Before I start ranting, a big Happy Birthday to my friend Jenn over in the US! This year I believe I’ve known her for… 10 years? Crazy stuff. I hope she has a great time this year as well.

This week was a complete mess. Just a giant jumbled blur of classes and insomnia, mostly. My insomnia has persisted from last week to the point where I only seem to have a few hours of solid functioning brain-power each day, now. Where before I might have been able to put in a good day’s work, now I’d be lucky if I’m productive for a couple of hours, and semi-productive doing busy-work for maybe another couple of hours.

This coming week I’m going to go into the doctor and see if I can’t get some sleeping pills or something. I try to avoid sleeping medication when I can because I know about the inherent risks in becoming addicted to them. While I don’t consider myself as having a particularly addictive personality type, I guess I just have an irrational avoidance mechanism when it comes to sleeping pills. Which is particularly odd since every now and then when I have taken them, they have usually been very effective for me.

I don’t know that I can emphasize how much this derails me when it happens for prolonged periods. It’s been happening for so long that I don’t even remember when it started, now. Just every now and again, I have these bouts of insomnia and I need to deal. Sometimes it only lasts for a week or so and I can just kind of gun through it. Other times, it lasts for weeks and I can’t seem to shake it, which leaves me feeling very, very drained. Insomnia is a funny thing. It’s not just a night of bad sleep, or not being able to get to sleep because you have too much energy, or whatever. I get people who look at me and give me all kinds of advice on how they put themselves to sleep… and most of it is good advice, if it’s just me not being able to unwind. But insomnia is more than that. Sometimes you just won’t sleep, all night. Sometimes you can’t get to sleep for a very long time, then crash for a couple of hours before your alarm goes off and you need to start the new day anyway. Sometimes you sleep through your alarm in a semi-comatose state after being up almost all night. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how physically or mentally exhausted you are – I’ve had basketball practice for hours and exhausted myself thoroughly and still not been able to sleep. If anything those are some of the most frustrating ones, because you are so beyond “tired” that it’s depressing. There are all kinds of things that people tell you – not eating a certain time or certain thing before bed, not watching tv, exercise, drink tea, don’t drink tea or coffee, meditation, various relaxation techniques… it just doesn’t end, really. Some things work for some people, on others it has the opposite effect. Insurance sales ladies showing up at your door in the morning when you’ve had two hours sleep? Not so good for me.

Ok, enough ranting about insomnia. Suffice to say, it sucks and right now I’m having a bad run of it that I wish would end.

This week I managed to get to some classes, which was good. I didn’t really understand all that much, but it was good to go and I know I’ll have some interesting stuff to study next week. I had the new graduate student ceremony (also understood nothing), talked to more people about what classes I should be taking and so on, enrolled in the next level of Japanese classes… and from what I can tell, did a lot of busy-work. Things that would keep me going and keep me occupied without taxing my brain too much since I’ve been in a semi-zombie state for pretty much all this week. Friday was particularly bad, I could barely function – you know it’s bad when you have trouble feeding yourself. ^^;

I did have a few moments this week where I made some adjustments to a couple of personal projects – some minor stuff to LeithComics and some stuff for Ian that he’s working on. I also got to see Kyoko this week, we had a wander around the area where I live, walking over to the larger river in the area and having Indian at a little place about seven minutes walk from my house, which was quite good.

A little while ago I received an email from Simon, a guy I was really good friends with in high school. After a series of bad things, the friendship did not end well. The end of the friendship was particularly weird for me in that it pissed me off for a very long time. I don’t get angry easily, and generally I process my resentment pretty quickly so I can move on with my life, but for some reason… my anger and resentment for him stayed with me for a long time. I’m over it now and just left with a sadness at how it all turned out, really. Still, such is living and learning, I suppose. Anyway, after thinking for quite a while, I finally replied to his contact yesterday, which was really hard. There was a million things I wanted to say and couldn’t, and I don’t know if I even really conveyed all that I wanted to, or how I wanted to say it. But I did reply, even though I don’t want him in my life as a friend any more. I figured that if I didn’t, I would regret later that I didn’t take the opportunity to properly process it.

I don’t really have a lot of experience dealing with friends that I no longer want to see, or that no longer want to see me. It seems like such a… disjoint experience, like something in the world isn’t quite right. Hey, I know you can’t please everybody all the time, and particularly ex-girlfriends seem to be the traditional candidate for not speaking to you again… but still, it would be nice to think that I could, in fact, be friends with everyone. Too idealistic?