Go to sleep... now...

Baseball playoffs start today! Is everyone excited? I am – especially since all I have to worry about is whether or not the Yankees win. I don’t care who’s pitching for which team, or which batters hit home runs, or if Torre brings Rivera out in the seventh inning – as long as the Yankees manage to win, that’s all that matters.

And guess what starts tomorrow, after what seemed like a very long absence? That’s right – Lost! The new season of Lost starts tomorrow! (I feel like I should give someone a high-five – c’mon, cyber-high-five! Lost! Tomorrow! Duuuuude!) I probably like Lost almost as much as Greg likes 24 – which, as anyone who’s been reading the comments can tell, is quite a lot. Lost is the only show I don’t like to Tivo and save for a later time – I like to watch it as soon as it’s on. I might wait about twenty minutes so I can fast-forward through all the commercials, but my curiosity usually prevents me from saving it for a rainy day. There are too many questions, and clues, and puzzles, and split-second “hit the pause button and freeze that frame” moments – if I saved the show for a later time, I’d be wondering too much what I’d missed and just end up watching it anyway…

So last night I was trying to get to sleep, tossing and turning a few times (as I often do before finally nodding off), and I started thinking about how I was glad I wasn’t a kid trying to get to sleep on a school night. When I was young, and I had to be up early the next day, any time I went to bed late my mom would say, “sleep fast!” Not “sleep tight” or “sleep well” or even “don’t let the bedbugs bite” – no, she’d always say “sleep fast.” In other words, “you’d better fall asleep in about two seconds, because that alarm is gonna ring before you know it… and it you haven’t had a decent night’s sleep, you can forget about getting an A on that history test tomorrow…” So then I’d lay there in the dark, with my eyes wide open, wondering who held the world record for fast sleeping… and whether it was something you needed to train for, or if it was just a talent imparted to certain sleepy individuals… and if it would be so horrible if I got a B on the history test instead of an A… and why was it so impossible to will myself into slumber when I KNEW I needed to fall asleep so frustratingly fast?

And speaking of trying to fall asleep – when we lived in New Jersey, my bedroom was the only one without an air conditioner. Usually, that wasn’t much of a problem… but in the middle of the summer, New Jersey can not only get pretty hot, but also very humid. It’s like a big outdoor sauna. So falling asleep in the summer was not always a comfortable endeavor. While the rest of my family slipped off to dreamland in air-cooled, dehumidified darkness, I kicked off my stifling bed sheets and turned my little room fan on high. It didn’t really help to cool down the room, but at least it moved the humid, suffocating air around more quickly. Perhaps this is why now, with central air in my house, I prefer to fall asleep in 47-degree air every night. (That’s an exaggeration, by the way… I don’t really set the air conditioner at 47 degrees… I am NOT part polar bear… really…) So it’s nice to fall asleep now without the pressure of immediate slumber, or jealousy over the knowledge that everyone else in the house is nice and cool…

Okay, I’m off to look for baseball scores and to double check Tivo – just in CASE I happen to accidentally miss the Lost season premiere tomorrow…