Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

The Bank of Time

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It happens for everyone at a different time and for different reasons, but I believe this does happen to everyone.

One day, you suddenly realize you are running out of time.

Another Saturday has gone by. Another birthday (your own or your kid’s) is coming around. You realize you’ve lived more than half your life, because you double your age and you realize it’s unlikely you’re going to live to see 2x. If you’re a woman, you reach the age where people — people under 30, especially — no longer see you standing there, their eyes go straight past you like you’re a ghost. You start making a list of all the things you’d like to do once in your life and you see in black and white you’re unlikely to get all of them done. If you want to get any of them done, you’d better get cracking.

That’s a great exercise, by the way: make a list of 100 things you want to do at some point in your life. “Oh, that’s easy,” you say. “I can come up with two thousand things I want to do.” I recommend doing this exercise anyhow. The first 20 come pretty easily. Then you have to start thinking about it. One by one, you begin to remember what it was you wanted to do, what secret dreams you had, what things you wanted to experience before you died.

Recently someone I know got sick. First there was one health problem, and that exposed another health problem, which exposed three more… The last time I saw this person, I realized there aren’t going to be that many more times I see them. It’s eye-opening, watching someone go through this process. What’s worse is, they keep talking about the stuff they’re going to do, and that’s all it’s ever been: talk. You can’t put stuff off to the future indefinitely, and one day you are going to run out of road.

You don’t have time.

Right now I have 30 minutes before my next appointment of the day. What can I do in 30 minutes? I ask myself. I’ve gotten into the unfortunate habit of saying, “I must have at least an hour to write!” So I have the mental mindset I can’t get anything done in only 30 minutes.

Except I am working on changing this mindset, because there are things I want to do, big and small, and I need to use what I’ve got to accomplish them. I can get a lot done in 30 minutes, even if it’s just writing today’s post. Or I could read some more of my current book. Or I can work on my list of things I want to do in my life, carve out just a little tiny bit of what I want to do. I no longer have the time to waste.

Everybody has a different universe

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I was in the supermarket this afternoon, buying snacks for tonight’s Webelos meeting, when the woman behind me in line started talking to the cashier.

“Do you like mysteries?” she asked. “I just read a good one.”

I concentrated on getting my credit card information into the machine and checking that the machine hadn’t been fitted with a skimmer. When I finished signing my name, I looked back at the woman who was talking: she had her Kindle out and was glancing through her most recently read titles. I guess the cashier was an old friend.

“Have you read A Song of Fire and Ice?” the woman asked. “It takes place in olden times, you know, with knights and horses and spooky things. I think they made a movie out of it.”

It’s a moment like that when I remember we all live in different universes.

Holy moly, I thought, how could you not know that the book series is called A Song of Ice and Fire? That isn’t the name of any of the books at all. It doesn’t take place in “olden times,” it takes place in a fantasy kingdom that never existed. The author is George RR Martin and it wasn’t made into a movie, it was made into one of the biggest television events of last year, a series on HBO?

I haven’t read any of the books (Darin has; he gave up on book 3, as has every single person he’s talked to, so I don’t know who all has been buying Book 4, let alone Book 5, which apparently was the best-selling fiction book of all last year), but I know all of these things. I know Sean Bean starred in the HBO series, and the series kept in The Major Twist that everyone expected them to get rid of (since, you know, they had Sean Bean). I know George RR Martin has a really big beard. I know the series is partially inspired by the Wars of the Roses, but once you have actual dragons in your book, you’ve gone rather further afield than just your inspiration.

People don’t know stuff.

They don’t have to. They still enjoy the world. The world still spins.

Most people haven’t even heard of any of these books or TV series and they’re still pretty knowledgeable about stuff. My dental hygienist bored me to tears while I was in the chair the other day going on and on about the football playoffs, and yet these things she was telling me were extremely important to her view of the universe.

It’s cool when you understand enough about the world that you can explain it to someone else. It’s frustrating as hell when there are things I don’t understand and can’t seem to grok for the life of me, no matter how hard I try. Generally, if I’m interested enough in something, I like learning all about it, and then I tell other people about it.

Sometimes it stuns me when I run across someone who’s enthusiastic about something (as this woman clearly was about A Game of Thrones, which was the top book in her Kindle) and yet doesn’t know very much about it. I wonder sometimes how many times I talk about something called A Song of Fire and Ice and the person next to me rolls their eyes and goes about their business.

Sleep on it

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I’ve always had trouble sleeping. When I was in high school I’d lay awake listening to KSFO, when it had a Comedy Hour and wasn’t Fascist talk radio 24/7. The best sleep I ever had was when I lived next to some railroad tracks — after a week of not sleeping at all, I started sleeping like a rock. When I lived in Studio City I told Darin I couldn’t sleep, and on the weekends when he came to visit he’d hear the shouting and ruckus going on and he’d say, “I think I know why you can’t sleep.” Even after 20 years I have trouble falling asleep if Darin isn’t with me.

Being able to fall asleep isn’t even the worst part of sleep, for me. Because eventually I always pass out. No, the problem with me is that I don’t stay asleep. I often wake up two or three times a night to use the bathroom. For a while I was fully awake at 3:33 in the morning — why that time? Was it significant? Was there something noise happening in the house that woke me up at 3:33? (Seriously, I even checked our watering system to see if it was coming on then.)

I worked on the problem with needing to pee: I stopped drinking anything after dinner. No comforting cup of Good Earth tea. As little water as I could stand. I noticed I slept poorly on nights after I had chocolate ice cream, so no chocolate ice cream after 6pm (which generally means…no chocolate ice cream).

Still kept waking up.

I started taking melatonin, which was popular for a while as the sleep aid that helped reset your internal clock. Except I noticed that it gave me a hangover. I’d fall asleep right away, with almost 99% certainty, and I’d sleep at least 6 hours straight, but in the morning I’d wake up still tired, my head pounding, not feeling as though I’d been asleep at all. I went from a 5mg dose to a 1mg dose. 1mg a)did put me to sleep and b)gave me a hangover.

I stopped using it. You’re not supposed to use it for very long anyhow — just enough to set your Circadian rhythms.

When you can’t sleep you’ll try everything.

On some web page I read about or maybe just on the shelf next to the melatonin I saw this product called GABA Calm. A sublingual tablet that would help you fall asleep.

And it worked. On nights when I couldn’t fall asleep, I would use one GABA Calm and with probably 85% accuracy I would be asleep within minutes. I would stay asleep for at least 6 hours straight. When I woke up in the morning, I could remember my dreams and my head felt fine.

Of course, the Wikipedia page about GABA (the main ingredient) says that the claims that GABA enhances calmness are probably false, because there’s no evidence that GABA crosses the blood-brain barrier. Well, okay, maybe these are extraordinarily effective placebos.

Who cares? I was sleeping six hours without interruption. Trust me, that was huge.

When I was taking antidepressants (having since stopped, because of a regular exercise program — don’t try this at home, talk to your doctor first), one that he wanted to try was called gabapentin, because it’s often prescribed off-label for anxiety disorders. Apparently it gets prescribed for a whole bunch of stuff:

Gabapentin is used primarily for the treatment of seizures, neuropathic pain, and hot flashes. There are, however, concerns regarding the quality of the research on its use to treat migraines, bipolar disorders, and pain.

Well, I don’t have any menopausal symptoms yet, so I don’t know if it helps with that, personally. I never noticed gabapentin having an effect on my mood (exercise worked much more regularly for me), but WOW did it knock me out. I had a crazy amount of dreams every night, extraordinarily vivid, and I woke up feeling almost refreshed. Which was awesome!

Then taking two pills at night started leaving me a little groggy, so I moved down to one pill.

Which now leaves me groggy and feeling slightly hungover in the morning…but I do sleep 8 straight hours if I take it. If I don’t take it…chances are I won’t sleep any more than 2-3 hours straight.

I refill my prescription for gabapentin whenever I run low, but I don’t take it every night any more. If I’m still awake at 1am, I take one.

I’ve gotten hardcore on anything that might be keeping me awake: I stopped drinking anything caffeinated after 12noon (since adjusted to 3pm, which seems to be my upper boundary for effects). I exercise frequently, but not even running a marathon is a sure thing for knocking me out, so who knows. I read boring books until I feel my eyelids start to droop.

I have considered going to the Stanford sleep clinic to see if there’s something else going on.

Because I’m not living next to train tracks again, no matter how poorly I sleep.