2003-02-17 - 8:20 a.m.

Hi.

Half-past seven, my innovative linux clock tells me :) It's snowing outside.. just noticed on my way back downstairs from getting a glass of orange juice. Not actually orange juice.. 5-alive. I like it enough, although I prefer the "tropical" subvariety to the "citrus" that my mom buys. Just one of those small annoyances of not having my own place.

Small annoyances. Hmm. At 5:30 am, I measured the rhythm of the furnace in our house. It stays off for approximately 50 seconds. Then it goes on for a while. I counted seconds once: 6 minutes and 17 seconds. Then back off for 51 seconds, then back on again. It is very regular.

After my shower, on my way upstairs to get the oj, I noticed that the exercise/furnace room door is open. This is bad. Let me explain, for posterity.

My room has no air flow. If I close the door, the level of oxygen in the room drops steadily. It does level off before I asphyxiate completely, but asphyxiation is not a black and white thing. I don't think most people know that, but, whatever, most people are happily clueless about their environment. Anyway, I started noticing my occasional night-time semi-asphyxiation (ok, time for dictionary.com... alright, cool.) back in Thunder Bay. When Michelle and I (I couldn't write "we".. I need to consciously stop that) had company over, I would close the door for privacy. Well I remember the room being quite stuffy in the mornings, and after I was alone in bed (remember, I would selfishly sleep in all the time?), I would crack the window and realize that I could suddenly breathe easily again.

Once I knew about this oxygen drain, I kept trying to leave the door open, but old habits die hard. It wasn't until I could suddenly breate better after opening a door or window that I would realize I had forgotten yet again.

Down here in Amherstburg, just after I moved down, I woke up from evil nightmares to realize that the room was quite stuffy. It was especially noticeable after I got back from the bathroom and left the door wide open.. there was suddenly oxygen in the room. Unfortunately, keeping the door open was not a viable option as my dad was on day (night?) shifts at the time and was exercising and watching tv from about 10:30 pm to 1:30 am. So if I wanted to get to sleep, the door had to stay closed.

For a while I tried opening the window. I remember it was quite cold, since it's the middle of winter here. At least that worked to keep the nightmares at bay. I found an extra sheet and things went along pretty smooth. But eventually one day I was too cold and closed the window, telling myself to remember to open it before going to sleep. I remembered that night and forgot the next, only realizing when I woke up in the middle of the night and realized the room was stuffy.

So, having my door open is important.

But I can't get to sleep if there's too much noise, and as I mentioned earlier, the furnace is always fricken on and it is loud and annoying. Also, the computer I set up to be a family web/mail server is by necessity left on 24/7, and it is in the furnace room too. This doesn't sound bad except that one of the hard drives in it is especially noisy. Haha, noisy hard drive. What a wuss. But really, this noise is best described as a constant high-pitched ringing. It sounds like metal being shaved on a lathe at high speed. I know this hard drive isn't going to last forever, by the way, so it's important I set up a good backup system when I get the family stuff installed on there.

Anyway, so it's important for my sanity that the furnace room door be closed. I make sure it is before I go to sleep, and this I can never forget. It's so much more noisy with it open that I will notice and get up and close it.

So when I realized it was open this morning, I also realized that my dad opened it before going to bed and .. ack.

Ok, I'm so wrong. He did open it before going to bed, but although I'd checked it before I went to bed and made sure it was closed, he was still up for a while, then went to bed soon after. Since I couldn't hear the tv, I got up to open my door and didn't realize then that... oh! I see. Ok, this is the story. Ack.. ack.. (I dislike myself for all this description. Bad me, this is good. I need to know what my sources of stress are.)

Ok, last night I went to bed at 11:00 like a good boy. I had checked already that the furnace room door was closed. My dad was still up watching tv so I put on a CD at the lowest possible volume, which has helped me fall asleep the last couple of nights. The tv was just too loud so I got up and pushed my door closed, making a nice loud click which in my family is considered major communication. However, a minute or so later I realized I wasn't sure if the tv was on. I waited for the furnace to kick out, then I was sure that the tv was off. At that point, I got up and opened my door.

Oooh.. speaking of it, the furnace is off now. Ahhhhhh.

Anyway, so that explains why I didn't notice that the furnace room door was open, because the furnace was off when I opened my door.

Furnace just kicked in again. Joy.

Alright, so all this amounts to what? Well, I had very restless sleep last night and woke up at 5:30 am, unable to get back to sleep. I lay awake having imaginary conversations with Niki, my closest friend in the area, in which we bitched at each other. I tossed and turned till 6:54 then gave up and hopped in the shower.

This is my life right now.

So, this morning feels good. It feels like the kind of morning where I care about myself and will change my life for the better. The kind of morning where I stop and think and say "man, that furnace really bugs me." The kind of morning where I start visualizing myself living in another place, whether it's just sleeping on the couch to see if it makes that much difference, or checking the paper for apartments in the area.

This morning I thought of a lot of things, only 1/5th or so of which I still remember. I made resolutions to do about 10 things so far, of which talking about these problems and stress factors is one. I will probably accomplish 1 more thing, hopefully writing to Lisa.

Anyway, just wanted to note that.

On with the stress. Oh, I wanted to mention that I dreamed of Aliens again. I've had on and off nightmares about Aliens since I was 3. When I was 3, I saw "the thing", up to the part where the dog's face peels back in 3 pieces. I can still visualize that, 24 years later. I had wicked nightmares about that horror movie. To me, "nightmares about Aliens" means that particular feeling I get in my sleep when something horrible is coming after me. The reason I call it by that specific name is that at the age of 14 I watched the movie Aliens and reinforced a thousandfold the power of those nightmares.

I remember vividly a chain of nightmares that haunted me for years. It wasn't always the same scenes, or the same occurrences, but the same feeling was there. Things were out to get me. I couldn't stop them. They came at me, and I was going to die. They came in various ways, and always quickly, like the little face-huggers from the movie. Small, dark shapes darting around at the edge of my vision bringing painful death. Hordes of them. I'm remembering one particularly bad chain dream now, where I'm in a huge complex with a group of people and swarms of these things are after us. Thousands of us have already died, and as I know from the movie, that means the number of Aliens is multiplying. As the dream wears on, the group of survivors that I'm a part of dwindles. Thankfully, I haven't been a victim, yet, but many around me have.

So anyway, last night I dreamed of Aliens again. It isn't the first time since I've lived here (2 months), and I think there's some association with the asphyxiation thing.

The dream was quite different this time. The face-huggers were shiny, flexible, seemingly mechanical things. And I was kicking their ass. Literally, kung-fu style, I was eagerly waiting for this one to come at me so I could whip it. I attribute this particular sleeping attitude to my latest game addiction, Natural Selection.

NS is based loosely on the Aliens movies, and in it I am a successful marine defender. Sure, I've died plenty of times in the game, but I know I am a force to be reckoned with and usually one of the best on my team at gunning down aliens. This sense of self-confidence has definitely carried over into my dreaming self.

Wow, I didn't think I'd get on this train of thought, but it's just as valid as any other :)

I can't remember at exactly what age this started.. maybe 17 or 18? At some point, anyway, I started to conquer the Aliens in my sleep. After years of running in horror, it started to occur to my dream self that I could defend myself and even fight back. Up until then it had always been something inconceivable. The Aliens came, you ran away. Like Newt.

I remember realizing it as my dream changed over the course of maybe a year and a half. I also remember correlating the change to a change in my life, but I can't remember now exactly what it was that was changing. I was gaining confidence somehow, some sense that if push came to shove, I'd come out fighting and win. Anyway, I feel that way now, and it shows. The Aliens no longer chase me in my sleep. Now, it's more like a pestering. If I have a nightmare, it has to be about something else.

Oh yeah. I had to read back to remember what I was writing about.

The stress.

Haha.. I'm reminded of a Dilbert comic. The intern says to Willie: "I have the stress that everyone talks about. What should I do?"

"Use it as an excuse not to exercise."

"Does that really work?"

"It made me the man I am today."

Excellent :) But only if you're me hehe or part of the 1% of the population that knows people like Willie I guess.

Anyway, I'm stressed. It's showing in a hundred little ways in my life, and most glaringly in how I feel about myself. I've lost a lot of ground from where I was when I was living back in Thunder Bay.

When I first came here, I was on a very regular sleeping schedule and I woke up at 8 every day. This lasted a few weeks (I think) until dad got onto whatever shift it is where he exercises at 10:30 and then watches tv until 1:30. I know I wrote about playing my guitar in bed in the middle of the night.

Soon after that, I started being more nocturnal again. This is a natural state for me, one that I lived in for years when I was a young teen. I used to stay up in my room, either playing computer games or flipping aimlessly through channels until I was too tired to function. If I don't consciously stop myself from doing it, this is the pattern I fall into.

I briefly stopped myself from doing it for a while back there in Thunder Bay. I also briefly kept myself out of that loop while I was living at Bay street. I think back on those times as among the best in my life.

Oh. A great idea would be to buy a little timer, the kind that you use to automatically control lights or a car block heater. I would plug my computer into that and set it to automatically turn off at, say, 8pm. This would probably be the single smartest thing I could possibly do in order to save myself from being a brilliant failure. Of course, I would need to allow myself vacation from this stricture, that is only natural, but to tempt myself every day with staying up late and wasting my life in front of an electron gun is just sad.

So anyway, after my sleep was thrown off by a few hours, I started sleeping in. This made me not want to sleep on time. The day came where I played Natural Selection straight through the night till 9:30am. Far from being foolish, this was me pre-emptively cutting short the amount of time I would be on my nocturnal cycle. I was trying to end it right there, actually, because I can sometimes kick myself right back into normal sleep if I stay up long enough.

It didn't quite work and my sleep's been super disturbed and weird for a few weeks. Anyway, just the last two days I've gone to bed at 11:00 no matter what and this is working out so far. I really need to deal with the exercise/tv thing, though, and that is going to be tough. I was never able to deal with my dad the whole time I lived with him before. He may have changed.. we'll see.

I keenly remember when I was determined to do well in school and get to bed on time that I was kept awake by the tv being super loud late at night. I went down to the living room and kindly explained to my dad that the tv was carrying up the stairs and that I couldn't sleep and could he turn it down, to which he flatly replied "No." The shock I felt then hasn't faded.

Anyway, that is just a typical example of interaction between me and him. There hasn't been a lot of love shared aside from hugs after years-long absences and observed formalities. I'm still not sure exactly what's up with that. I know that this morning I resolved firmly to talk to him about the furnace room door. I think I should be able to explain that how important it is to me that it's closed before I go to sleep. I'm not mad about it or anything, I realize it's something he just didn't realize, and that he never intended anything by it, but somehow it just isn't that easy to talk about it. Well, now's time to try :)

Time to stop recording and get on with life :)

Bye for now.

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