I Should Just Go To Bed....

I have a love-hate relationship with sleep.

I love to sleep. My bed is probably my favorite piece of furniture in the entire house. It has 4 main pillows, plus 6 other accent pillows I pile in a corner at night, then reassemble in perfect order when I make my bed the next morning. I have an oversizes pink teddy bear I cuddle with since no one else is sleeping with me. When it's cold, I like to have the sheets and comforter pulled up tight under my neck . In the summer, I still like to have something covering me, but I poke one foot out from under the sheets on the side because if my foot feels comfortable, the rest of me doesn't feel hot either. I enjoy sleeping so much, it takes 3 alarms, multiple snooze hits and at least an hour to get me out of bed in the morning.

You see, my problem is not actually sleeping, it's deciding to give up and go to bed. As my mother will tell you, I've resisted going to bed ever since I had a determined "bedtime." When I was little, I always wanted to stay up late. Since I was the oldest child, I argued I should stay up later than my brother and sister. Even after they went to sleep, I would creep down the stairs to see what my parents were watching on TV, and hide in the shadows until Mom or Dad invariably caught me and ordered me back to bed. Always afraid I was missing something....

Even now, I'll be lying on the couch nodding off, but if someone suggests going to bed I'll always say, "I'm awake" or "In a minute." Most of my various roommates and friends have left me on a couch, chair, or floor at some point, covered by a blanket. When I stay in hotels alone, more often than not I fall asleep with the TV on, and have strange dreams which I realize the next day were portions of my REM sleep being disturbed by gunfire or a car chase from a 3 AM movie of the week.

So why the issue? Sometimes it's stress, a simple case of too much to do and not enough hours in the day. If I can just stay up a little longer, I can get something else done. The problem is that I'm too exhausted to get it done, and I sit there fighting with myself thinking that if I just went to bed and attacked the problem in the morning I'd do a better job. Sometimes I feel like I can't turn off my brain. It's still coming up with ideas, but the rest of my body doesn't have the energy to catch up. And sometimes, I get involved watching a movie that I've already seen 50 times but can't turn away from. Like right now....

So I'm exhausted, I have a ton of things to do this weekend (my last before I leave for a trip home for Christmas), and I'm sitting nodding off during "A Few Good Men" on Bravo.

Someone please cover me up.....