It's raining cats and dogs or antelopes and deer and I wonder if I will ever fall asleep. I flip on CNN and read the latest "breaking" news where breaking means "recent". They used to just call that --- well --- news. I've been having a hard time sleeping lately if consider lately the past 10 years or so. I want to blame it on my job or too much caffeine or life stress or what not. But maybe it is just they way I am. One night every few weeks I will barely sleep at all...scratch that two nights but one of the two is chemically induced. The lack of sleep makes me tired during the day and makes me stress over things that are not so stressful which causes me to sleep less and so on. You get the picture. Circles create their own momentum.

So I'm wondering if I shouldn't just embrace this inner insomnia and live with it. Don't stress about stressing someone I used know said. But the strange things about those nights that I don't sleep is that I eventually collapse for an hour or two of super deep sleep. I then have these dreams that I don't remember much of. But I wake up feeling connected because she or her (but never both although I do get confused about which is which) were in my dream and I wake up happy. Happy, but tired. Somehow the lack of sleep seems worth it.

The rain finally stops but the ground is too wet for me to ride my bike to work and I am too tired so I drag my sorry ass into the shower. The mirrors tell no lies. My sagging flesh losing tone, showing a shape with the consistency of pudding on top of ice cream. But my actual image isn't as bad as my mental image of myself and that is comforting in a strange way. I make sure to avoid the scale because I've already had a glass of water.

I dress noticing how the clothes feel too tight and leave the house silently. I'm pretty sure I know who I was dreaming about now. Venti starbucks coffee in hand, Chinese lesson in my ear, I enter a taxi. I try to sleep in the back of the cab but can't because I worry about resting my head on the head rest since the head rest must be dirty. Strangely enough, I also worry that the cab driver may be mad at me for using the headrest and making it dirty with my head. I recognize his as my mother's influence ("don't put your xxxx there, it's dirty") and my father's influence (enough said, you figure it out).

I manage this half alert, head bobbing not because I'm tired but because of headrest consequences (this is not to say I am not tired, pay attention people) all the way to work. It takes 40 minutes, the cab driver trys for a little conversation but I just respond with quick one word answers not just because it is the only way I can speak Chinese but because that is what my nature is. And I am pretty tired of fighting nature (see pudding ass reference above).

I get to work, pay the 36 kuai cab fear, dump my drained starbucks venti in the ash tray wastebasket, and enter the office building I will call home for the next twelve hours.