Sleepless

Up at 0300 this morning. My sleep pattern has been lousy, seemingly for months now (the job loss, you say?). The Ravishing Mrs. TB has had the same complaint of late - it seems that it alternates between the two of us, and one or the other has been up at the time for longer than I care to remember.

What got me up? Not sure today. An odd dream about working in a grocery store with no air conditioning, followed by the thought when I woke up of "The Center Cannot Hold". And then you wake up, of course, and realize that you're not going back to sleep, and you might as well make a go of it and not wake your spouse up by twisting in bed, trying to catch that elusive sleep...

The waiting is grinding. I tried to explain to Uisdean Ruadh once the amount of time it takes to get hired in The Industry. He verbally shook his head in shock, but as I pointed out to him, my previous two jobs took a month or more between first applying and getting hired - and actually as I think about it, it got consistently longer over a 4 year period, from 1 month to almost 2. In my current case as well, the jobs were both applied for in the end of March, and only now are potentially coming to fruition, 2 months later (and it will be 2 months plus by the time I would start one of them - something to bear in mind the next time I get the "urge" to be unhappy).

The sense of lack of control is astounding, something one cannot grasp unless you have been there - in a lot of ways I guess, just like sleep: it comes and goes, sometimes without your conscious participation in the process. You can't really do anything about it except to ride it out - which, I might add, is bitter consolation at 0300...