No sleep til Lower Manhattan

I have had such a hard time falling asleep the last 2 nights. This is an incredibly rare occurrence for me. I'm mildly narcoleptic, I can fall asleep anywhere. So why the insomnia? Stress? Anxiety? Jet lag? The last one would make sense except that 2 nights ago I was still in San Diego. Anticipatory jet lag? I do like to get ahead of the game...

So I stopped fighting, turned on the light, and continued reading the book I'd started that morning. And at 12:47 am I felt a tickle on my arm, only to look down and see a mosquito, or as I like to call them, vampire bug. (Mosquito is such a euphemism. Call it like it is. Like when people say if a cockroach is over a certain size it's actually a water bug. F that! I know a roach when I see one.) What the HELL is a MOSQUITO doing in my APARTMENT in the middle of JANUARY?? I live in New York - there should be a permanent 17" snowbank on the shady size of the street. I think Al Gore might be on to something...

Mosquitoes remind me of being little, because we had a veritable tropical forest in our backyard and, my sister and I would get eaten alive in the summer. When the red welts all over my body kept me awake I would go downstairs to my parents in the TV room, calamine lotion and cotton ball in hand, so that my mother could sponge paint me into a little pink polka-dotted freak. I imagine that's what plague victims would have looked like in the land of Strawberry Shortcake.

The little blood-sucker managed to elude my grasp not once but twice. The upside is I got to finish Dry and, courtesy of my academic schedule, sleep in until about 2pm. But tomorrow I've got to teach so I'm going with a tried and true sleep aid. Plus it's moderately classier than Tylenol PM. Cheers!