Friday, October 25, 2013

All Nighter

I enjoy sleep, it's one of my favorite things.  However, I will occasionally feel the need to forgo sleep for one night.  Why does this happen? It could be a number of things.  It might be so that I could get a few more hours working on a project or perhaps simply because I had way too much coffee.  Then there was that one time when I stayed up until six and didn't even realize it until my sister got up to get ready for school.
I pulled another all nighter a few nights ago.  There were a few art projects that I could get ahead on and the few extra hours would really help. 
My sister's irritation was probably warranted.  Because a few hours into it I took a break from drawing and was aimlessly looking through pictures of animals...
The next morning, Kristin was not very happy with me.
Yeah, I tend to get a little loopy during the morning.  My brain is...imaginative at my most lucid moments.  Give me little sleep and gallons of caffeine and well....

Even though all of the above is true.
But after drinking all of the coffee my little, sleep-deprived mind desired I actually managed to draw a few things and catch up on some work I had let fall behind.
And I actually felt quite pleased with myself.  Because who knows when I would have stopped procrastinating otherwise? I am horrible at procrastinating on artwork.  I fail to see why people still trust me with it sometimes. I find it so very easy to ignore it in favor of some other shiny and new art idea.  They usually arrive in abundance as soon as I have something else I'm SUPPOSED to be focusing on.  
However, my productivity only lasted a few hours. And while I got a lot done in those few hours I had been hoping for a bit longer.  But I recently I discovered that my brain does this weird thing in the middle of the night.  It waits until it's the darkest outside, until my emotions are completely open. It waits patiently for me to become the securest in my surroundings, completely content with my life...
And then it attacks.
It takes every stored up horror it has ever seen or heard and launches them at me like some kind of deranged horror tornado.
As a result I found myself curled up in the corner of my bed with my fuzzy green blanket; trying to remind myself that there was no guarantee that the monsters and other horrible things were out there.
While my sisters would, IN FACT, murder me if I were to suddenly scream and turn on every light we had in the household.
My mind, however, clearly wasn't in a merciful mood.  As it kept on with it's little horror stories.
I DO NOT LIKE FROSTY THE SNOWMAN.
But that is very definitely a story for a later date.
My mind continued with this attack of mental images and 'oh just suppose' moments even as I clung to my computer like a nightlight.  And then a magical thing happened.
LIGHT WAS COMING FROM OUTSIDE.
Guys, I realize that the sun rises.  That it's there everyday.
But to my caffeine riddled, horror-filled and sleep deprived mind...
This was some kind of wonderful, wonderful magic
It was pretty, dang awesome at the time.
By the time I got over my initial excitement over the fact that the sun hadn't abandoned me, most of my family had started to get up as well.  Giving me shared looks of 'wtf is wrong with you?' and 'oh God, please tell you didn't burn anything'.  
I proceeded to tell them about my night time adventures.  They listened with the kind of attention that one gives to someone when they're not sure whether ignoring them will result in a stabbing or some kind of sanity breakdown.
My mother simply smiled at me like I had gone insane and then made more coffee.
I managed until noon.  By then coffee had begun to lose it's magic and my brain had decided that it DID want sleep after all.  
 
My mother told me to get up and go be crazy in my own room.
I then slept for four hours and by the time I woke up again I was MUCH happier.  And that night I went to bed at a reasonable time.
But, naturally, a few days later. My brain decides that it should repeat the process


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