I’ve been watching Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. I’ve laughed, cried, felt my heart soar and ache, and wondered how it is that fiction can be so deeply touching. I keep coming back to something Emily Gilmore says; I wonder how this character, this fiction, has struck me so thoroughly in the heart. She says that, since Richard’s death, she can’t remember which side of the bed is hers. (more…)

The results were in: mild sleep apnea but severe hypopnea. I’d be getting a CPAP machine, and maybe getting some sleep.

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I’ve had trouble sleeping for years but only recently decided to seek treatment beyond an Ambien prescription. My sleep specialist’s request finally wended its way through the insurance process, and I got to have my sleep study. (more…)

Sleep. It’s awesome, and is especially adorable when baby animals do it. Like so. (more…)

Most nights, I am visited by nightmares. They range from “being chased by a crazed murderer” to “being swallowed by a tsunami” to “I’m late for a test in a class I didn’t know I have” to “It’s been a mistake, my mom/dad/cat didn’t actually die.” I wake up feeling sad, depressed, scared, and unrested. And so I wondered: What causes nightmares?

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I’ve recently graduated from college (as in, less than a week ago), and one thing they don’t warn…

Sleep has been something of a learning curve for both Mr. Juniper and I, and it’s also been an issue where Mr. Juniper has needed a lot of support. There have been periods of time where sleep issues have been incredibly distressing, and to an extent, I can understand why: lack of sleep is something else pushing his mind further. Lack of sleep has an actual physical impact. When he’s tired, Mr. Juniper struggles more, his mind can’t cope as well as usual, and he can’t think as clearly. His brain is not working as well as it should. Fun fact time: the danger of driving while sleep deprived can be as bad as the danger of driving drunk. In short (in case it wasn’t already clear), sleep is important.

I think that’s what it comes down to. I don’t love my job, I absolutely hate my super-long commute, and with my busy schedule, I always feel like I’m giving something (or multiple things) the short shrift. Pouring that coffee down the drain in the mornings wasn’t so much about wasting the coffee, but it was just another compromise, another failure to take two freaking seconds to do something I wanted to do rather than what I had to do. Maybe because this “problem” was so small, I decided that it would be the one I would fix. And maybe that’s why my sense of accomplishment was so outsized.