for companionship. Hungry to crush something beneath its velvety grey expanse.

It’s not even exclusively hungry for me. I noticed this a few weeks ago when my beloved Blogger.com t-shirt went missing. I was sure I had set it out just before a shower, but when I returned it was gone. I searched high and low for it for days to no avail… only to find it nearly a week later within one of the folds of my blanket!

I’m not saying the blanket is sentient. Not necessarily. I’m saying if you take a large floppy thing like a blanket and give it weight, it starts acting like a prehensile tail or the arm of an octopus. If the edge of it drags across the floor, it actually GRABS THINGS as it goes. And, if you give it a solid yank to fold it or flip it as you would with a normal blanket, it’ll curl around whatever it can grab a hold of and swallow it up in its folds.

T-Shirts. Headphones. Pencils. Your entire waking life. All devoured by a ravenous 10kg beast dangling innocently off of one side of your bed.

Maybe this is why the blankets come with weight recommendations. Maybe it’s not about the blanket being too heavy for my delicate frame. Maybe I’m just not enough to satiate it. Maybe if I had asked for a lighter blanket it wouldn’t wake up hungry in the morning and try to swallow anything I placed in hem’s reach.

Maybe so. But… I’m sleeping so well.

extra sleep sunday

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Last night I slept the sleep of the dead. This morning, too. Really, all day.

I was already nodding off in my chair after dinner. I barely made it through supervising kid bedtime activities. Then I was out again for fifteen hours of pure unconscious bliss until late in the morning, when I woke up, ate breakfast, and then promptly took a nap.

I’m not sick. I hadn’t worked out extra hard. I slept perfectly fine the night before. I just needed extra sleep.

No, not just needed. Wanted. Desired. Craved.

It was glorious. Pure luxury. 5 stars out of 5, would sleep that much again.

Something not enough parents explain to you as a non-parent or an expecting parent is how rare extra sleep will be for at least the next decade of your life.

Or, if they do tell you about it, they make it sound like it will be purely out of spite. The spite of a tiny rage-bomb of an infant who will never sleep. Also, the spite of your partner, who will never again be willing to cover for you for the morning so you can catch up on sleep.

And then you’re like, “of course they will, we both love to sleep in, they’ll never do me like that.”

Here’s the actual secret I’ve discovered, as someone with a kid who has always slept through the night and who has an amazing parenting tag team partner:

Parenting programs your brain to believe that sleeping extra means danger.

I’m not sure if it’s evolution at work or a result of our modern lives, but I find this is true even when my kid is many miles away on a camping trip with said parenting tag team partner, leaving me alone in the house to sleep to my heart’s content.

As a parent, oversleeping is always a scary prospect. It equals not checking on a diaper in time. Or a hungry kid trying to forage for their own breakfast. Or missing school dropoff. Or simply getting your kid up so late that their sleep schedule is ruined for days to come.

They’re all dangers external to your own well-being, so they’re an impossible alarm clock of anxiety to turn off. It’s not the same as hitting the snooze button as you tell yourself you don’t mind having to take the late bus to work. At some point, you stop being asleep because your brain is trained to spring into action.

Over the years we adapt. We affirm ourselves with statements like, “I’m a morning person now” and “I cannot imagine wasting that much of the day.” But the truth of the matter is if we want to sleep the sleep of the dead, usually it involves feeling like death rather than doing it just for the lazy weekend joy of it.

That’s why last night was so delightful. It was a random act of drowsiness. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I slept that long in a single sprint of unconsciousness apart from being ill. I didn’t have a single damn reason I needed all of that sleep and I got it anyway.

And I’d do it again. If my brain would let me.

28 years, 51 weeks: intro

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It is six thirty-five in the morning, and I am on my way to work to begin raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity for two hours before doing my actual job.

I slept about three hours last night. I have eight-hundred more words due on a freelance assignment before midnight tonight and then rehearsal for the next two nights. I’ll have Thursday night to myself, unless I go out to see the show I’d like to see. Somewhere in there I have to fold some laundry and edit and upload a few gigabytes of videos for three different bands.

All that, and turn 29, on Wednesday.

Sometimes I don’t know how I’m supposed to do it – be this thing that I so desperately want to be. Like some Sisyphean Looney Toons sketch, I feel like I’m constantly plugging leaks in a giant dam only to have a new one spring for each I’ve stopped.

Can I be a successful professional in good shape with a happy marriage, an evening music career, a well-kept home, and writing gigs on the side?

Last week I tried to do it all. I was moderately successful, but it meant I was too busy to blog about it at the time. Does it defeat the purpose of being moderately successful if I don’t have time to blog about it?

Well, I’m making the time now. I’ll be moderately successful, damnit.