I’ve barely slept this week.  An admitted night owl, sleep tends to take a back burner when there’s a lot going on.  I know that sleep is something I need more of, from an energy standpoint, but whoever coined the term “beauty sleep” was on to something. I’ll refrain from including a picture of myself with dreaded bags under my eyes.

But there are times when your sleep patterns seem to be out of your control.  That’s how it seemed for me this week.

Monday:  I’ve started hitting the gym hard again.  This means I’m in constant pain.  And since all good diets start on Mondays, I ate half of what I normally might and burned as many calories as my out-of-shape body would allow.  My armband that tracks my calorie burn tells me that I burned 660 calories in my workout.  My knees think I burned twice that.  And the sick irony of this is that the more I seem to work out, the hungrier I seem to be.

But you’d think I would have slept well after such exertion.  Instead it had an adverse effect as I found myself hypnotized by late night television and instead of dreamland, I was analyzing old sitcoms on TV Land.

As anyone who’s ever had a bout of insomnia knows, the evil alarm clock will taunt you endlessly.  With every flipping minute, the stress level builds and the possibility of sleep seems even more remote.  Minutes, hours, the dreaded PM to AM flip.  You know you have work in the morning, and you know tomorrow will suck a big one.  You toss, you turn, you get up to pee, you strain to relax, you cover your pillow over your head to drown out your partner’s seemingly louder-than-usual snoring and wish it was at least rhythmic.  You channel surf, you play with the volume, you toss and turn again.  This pattern could go on for hours.

And then you realize you’re hungry, and no sleep is going to happen until you do something about that.  So you break the “no food after 8 PM” rule.  When you get up to drag your aching knees downstairs to the kitchen, you will then spark the cat’s interest.  And by the time your belly is somewhat satisfied, said cat will be wreaking havoc in your bedroom as he plays trapeze artist across your furniture, knocking down all your little knickknacks.

This wakes hubby up, who is not happy.  So now he is tossing and turning too.

Finally, at some point, you knock off.  And what seems like a minute later, the damned alarm clock blasts some idiotic song like Morning Train by Sheena Easton.  Perfect.

The same armband that tracks my calorie expenditure shows my sleep pattern, or lack thereof, on a graph.  Apparently, it all added up to just over 3 hours.

Was it the grueling workout?  The hunger from my 850 calorie deficit?  The hard-to-swallow loss for my USC baseball team?  The drama from the NY housewives?  Who knows?

Regardless of the reason, sleep was an epic fail Monday night.

But always one to look at the bright side, I caught up on my TV watching and made the following maniacal insomniatic observations and musings of things that apparently can keep me up at night.

• When you’re keeping a food log and you feel the need to eat after 12 AM, does that go on the next day’s journal as breakfast, or does it go on the prior day?  What are the rules?  Does it even matter?
• TV Land needs to ditch That 70′s show. And The Nanny.
• If you find yourself playing Scramble With Friends in your head, you may be a game addict.
• Somehow I ditched the game moves in my brain only to realize that I still remember the extinct talent of shorthand, and that pisses me off.   I may have been state champ in my day, but this “talent” is taking up space in my brain that I need for other things.  I do not like doing shorthand in my head to everything that is said on TV.  Make it stop.  Please.

• Blue Lagoon has been remade. The girl in it even looks like a young Brooke Shields.  The guy from the original is playing the teacher.  It is not a good thing to watch a movie you have never watched when you should be sleeping.  Bottom line is they’re probably rescued.
• The Everybody Loves Raymond episode where Deborah brought forbidden snacks for the baseball game has to be one of the funniest episodes ever.
• In the first episode of Rosanne, take a close look at DJ.  It’s not the same kid, and as many times as I’ve seen this episode, I’ve never noticed that.  Then I ponder that  somewhere there’s a kid who is going to therapy over being fired at such a young age.
• It’s hard to relate George Clooney as Booker to the Ocean’s Eleven movies.  A haircut DOES a make a difference.  And it’s not fair that grey hair makes a man more distinguished and a woman just look old.

• Three’s Company is where I draw the line. I miss John Ritter, but some of these old sitcoms are just plain silly when I watch them now.

And if you’re wondering whether the rest of the week got any better…

Tuesday:  I skipped the workout to “repair” my muscles.  I ate poorly and felt like crap.  Still I couldn’t go to sleep at a decent time.  Total  hours?  About 5.

Wednesday:  The upstairs air conditioner is out, which means sleep is not going to be a thing of comfort.  Yet I slept about 6 1/2 hours and eagerly went to work to be in the A/C.

Thursday: I’m cranky due to lack of sleep and an exorbitant air conditioner bill.

Add in the excitement of college baseball, and it would be Saturday before I would be able to make any dent in my sleep deficit.  My husband taunted me for sleeping half the day away.  I prefer to liken it to a game delay.

So in thinking of how I will make sure sleep is in the forefront this week, I suddenly remember that I was tagged by Jlee in a post last week titled “Questions that Keep Jlee Up at Night”.  Shit. I feel really bad now. Not wanting to be the cause of anyone else’s insomnia, here I go:

11 Questions That Keep Jlee Up At Night

1. Batman or Robin?  Robin. I always loved him.  I assumed he was pretty cute under that mask, yet I’m a little haunted by those Saturday Night Live cartoons from years ago.  Hmmmm.
2. If you had to give up alcohol or coffee, which would you choose?   I love both, but there’s no contest.  Goodbye, Folgers!
3. What is your favorite book and why?  This is a tough one, because I barely have time to read books any more.  I’m going back to a book from many, many years ago, Flowers for Algernon.  Brilliant. 
4. Which Kardashian do you most resemble?  None, hopefully.  Maybe Bruce Jenner.  If I must choose, I’ll be the one whose name starts with “K”. 
5. If Doc Brown wanted to take you back in time, which year would you choose to go to?  Or forward in time, in that case.  If just visiting, I’d like to go back to some childhood years and see if things were actually are my enemy.  I’ll stop there.
6. Do you have any tattoos?  I am tat-free, because I can’t think of a thing that I’d want to wear permanently.
7. What is your favorite fruit?  Plums in the summer, tangerines in the winter.  Strawberries aren’t so bad either.
8. What is your porn star name?  (First pets name/First street you live on)  Laddie Riverland.
9. Animal print: Yes or No?  Definitely yes.
10. How would you feel if you were told you couldn’t write your blog anymore?   I’d feel bad for the disappointed millions who would be missing out on my brilliant wit.  Just kidding.  I would resort to being an extreme couponer.  And then I’d wish I could write about that.

Now Jlee says I’m supposed to tag 11 other bloggers to answer my 11 questions, and I hate to disappoint, especially since I’ve kept her up at least a week.  I’m hoping she’ll understand that my baseball is in trouble as I speak, so I’m going to cut this short.  Here are my 11 questions that I hope my readers will answer.  Feel free to answer any or all questions in comments below, or write a post and share it with me.   You wouldn’t want me to lose another night’s sleep and ramble on in another blog post this week, would you?

I didn’t think so.

Questions That Keep Szaboinslowmo Up At Night

1. What is your all-time favorite sitcom?
2. Do you have some weird talent that you learned years ago and you just can’t seem to get it out of  (like my shorthand habit)?
3. What’s the craziest diet you’ve ever tried?
4. What is your all-time favorite Saturday night live recurring sketch?
5. Name something, other than blogging,  that you spend way too much time online doing.
6. Who snores?  You, your partner, or both?
7. Name a song you’d hate to wake up to.
8. Do you have a recurring dream that you wish would go away?
9. What do you do when you have writer’s block?
10. What shortcuts do you take in the morning when you’ve overslept?  Or do you just arrive to work/school/whatever late?
11. What keeps YOU up at night?