Insomnia

This blog was conceived in insomnia -- I was awake at 4 AM, for jetlag reasons, and couldn't go back to sleep. I was, however, not really awake; I was in that sort of in-between space that comes right before you see the beginning of the sunset. I was having lots of weird dreams about time-travel and jetlag. No matter how rationally I know the nature of the world temporal system, it still boggles the mind that one can, for instance, leave Japan at 3 PM on Wednesday and arrive in New York at 3 PM on Wednesday, as I did.

One of my dreams was about The Langoliers. For those of you who might not remember this book/TV movie: it's about an airplane that goes through a time warp. It doesn't go to a different time, exactly, but rather gets left behind in the stream of time. The cosmology of the Langoliers: time moves forward at a steady pace, and each moment leaves behind it a kind of shadow, that fades and is finally eaten by big brown time-monsters called Langoliers. In this temporal shadow world, matches don't burn, food doesn't taste like anything, etc. This reminded me of what insomnia feels like. It also kind of reminds me of the process of writing in general, or at least writing about your own life.

Other than this little story, I'm not sure why I started this, and far less sure that I'll keep it up. I do know that I tend to love it whenever my friends have blogs, whatever they might put there. So in the hopes that everyone loves procrastination and voyeurism as much as I do, I present my blog. RSS me.

[later update: I meant for the below to be its own post, but I accidentally added it to the former. For future historians, context clues date this at around 1 August. The post above was written before leaving for Israel and after coming back from Japan, dating it to around 28 July. I don't know why the datestamps have disappeared]

I'm currently experiencing insomnia again, which I thought merited an inaugural post. I'm staying at a woman's house in Jerusalem, which is exceedingly generous of her, as I don't even know her -- actually, we don't even know any of the same people, so it's highly mysterious how I ended up here and possibly a mistake. Anyway, the only downside to this house is the noise. I'm not talking about, you know, creaking doors. There is a dog who stays on a balcony right outside my window. This dog insists on disrupting my life every second that I am here. When I am not in bed, the dog is trying to bite me or my shoelaces. When I am in bed, the dog howls, all night long. This sets off a cacophony in the neighborhood, both of other dogs and of a bevy of do-gooders who think that by shouting continuously or slamming doors they will socially coerce the dog into silence. I possess a pair of those bright orange foam earplugs, which were not designed for noise such as this. I have been sent into depths of my soul that I did not know existed. I have very seriously considered murdering the dog, although I decided this would, actually, be pretty hard to do. So instead I lay in bed with my hands over my ears, praying for the merciful Langoliers to devour me.