Have You Ever Been, Like, Sooo Tired?
On Being a Sleepyhead Not Otherwise Specified
Hello— there are a lot of new subscribers! That’s so cool. I’m told that what subscribers want is constant content, just an unrelenting stream of pure emails at the same days and times from their beloved creators (personality brands) forever until the end of time. I’m told this is what makes people go absolutely apeshit for even more, what sells books and speaking tours and entices paid tiers and kick-starts minor cults and stuff, but this is not that kind of Substack.
Picture me in a black turtleneck, looking sexy (picture me in shape also), and I’m smoking a pretzel stick that I have set on fire for the purposes of this set piece, and I’m not making eye contact with the camera or the audience or the mirror (which have all become the same thing), the only thing I’ll sustain my gaze upon is the ground and the art itself (a website displayed on the white walls of the gallery with an unnecessarily robust projector connected to an intern’s phone), and I’m being like, “nah man, I don’t do it for the clicks or the chicks, I’m not about that, I’m about authenticity.”
That would be so fucking cool! If I rejected commercialization because I was deep and wise, I mean. Let’s agree to pretend that this is the reason I write here, like, once a month kind of, because the real reason is that I’m really fucking tired the vast majority of the time.
I tried having a Patreon or whatever once, years ago, and you know what? It was embarrassing for everyone, because I can’t deliver consistent volumes or quantities of jack shit on a schedule unless I’m being paid to do it (to the tune of a living wage or salary) and also schedule it in advance and also nothing bad or distracting happens around me near any due dates. What this means is that this is an ideal newsletter for people who get stressed out from receiving emails and would prefer to actually kind of receive as few of them as necessary. If you do become a paid subscriber, you get to read the occasional exclusive work of fiction or poetry by me, and I do mean occasional! The main benefit of paying to read emails from me is being entitled to complementary print copies of things that I write here and also the warm feeling in your heart of keeping me afloat slightly more than I would be otherwise floating. You would become very cool, in short.
Anyway, about being tired. I don’t know that I’ve ever had great sleep habits, but I do know there are certain hours when I do better than others. The first few hours of the morning and last few hours of the evening are essentially, in that order, when my best cognitive capacity seems to open up, provided I’m also rested, hydrated, and medicated. This morning, I logged on for a remote work day earlier than usual, got an immense amount done until around lunch, and then sort of struggled through until things kicked back up again around… approximately now. See, I’m even writing this very post, oh-la-la. Soon I will tell myself the lie that I will get something done after dinner, and it will happen slowly and be incoherent, but then I’ll revise it when I’m back in another spurt of brain-having, and so on and so forth.
Recently, I connected a few dots about how those precise hours— my good brain times— were the ones I used to lose to my horrendously long commute at my former fancy-boy job, which surely could not have helped with the vast amounts of dysfunction that existed there independent of my contributions. Hmm!
In general, I’ve always been lower energy than my husband, who is my primary point of comparison these days, and recently he said he was worried about just how tired I was so much of the time. I got a little grumpy about hearing this concern, because I’m in that zone of self-awareness as a disabled person where at any given moment I am either overcome with shame and despair for not being able to accomplish as much as I’d like, or else I’m very “knife-y spoon-y” resentful of being measured against absolutely any kind of standard or norm.
Regardless, I did talk to my doctor and have a lot of blood work done, and the results are in! There is nothing that my blood can tell my doctor that can explain why I’m like this. Not Lyme, not thyroid stuff, nothing detectable at least.
It simply brings me back into my terrible oscillating attitude, because in some ways, it’s frustrating to not have a condition to blame things on, and in other ways, I’m perversely vindicated. It’s like, see? I am just a sleepyhead. This is just how some people are (I am some people). Also, I would like to feel differently and be more energetic and would probably endure a lot of bullshit to achieve that. Also, I will bite the next person who is not my husband or doctor who tells me I can’t move fast enough on some thing or another.
That’s all for today, I think, except for one final fun thing:
Tomorrow night (August 31st, 2021) at 7pm Eastern time, I’ll be participating in a full cast performance of Calvin Kasulke’s Several People are Typing as part of the book’s release celebrations. It’s a virtual event so you can tune in from anywhere. No spoilers, but Calvin rightfully typecast me as the Slack chatbot known as Slackbot, and it is going to be a wacky zacky good time. My personal copy of the book came in the mail today and it’s hilarious, just FYI, so if you can’t make the event, you will still— thank God— have the option of just reading the book.
That’s all for real now, because I need a nap.
Love,
Julian