For tonight, I apologize in advance to those of you (surely in the majority) who are reading this blog because you want to hear awesome things about Moldova and the Peace Corps. This particular post couldn't really be much less about the Peace Corps and still pertain to my life right now. It's just me loving when the continuity of events makes my life here just a little more "normal" (or at least similar to how it was before I came here, if that was "normal") while marveling at the capacity of the unconscious mind.
I've always had a habit of staying up too late, overtiring myself, and sleeping through morning alarms, thereby just incorporating the sound of them into my dreams. I dream I'm at school-- the buzzing becomes the class bell. I dream I'm outside-- the beeping becomes a passing garbage truck. Upon arriving here, and figuring out all the fun features on the new phone I got before I came, I saw that I could play songs as alarm clock tones. I picked one of my favorite utterly absurd tunes, because there's just no way my brain could ignore it. I figured that was for the best, because I know that no family wants to spend the whole morning listening to Cassie's alarm buzzing and beeping away while she dreams of giant bees and the motorized shopping carts at Wal-Mart traveling in reverse.
You should definitely listen to the song to appreciate the degree to which this couldn't possibly be slept through-- it's silly, but the punchline is a good one, and it's a little catchy. (Well, I can only attest that it's catchy if you're a sucker for kids' music... I guess not everybody is.)
Go on. Admit you giggled. It's cute. I won't tell anybody you enjoyed it.
So, I passed a summer without internet, without much language capacity to stay up visiting with my host family, and utterly exhausted at the end of every insanely long training day. I'd fall asleep pretty early, and because I wasn't especially at ease all summer, I never fell into super-deep sleep and I often woke up before my Duck Song even had its chance to play and silenced it in advance. It worked great.
Fast-forward to present-- a host family who I eat dinner with around 9:00 pm every evening, then visit with for a bit, internet access in my own bedroom and family and friends who don't even get home from work to talk to me until midnight my time, and I've finally become sucked into the Harry Potter series (Hooray, for friends who have large digital book collections to share with me, and for my Kindle!), so I read by flashlight (headlamp actually-- my book light died) for a while to relax before turning in.
Clearly, I'm now back to my routine of depriving myself of the sleep I need. This whole schedule's just a little wacky for my body, and after I eat that really late dinner, my body is usually not at all convinced that I should be able to rest for the few hours afterward.
This has me back in the routine of snoozing through alarms. Today was my third in a row of weird dreams just before getting up about ducks trying to buy grapes from lemonade vendors.
One minute, I'm en route to Chisinau via Moldovan minibus, about to pick up a water distiller from PC headquarters, because my family has decided that they're afraid to have me drinking the water here when it starts coming out of the tap brown (a dream of average weirdness, I think). The next minute, there's a giant animated duck boarding the minibus and making a whole-hearted effort to purchase grapes from the old man driving, who, obviously, is insistent that this minibus is a lemonade stand, and lemonade is all he's ever sold.
Ridiculous? Of course.
But, you know, there are worse ways to start a morning than waking up already laughing at yourself and wondering just how it is that your mind can do the absurd things it does.
:-)
I'll be changing my alarm tonight in hopes that I can find something I don't sleep through, and I'll be settling in with my Kindle a little earlier, if I can. Now, everybody, cross your fingers that, for my host family's sake, the alarm wakes me on its first attempt tomorrow (and every day after).
These nice people have already been subjected to three mornings of repeatedly hearing the first 60 seconds of the Duck Song before they're even out of bed, and I think that's a little more than they bargained for when signing on to take in an American.
No comments:
Post a Comment