… but I have around an hour to get this blog entry written (ideally), and that is not a lot of time.

You see, I finally got around to going and picking up my Zopiclone yesterday. After all the hassle with getting the government approval, I decided to wait a good long time before I inquired about it again, and yesterday was the day I decided to give it another shot.

Turns out it was in, finally, and so I wandered next door at 3:30 PM or so, and picked it up, still quietly seething with resentment about how I will not be getting Shoppers’ Optimum points for my drugs any more. Just another small mercy snatched away from us on the boot heel of society.

Anyhow, I picked the stuff up yesterday, and today was my first time trying it out. The pharmacist recommended trying just half a pill the first time, and so that is what I did. I took it somewhere around 10:30 AM and waited for the effects to kick in. It’s supposed to take about an hour.

And with all the hype and anticipation around this pill, I was expecting something extreme, I suppose. But all it did was make me sort of drowsy. Nothing radical there.

Still, the result was that I slept all afternoon, and that meant I had no time to write my blog entry until now, which gives me an hour or less to talk to you nice people.

So I might not finish on time. Or I might. This writing thing is not an exact science and the amount of time it takes me to bang one of these things about is fairly variable. Sometimes it take take me a whole evening, if it is a tricky subject or I am just too tired to make the words come easily. Other times, it all flows out so easily that when I am done, I say “That’s it? Weird. ”

Tomorrow I will try a whole Zopiclone and see how that pans out. It might be that the effects were so mild because I am such a big fellow that it was simply too low a dosage. What I am hoping for is a nice eight hours of sleep from which I awake refreshed and energized and happy. I am not sure I have ever had that in my life. My mentally hyperactive and physically hypo-active life precludes it. All the thinking I do, and all the mental stimulation I seek, creates so much energetic chaos in my mind, and stress in my body, and without regular exercise (or really, any exercise) to act as a release valve, it is hard for me to simply relax even while I am asleep.

The result is the sort of knock down, drag out, REM crazy sleep that I have. Throw in my bad habit of napping throughout the day, and I have pretty terrible sleep hygiene. I am not good at sleep.

I hope to use the Zopiclone as the cornerstone of my attempt to change that. I will take the Zopiclone, sleep through the late morning and afternoon, and then (and this will be the hard part), resist the urge to name in the other sixteen hours of the day.

I have actually pondered moving my computer into the living room so that my bed would not be so enticingly close to me, saying “Dive in and escape reality for a while!”. But that would involve an extraordinary level of hassle and disruption to my own life and my roomies’ lives. So perhaps I will just pile objects on my bed during the day, so that taking a nap would require taking the stuff off again, and thus make it just a little less easy to nap.

Rely on my laziness to fight the rest of my sloth. It works, in a way.

The other major pillar of my attempt to get my sleep into something like a normal pattern is, oddly enough, my Facebook game addiction. With so many games offering so much stimulation and distraction, they can fill the “well, if I don’t nap, what will I do with my time?” gap for a while.

In the long term, I hope to grow tired enough of them as a whole that I end up doing actually productive things out of sheer boredom.

It sounds like a weird plan, but it is a very “me” plan, and I am coming to accept that I am a highly idiosyncratic person who just has to do things his own way.

Other people’s ways just do not work. I am a one-off model with a distinctly non-standard operating system. Other people’s programs do not run. They crash.

Of course, that means my only guide in live is my somewhat intermittent common sense, and my intuition as to what course I should take, and that would be a pretty big step away from my more rationalist, heavily left-brain dominated lifestyle so far.

I tend to be the sort of person who looks down on people who are ruled by sudden whims and who act out of pure emotion instead of thinking things through like their human brains are built to do.

And I doubt that will ever change. That is just too fundamental to my personality to alter in any big way. You can’t go from bookish, shy, world-avoiding intellectual to radical free spirit overnight.

But I can be a little flexible, and at least allow for the possibility that sometimes, my emotions might know more about what is good for me than my tired and overstimulated rational brain can figure out.

And that sometimes, the best thing you can do is to listen to that persistent and nagging inner child voice that wants what it wants and does not want to have to submit everything in triplicate to the slow and tiresome committee of influences that make up the rational mind before not getting it.

Maybe sometimes, the smartest thing we can do is ask ourselves “If I was myself as a kid on summer vacation, what would I do right now?”

The answers may surprise you.