There's a reason why sleep feels so good in the morning. There's a reason I like sleeping in, waking up, and staying in bed to get more sleep. It is such a wonderful change from trying to fall sleep and not succeeding. It doesn't happen to me a lot, once a month maybe. But when it does, it really pisses me off. Last night I felt tired, so I thought I'd try to go to bed early. I turned in at around 9pm and I sensed I was a little too alert to sleep. Nevertheless, I was determined to stick with it. After a while I hear noises from the kitchen, people talking and yelling. I knew this is not going to happen. Every time I try to sleep and can't is a defeat, which only adds that much irritation and bad experience to the night.

So I go to bed again at around 2am. By now the house is completely quiet. Just as I feel I'm falling asleep, a goddam fly buzzes right over my head and knocks me out of that feeling of losing consciousness. It is by being awoken from it that I actually know that I was about to fall asleep, cause by then I was already well on my way. And now comes the worst part, the thoughts. There's nothing worse in trying to fall asleep than starting to worry that it's not going to happen. I know this, but somehow the thought comes to me anyway. I try to push it away, but the moment I'm just a little bit conscious of it, I sense that I can't escape it. I try not to think about it, but it's there and while I'm not thinking about it, I'm conscious that it's just it's just one little thought away, so basically it's just as bad as consciously thinking about it.

I've heard people say that if you don't fall asleep within 10 minutes, then you're not tired enough to sleep right now. I cannot think of a time when I would take less than half an hour to fall asleep. So far as far as I'm concerned, that rule is nonsense.

One thing that really gets in the way of sleep is knowing that tomorrow there's something I have to get up for. This kills the prospect of a good night's sleep like nothing else. If it's just an everyday thing, it's not a problem. But if it's something out of the ordinary, a one time event, that is what triggers it. Again, I'm not obsessing about it, but I know that the thought is within reach. And at the first sign of insomnia, it comes knocking. Now there's pressure to fall asleep, cause there's a reason to be up at a certain time in the morning. A couple of times this has happened to me, I couldn't sleep for hours, I gave up and canceled my appointment, and then I could finally sleep.

So I try to distract myself from not sleeping. I watch some tv, a sitcom episode, surf the net for about 20 minutes, something to take my mind off not sleeping despite being increasingly tired. I go back to bed and the bed feels great. I lie on one side, after a while I turn to the other. The longer I'm not sleeping the more uncomfortable the bed feels. Suddenly it's hot, the pillow feels big, so I push it aside, I lie on my stomach, then on my side, on my back, again I can sense this is not going to happen.

I've tried various things to sleep, but I haven't found anything that really works. Taking a shower, going out for a walk, jogging to make myself physically tired, reading, watching tv, a glass of milk, a glass of water, coffee, tea, herbal tea, it's all just a stab in the dark.

Not falling asleep sucks. Eventually there comes a time when fatigue sets in (around 6am I'd say) to the point where falling asleep is very easy. Of course, by that time, any prospect of having a normal day tomorrow is long gone.

I guess it was Ash's entry that gave me this impulse to sort of wrap up this issue in my mind, as I'm done thinking about it.

So I moved to Utrecht in February and I was a little anxious about how I would handle this socially (with good reason, not one of my strengths). One of the first people I met, in an introductory class to the Dutch language, was this girl Zoe. In a situation like this, arriving in a new place, starting everything from scratch, there's a lot of people to meet and greet. But there was something special about Zoe, it was as if we spoke 'the same language'. So often with people I meet, there's a language barrier, there's accents to deal with, a difference of background, culture, expectations etc. It's not that easy to understand where the person is coming from. And indeed this is the reason why I've never had a lot of real life friends, I just don't meet a lot of people who 'get me' and whom I 'get'. Coming to this new place, it was a concern for me to make friends and I wanted to make the best out of it.

Curiously, there seemed to be somewhat of an understanding between us on this point, she seemed pretty keen on staying in touch with me too. This is pretty rare, so often people come at this from different angles, so often I either have to do most of the work myself, with the other person not seeming very interested, whereas sometimes it's the opposite - the other person wants to stay in touch, with me being fairly lukewarm at the idea. It's rare that a balance is found, especially when you're just getting to know the person, but this seemed to be one of those times. Seemed to anyway.

Just what a person really is thinking I'll never know, but I certainly thought she was being sincere when she seemed happy to see me and eager to talk. Why would someone fake that? Trouble is, we only got to talk during that language course, or just standing outside the building after it was over. I wanted to ask, but I'm awkward with these things, I try to make the transition as smooth as possible, just to naturally fit it into the conversation, and I was not succeeding at all. But before the "I should get going"s were exchanged, she finished my thought "so maybe you can give me your email address and we'll get together sometime?". I don't recall the exact words exchanged.

Lesson number one. Never give your email to someone and expect them to do something with it. The vast majority of people (I've had a chance to establish this fact over the years), even with the best intentions, will never use your email for anything. And if you actually take down someone's email and send them a message, you are way above average.

So a week flew by, no nothing. I saw her again in class, she seemed pleased to see me, and apologetic for the email thing. Accidents happen, right? I won't bother hashing out the exact record of events, I don't even remember it to detail. But I didn't always see her in class, at some point I did get her email address off a list of student data being passed around by the teacher. I tried to set up something, anything, by email - she was always cheerful, but busy. I have to say I was a little attracted to her as well, but frankly making friends with her was far more important to me, I needed a friend in this town.

Eventually I got very fed up with the "I'm busy" responses, which always included some form of pseudo apology for my inconvenience. This went on for about a month. So my careful diplomacy was completely failing, and the fact that we seemed to get along well didn't seem to help at all. At this point, I was very frustrated. I hadn't met anyone else who would 'get me' and I really invested a lot of thought and intent into this potential friendship. There was nothing wrong with what was being said either, just that nothing was happening.

So my patience was about to run out. I finally lost it and said something as if to imply that I didn't believe she was actually that busy and that she was just humoring me. Wow, that was incredibly stupid. I was kicking myself for about 2 weeks for saying that. I can't believe I said that, but I was really frustrated.

Lesson number two. Whatever the person's story is, and whatever you believe or suspect the truth to be in relation to the story, never, ever, ever breathe a word of doubt over the story. What's on the record is like evidence in a trial, it's irrefutable. The only thing you can do is maneuver the person into admitting it themselves.

So I said that, and of course she was offended, saying she's doing this and she's doing that and she's really completely booked. I felt like such an idiot, I tried to say something by way of an apology, but I couldn't even convince myself that I could explain it or smooth it out. Basically, I had just shot myself in the foot and I was painfully (pun intended) aware of it.

So I tried to apologize and despite this screw up, she still seemed interested in 'how I was', which I thought was big of her. And that's pretty much where it ended. The language class ended, I never saw her again. I wanted to say something, I just didn't know what. I had basically tried every which way to do something with her, but I wasn't getting anywhere. And on top of that I was disgusted with myself for being so completely tactless.

It preyed on my mind for a long time. I thought about this case as my best opportunity to make a friend, possibly a very good one, and I had failed so spectacularly. It just wouldn't stop, I kept kicking myself for it and wishing something had been different. But eventually, I stopped. As I was coming back from vacation, I thought I would give it one last try. Time wipes the slate clean, right? So I sent an email just about the day I arrived, well over a week ago. And... nothing. I don't even know if she's in town anymore, but I'm done with this now. Aside from the little trip down memory lane that is this entry, which stirs up some momentary sadness over what happened, I'm at peace with this now.

"If you're not looking into my eyes when I'm talking to you then I don't think you respect me." Do you know these people? Get off your high horse already. All it means is that I'm able to carry on a conversation while doing something else. Ie. I'm economizing on my time. It may come as a shock, but everyday conversation is not some noble art, it's a very common and cheap thing, any two people can have a go anytime at all.

And at the heart of the issue, not every conversation is engaging enough to require that kind of undivided attention. If I were speaking to say Jerry Seinfeld about his writing process or say Miguel de Icaza about his next vision in the linux space, I just might want to concentrate fully on that. But if I'm having an everyday conversation about some issue that isn't immensely gripping, I'm not going to. In any case, it's a drag to keep up that staring contest beyond the first 5-10 minutes anyway.

In Norway, in the juice section of the supermarkets they use to sell these 1l cartons of grapefruit juice in a green container. That was good stuff. Then they switched the juice that was made from yellow grapefruits to the red grapefruit variety, and that was a really bad move. Juice from yellow grapefruits just tastes better, you can't just suddenly pretend otherwise. At least they could have introduced the red grapefruit juice alongside the existing one, but no, they just replaced it.

But here I am now and so far in the Netherlands I've yet to see yellow grapefruit juice. I bought a carton of red today and it's not bad, but I miss the yellow stuff.. :(

I would have made this comment a long time ago, but I'm not a big fan of guns and death. Still, on tv it's all fictional, so I don't care how many people die on screen. Meanwhile, it becomes unbearable to watch how many times you see the same thing happen. So here goes, after many years of watching annoyed, just for the sake of making movie scripts a little more believable.

See, a gun, as opposed to a knife, is a long range weapon. And the perfect range is probably a few meters away from the hostage. At this range, you are less likely to miss, while you're still at a safe distance from any hand combat attacks. Moving closer to the victim does not improve your position, it compromises it. Why, because once you come close enough to the victim for them to reach you, they can disarm you before you can say 'bastard, you killed my father'. It's mostly newbies doing this, apparently we as the public are supposed to believe that they are so dumb as to think 'this bad guy will get more freaked out if I put the gun to his head, oooh cold metal'. And then what happens? The bad guy takes the gun away.

Could they possibly make it any more predictable? :lazy: