Staying awake too long

As I begin to write this, I’ve been awake nearly 27 hours. I tried taking a nap earlier, but that didn’t work out very well, since I needed to wake up so soon after I laid down. Well, soon relative to the amount of time my body wanted to spend getting to sleep. Now, about 5 and a half hours ago I was starting to feel pretty tired, but I had already purchased my ticket to the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. As you may know, that movie is nearly three hours long. So, in order to ensure that I did not begin to nod off during the movie I drank a couple of cans of something called “Liquid X”, the closest thing the Coffee Plantation had to Mountain Dew. It smelled like some sort of solvent or cleaner, but it tasted pretty good. A little fruity, but not as sweet as MD. I immediately was revived, and had no difficulty at all staying awake throughout the movie. (By the way, I really liked it. Enhancing it somewhat was that despite my intentions, I did not get a chance to re-read the book before seeing the movie. I recommend it to anyone who has ever liked the Harry Potter series. It is a much better movie overall than the first one.)

Except now I’m still pretty much fully awake. Starting to feel a little heavy in the eyelids, but my body is saying it doesn’t need the rest. And my ambitions. Don’t get me started with my ambitions. Despite getting together with and sitting in front of my computer next to fellow writers also sitting in front of computers trying to write novels, I somehow only got around 1000 words written all night. Compared with the 6k+ words I wrote .. well, at this time yesterday (I was going to say this morning, but that isn’t right anymore, now is it?) I feel like I need to do a lot more work. Since it’s now the 16th, I’m supposed to be at like, 27,000 words by now. Except I’m only at 12,000. Less than halfway to halfway there.

When I thought I was going to be keeping up with the appropriate rate of writing, I thought ot myself that I ought to paint a painting every 10,000 words or so, to take a break from the writing, but also to be sure that I balance my creative endeavors. I broke 10,000 words today, but I feel like I need to get to 25,000 before I’m safe to take a break. Oh, and there’s that 2D Design assignment I made too hard on myself. This time it’s all in the computer, I have 11.25 or so more images to complete, and each image will take at least an hour and a half of non-stop work. And I’m already disappointed with my results. I was awake all night Wednesday and most of the day Thursday working on just getting the setup in place for it (it’s hard to explain unless I show you, which won’t make sense until it’s done, but a large portion of all the images is the same; it will be available for purchase for about $18-$20 when I complete it, though, so you can enjoy it in your own home) and to get the first image done. I basically passed out around 1:30PM Thursday, planning to get up before class started at 4:40, so I could at least show what progress I had made. I don’t remember now if I posted about this, but I slept through class. I sort of noticed that I was still asleep at 8PM, but rolled back over and slept until 1AM Friday morning. I have been awake since. I haven’t been able to face the project since, either. Soon, though. It’ll be a full day’s work to get it done, and I absolutely, positively must have it completed before class Tuesday.

I haven’t heard back from the job that wasn’t going to pay me enough, which means I almost definitely can’t attend the training that starts Monday. Which may be a good thing. I may have a job opportunity working in a department at ASU that I didn’t know existed until “today” but am very excited to possibly have an opportunity to be a part of, so having an extra couple of weeks to try to find a better-paying job suits me fine. Actually, even if I don’t get this other job, I just did some balancing in Quicken, and with Unemployment Insurance I’ll definitely be good until I have to pay rent 1/1/03.

So, I’ve been talking about buying a house for some time now. I’ve been talking to my friends and my family and I’ve been doing a little research into the matter. My father owns a house in the North Phoenix are that he is planning on selling soon. Likely before the end of January. Depending on what he is able to get for the property, and after he pays for some other neccesities and expenses, he is planning on putting something between $10k and $30k down on another house. For a while, the plan was for him and I to go together on the loan so we could afford enough house that myself and my sister and eventually my little brother could live there comfortably. I would be earning equity and paying less a month than I am now, and I would be living with people I know I can get along with. Recently my dad has altered the plan. At first it seemed for the better; he said he wanted to pay half the monthly payment so my siblings wouldn’t have to work while they went to school. Then he started saying he might want to come down once a week or so to stay with us. Now my impression is that since he plans on paying half the payment, he’d like to basically live there full time, and maybe return to Pine (where he is living now, and where he needs to be to manage his only source of income) once a week.

If I wanted to live with my father, I wouldn’t have moved out at 18. If he’s going to be living there with his three children, I don’t feel like I should be paying half the payments, either. The last time all of us were living together, he made all the payments. Aside from my general attitude that living full time with my father might drive me crazy, there’s social stigma as well. I don’t like to worry about what other people think about me, but there’s a definite stigma against adults who live with their parents. Even if the situation is that I don’t live with my parent because I’m too incompetent to support myself, the implication is there. Worse, the feeling that I’m not living in my own home is there. I wouldn’t feel free to behave as I would in my own home because I would feel like I was a guest in someone else’s home. I wouldn’t feel like it was alright to bring someone home with me if I so chose, because I’d know my father was in the next room.

So I’m practically back to square one. When my father was going to be the one with the capital for a down payment I could afford a reasonably sized house and the monthly payments. When my siblings entered the picture, and when he offered to pay their share of the mortgage it looked even better because now I could make the monthly payments and save money for the other things I wanted to accomplish with my life. But I don’t think I can do any of it with my dad there. So now I’ve got to (find a job first, I know) save my own down payment, hope I can qualify for enough of a loan to get more than a condo, maybe go in with Art on the house to split the expenses. Which means (mostly because of my lost job eating my savings entirely) that I won’t likely be able to buy a house even at the end of my lease here in summer 2003. Which pushes everything a little further into the future.

Iain posted something about me yesterday afternoon. In it he made a comment that people who don’t know about monkeymonkeymonkeymonkeymonkeymonkeymonkeymonkey probably don’t understand fully, but which I understood before I read it. He asked what I really wanted from a job, and wondered why I don’t have one yet. Good question. I’m certain the answer is complicated, and involves all four of my first four monkeys. A big part of it lies in my overwhelming and only recently detailed desire to not be working at a job at all and to be able to concentrate full time on my creative endeavors. I was trying to make a list of my long-term financial goals recently and found “take at least 10 years off work to just create full time” at the top of the list. Which means saving up more than $200k (or winning the lottery). I’m going to see if I can figure out if there are government grants out there that I can combine somehow to support me while I work on my creative development. I fully believe that with 10 years invested in doing what I love (writing, painting, film-making, etc…) I can begin to make a living at it, so when the 10 years are up I’m not out of money.

I’ve been writing so much in so many different places that i don’t know how much of this is repetition, if any. I don’t know. It’s 28 hours now, I and what have I done but write a long entry for my blog? I suppose that’s important to me, too. Apparently sleep not so much as it used to be.

The 12,000 words I’ve been writing have all been about my relationships with women. I haven’t even got to 1996 yet in my personal history of relationships and heartache. Surely there’s enough in me to get to 50,000. Ooh. I just remembered why I started chatting with Melissa earlier today but didn’t get to; I once wrote close to 100 pages of hand-written text to her, and I wanted to see if I could borrow it from her to put into my novel. I wish I could somehow get ahold of Amanda to see if she still has the over 200 pages of letters I wrote her; that would make an amazing contribution, especially considering I would have to add narration in between every page or two. Alas, she is still missing. This is almost the time of year that I usually do my second paid search for her, but with no job I don’t think I can allow it just now. Ooh, and in the last month and a half I’ve sent some 74 pages to Sara, plus who knows how much over the years before that. Since she’s in Spain though, there’s no easy way for me to borrow and then return my correspondence to her. I may ask her to send me photocopies of it all though, or scans…. that seems like a lot of work, and possibly expensive. I don’t know. I’d like to be able to read it all anyway, to get a handle on what I’ve written. Anyway, this whole thing has got me in a little bit of a weird place right now, emotionally. In addition to that I recently found that my heart has decided that I need to move on and find someone new. Lo and behold, I meet someone new about a week ago, and the more I get to know her, the more I like her, and the more I’m attracted to her. Except I’m so far out of it that I don’t know what to say or how to act, and she’s so low-key that I can’t tell if she’s interested in me too, or just being friendly. I don’t know if it was me who set next to her, or her who set next to me tonight at dinner and at the movie. She’s seen excerpts of some of the least appealing posts I’ve made here and hasn’t run away screaming yet, so maybe there’s still hope.

Okay, 28.5 hours. I’m not feeling much more tired. I have things to do. I could be washing the dishes, folding and ironing the laundry, cleaning up generally, working on my homework, working on my “novel”, working out… I was thinking I’d go work out, which takes at least a little over an hour, but then I realised that while I’d be physically sore after working out, I would be invigorated as well, and unable to sleep. I’ve done it before. Maybe I’ll go work out, then wash the dishes. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to lift the dishes after I work out, but I suppose I’ll find out. Washing the dishes is always a good time to watch a movie on my laptop. I wonder what I’ll watch.

Yep. I’m going to go try to work out, then try to do the dishes, and then try to go to sleep (though sleep may win out sooner than I think). I’ll try to remember to come back and comment on how long I end up having been awake right before I lay down.