About an hour

I have unintentionally dedicated the last year of my life to helping people. I don't mean the way I usually do through my work, but by unintentionally starting a nonprofit and following through on nurturing this creation to true sustainability.

It's killing me.

I want to drop it and just go on to other things, but I'm sure that if I do that, all of the hard work that four of us have put into this will just evaporate into nothing more than an idea that could have worked. Could have.

I spent today outside in 100-degree heat, working my ass off in the name of helping my fellow humans. I am exhausted. my feet hurt. My ass is killing me (lots of bending, stretching, and cargo loading). What is wrong with me?

I was up late last night--until about 2:00. It was too late for me to take Ambien and still expect to get up and function by 6:00. It was hot in the house. I turned off the lights and got into bed. The room was bright. It was much too bright for me to sleep. The full moon always steals my precious sleep, and it always comes around just when I most need to rest. I stared at the ceiling and tried to lose myself in the blur of the ceiling fan paddles swirling in the semi-darkness over my head. A delicious burst of cool breeze tumbled through the window above my head and I tried to breathe in this ripple of night air.

My iPod was on, but the room was just too bright. I tried to clear my mind, but I just kept coming back to a mental checklist of everything I needed for Sunday's event. Every time I checked the clock, it seemed like it had leaped ahead an hour. I have a sleep mask--two, in fact--one for cooler weather and one for hot summer nights. It was just too hot to have anything on my face.

In the end, music didn't help, soft breezes didn't soothe me, and exhaustion didn't slow down my mind. The last time I looked at the clock,it was 5:03. I got up as 6:15 aware that I had slept only because I remembered my dream.

An hour of sleep just isn't enough. Nobody's brain should fire at such rapid high speed that an hour of sleep still allows you to go full-bore through a 13-hour day in blistering heat. I am tired. I am not sleepy.

Sometimes I wonder what would be happening amongst my neurotransmitters if I weren't taking all of those sedating pharmaceutical medications. Ziiiing!