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alexandraerinOnly seven? :P Clearly I'm going to have the opposite problem here from the Envy one. I think that to make this manageable I'm going to restrict myself to things that don't really matter all that much, petty little inconsequential things that can still make me froth and boil over... not the Big Issues of the Day or the things that really impact my life. I have a feeling that this is more in keeping with the spirit of the meme, and more likely to be instructive to both me and anyone reading this.
Note: I started writing this last night when I couldn't sleep, so some parts of it refer to that. The first section (on errant pedantry) was not actually inspired by the preceding anti-pedant rant... that's just something that's always on my rant-dar.
1. Errant pedantry. See any of several other entries on this subject.
Language is memes.
Not in the LOL I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER sense, but in the original, very cool and slightly scary sense: ideas as living things. Ideas as genes, as organisms. Ideas as things that can grow and reproduce and evolve and transmit themselves.
Imagine a virus that is fragile and generally damaging to its host. It has a high mortality rate, but some hosts it doesn't kill... it adjusts to them or they adjust to it, and they become carriers, and through them, it spreads.
Now imagine that there are supposed "rules" of language, mostly products of the 19th and 20th century, but invested with the force of authority by people who spoke authoritatively enough. These particular rules make no natural or intuitive sense. They run roughshod over the way language is actually used and the needs of language.
For instance, the prohibition against "singular they". We need a third person gender neutral pronoun. Our language cries out for one, especially in modern society. "They" is perfectly suited to answer the need. Its double-duty as a singular and plural pronoun perfectly parallels the second person pronoun "you", even down to its history ("you" was originally a plural). This is why it keeps cropping up, why people keep trying to use it as a singular pronoun independently. This isn't a meme that started in one place and spread. It crops up again and again, through parallel evolution. If it were stamped out completely, it would be back in a generation.
The idea that "singular they" is incorrect? It must contend with this reality, with a habitat that is much more naturally hospitable for the competing meme of "singular they" itself. This environment is not conducive to its long-term survival. So what does a meme... a thought-organism... do in this circumstance? It evolves a defense and propagation strategy, or it dies.
The prohibition against singular they hasn't died, obviously, so it must have a survival strategy... and in fact, the same strategy used by all the rules that I term "errant pedantry": the mutual less/fewer total mutual exclusivity, the prohibition against splitting infinitives, the American placement of all punctuation inside enclosing marks, the non-adjectival fun, and so on.
This strategy is a viral one, and I don't mean like a viral video... I mean something more nasty. For a class of 30 people taught English by someone who carries these memes, a small number of the students will manage to internalize the errant rules at a significant level. These will be most of the self-professed English nerds, the people who love language and writing and want to have a career as a teacher or writer or editor.
These people? They become the carriers. There doesn't have to be many of them. Just enough to fill out the ranks of teachers and writing industry professionals for the next generation.
Of the remainder, some people will be naturally immune by virtue of not really caring... but then there are the people who might have loved language, who might have cared, but that fire, that spark is killed by the virus. When faced with one too many metaphorical hand-slap for something that doesn't make sense, they would rather just give up... rather not bother than bend in an unnatural direction.
And that just makes me sad. I feel sorry for them and for the carriers both.
Now, perhaps more than one person reading this thinks I'm being a bit melodramatic with my talk of viruses and carriers. But please, stop and think: how much does it bug you to see me breaking these rules I talk about? If you know and care about these rules, then chances are that one or more of them is a major English pet peeve for you.
Why is this? The same teacher who taught you that these things are wrong taught you that many other things are wrong. You were probably told not to use slang in writing assignments, either... you were able to learn and internalize that to the point that you could do your assignments and do formal writing now, but do you forevermore gnash your teeth at all slang, everywhere?
Why do some things become pet peeves and other things don't? There are a lot of factors at play, but the harder something had to be drilled into your head for you to accept it, the more "wrong" the alternative will seem to you. It's human nature, and it's what the memes exploit to survive in the face of harsh and unforgiving reality. It's harder for them to lodge themselves in a given head than a rule that makes sense or is arbitrary but makes no less sense than any alternative, but once they're lodged there, they're sitting in the catbird seat... they're there to stay.
At the moment I'm really not raeging about this, though. The future looks pretty bright to me. The revolution is here. It's not happening overnight... etymology is faster than geology and biology, in most cases, but it doesn't move at the speed of our lives. Things seem to be on the right track to me... and if the shift won't be completed in my lifetime, I've still arranged my career in such a way that I can do what I like regardless.
2. People who insist that their pet "fanon" theories are supported/implied/suggested/proven by the text.
I could probably give specific examples for all seven items on this list, but I'm just going to give one particularly illustrative one.
There are some readers of Tales of MU who figure that Mackenzie's misadventures are best explained by assuming she has an Aura of Attraction that's always on. She has five or six pretty decent friends, maybe a dozen people she could call friends if she were to count them, three lovers, a variety of people who don't like her or want to make her life miserable, and an unknown number of people who pass by her without noticing or being noticed by her.
I think it's the "three lovers" thing that gets people, honestly. Poly is outside many people's experience, and thus, it must be explained.
The specific things that are pointed to seem specious at best. Like, she's not described as being drop-dead gorgeous, therefore, something must account for her sex appeal. Okay, so anybody who's kind of plain or average must be using mind-melting magic to get a lover or three? Amaranth made a speech near the beginning of the story about how much of that stuff is subjective... I didn't really expect that to sway many people who didn't already believe it, but I figured it must be a massive raging clue that I the author who is writing the thing doesn't believe in a strictly linear hierarchy of beauty/sexual appeal.
(Or, alternately, that the text which contains Mackenzie doesn't support the existence of such a hierarchy within it.)
I'm not going to go into any further detail debunking (or bunking) this, because honestly, it's not an invalid reading. That is to say, there's nothing in the canon I can point to that outright says Mackenzie doesn't have an aura of attractiveness. But that's the most that can be said about the text supporting its existence: nothing says otherwise. Pretty tenuous, no? In a story where quite a bit of information is insinuated, implied, suggested, written between the lines, or otherwise left for the readers to work out, there's no hint of it. There's no mention of anybody seeing anything strange in Mackenzie's aura. People who stare at or scrutinize her... whether with their eyes or through mystical means... don't uniformly fall in love with or obsess over her. Some people do, and these people tend to recur in the story more so than people who examine her and move on, for obvious reasons. But no one's ever examined her aura and said so much as "Hmmm, there's something weird and unexplained there. I wonder if it will perhaps be important later? Also, you're pretty."
To put it in short and simple terms: there is no there there.
If folks were just advancing this as their pet theory in the comments, it would be one thing... it's the fact that they'll sit there and claim that the story "heavily implies" or "strongly suggests" it that put this item on the list. No. This is conspiracy theory level of thought: "I have this pet theory. Facts that do not conflict with it are proof. Facts which align with it are proof. Facts that do conflict with it will be ignored or reshaped until they are proof."
Like, here is something that the text does establish: Mackenzie is delicious. Any kind of human-eating predator finds her smell and taste tantalizing. This is important. It has mythic-backstory significance. It affects the plot in the present day. It has been implied in places and made explicit in others. It is well-established. It is canon.
And yet here's some dude in the comments claiming that no, she doesn't actually smell tasty... that's just her aura of attraction that the story totally implies she has coming into play and affecting predators.
No.
This isn't me speaking as author coming out with Word of God from on high. Leaving any special knowledge I have that exists outside the text aside, I will say again: no. The aura of attraction isn't in the text. The aroma of appetizingness is.
The fact that some people take their fanon theories and not only elevate them to the status of canon but then argue against canon with them really ticks me off.
3. People who ignore what the text of the story says when it conflicts with how they want to view a character.
This is sort of a special case for 2. I've railed in the comments against people who want to defend The Man on the basis of "What has he actually done that's so wrong?", seemingly because they find him charming/cool/whatever and therefore want him to be good, or at least not evil. By the same token as people interpreting the story based on their desire for The Man to be right/good, there have been quite a few comments here and there from people who are clearly spinning things based on the idea that the characters they find annoying/stupid (Mackenzie, Steff, and Amaranth, mostly) must be wrong. About everything.
I'm not demanding that everybody who reads the story revile The Man. When I introduced him, I expected him to be a popular character... popular as a character. I'm also not demanding that everybody like Mackenzie. Part of my whole "let's do everything wrong" experiment that was underlying the launch of Tales of MU was making a protagonist who is not necessarily likable in the conventional ways in which a protagonist is supposed to be likable. The people who like her anyway tickle me. The people who hate her and keep reading also tickle me. But then somebody who hates her says something that's kind of at a 90 degree angle to what actually happened and is only supported by the fact that they hate her? Raeg.
There's a bit of overlap between The Man's apologists and Mackenzie's haters. One of the most common pieces of evidence brought forth for why The Man can't be all that bad is that Mackenzie doesn't trust him, and Mackenzie has poor judgment.
Yes, it's true that Mackenzie doesn't have good judgment. It's also true that there have been third person omniscient (or at least not-unreliable) narrated-stories that depict The Man doing some truly skeevy things involving a minor. Is Mackenzie so unreliable a narrator that her dislike of The Man makes everything he did in those other stories okay? I don't think so. Some people do.
Raeg.
4. People who do not understand the many, vast, and considerable differences between the myriad hats that I own.
They are many, vast, and considerable. Any hat I'm considering buying is clearly also very different from any other hat I might own or be wearing, or else there would be no reason for me to consider buying it in the first place.
QED, Jack.
QED.
5. Internet-based sleep specialists.
I understand the phenomenon whereby somebody is so relieved to have found the solution to a problem that plagued them that they become an evangelist for their solution... but when you do this, you become something like a Scientologist: "whatever your problem is, I know my answer fits it." It's annoying. I get it all over, as many people with chronic/congenital health problems do, but I get it most often with my sleep issues, perhaps because more people have (or know someone who has) sleep issues.
I live with insomnia. I do not have sleep apnea. No matter how convenient it would be for me to have a sleep-related breathing disorder in terms of allowing you to supply me with a solution, I am afraid I simply don't have one. Nobody I've slept with/in the presence of has reported me breathing weird. I don't go to sleep and then wake up in the morning feeling mysteriously fatigued. There are rare occasions when I sleep for 6-8 hours but it's low quality sleep and I'm groggy the next day, but they are rare and they usually correlate to something like I drank caffeine too recently. Generally speaking when I am able to sleep for more than four hours, it's good sleep and I wake up feeling refreshed.
And much of the time when I wake up after four hours I feel (temporarily) invigorated... it's the boundless energy in my brain that's keeping me awake. It's only when I go through a stretch of time of not being able to sleep more than four hours (or I'm worn down by other things) that I start to feel the effects.
This is among the reasons why I am not a good candidate for a sleep study. Those are used for when you go to sleep and you wake up tired. They are not indicated for people who can't sleep in the first place. I can't even imagine how many sessions it would take for me to actually fall into anything like a normal sleep. You put me on my back with a dozen or more wires and things to measure my breathing and movement and I will lay there for eight hours without falling asleep, I guarantee it. What does that tell anybody? That I don't sleep on my back, I don't sleep with devices hooked up to me... I don't sleep lightly or easily in general, period, and that is not something that a sleep study is designed to diagnose or suggest treatment for.
How do I sleep?
Mostly on my side or stomach.
Under twenty pounds of blankets.
On the floor.
None of that guarantees sleep, but its presence all makes a big difference. A valerian-and-melatonin cocktail also helps. There are nights when my brain just won't shut off, though, and on those nights nothing I do will let me get to sleep (this night is one of them). If you are also a floor-sleeper who needs twenty pounds of blankets to sleep soundly, and there is something else that you've found makes a great addition to your sleep routine and really helps you sleep, I would love to hear from you.
If you are otherwise someone who had your own sleep problems or knows someone who did and you've found something that fixed it... I am tremendously happy for you. I also hope you are able to enjoy your triumph in its own right without evangelizing it to me. If your situation is not my situation, why should your solution work for me?
And I'm editing this just to make it clear: what I am saying is that I do not want advice about getting to sleep or dealing with insomnia from people, in general. I've hit my lifetime limit. Someone who can actually say that they're in the same situation as me (i.e., sleeping on a hard surface under a heavy weight)? There's a good chance that you might have something to say that helps me, and even if it's not anything new to me it's nice to know that someone else out there is dealing with the same things. Anybody else? No. The odds that you're going to have something to suggest that is not common sense, something I've found out on my own, something I've been told about a dozen times, something I've tried that didn't work, something I'm doing now, something I haven't tried because it doesn't actually apply to my life... it's vanishingly small.
You might think "Well, it won't hurt to suggest it."... but it does. It wears me down. If you want to help me sleep at night, don't give me another thing to keep my mind racing around in circles when I lie down. Don't be the person who says "I bet she's never thought of a white noise generator."
6. The person who's going to read the part about sleeping on the floor and comment or contact me in horror at the idea.
Yes, I know the importance of finding the right mattress. That's why I sleep on the floor. My right mattress is broad, and flat, and sturdy. It doesn't move when I move. That's very important, as I'm prone to hypnic jerks when I'm falling asleep if I feel any movement that doesn't originate within me... see, I've studied my own sleep habits. My mattress doesn't need to conform to the contours of my body... I have twenty pounds of blankets and a pile of pillows that can do that.
The how and why of me ending up sleeping on the floor isn't important (or anybody's business in particular), but it goes back to something I've known for years: when faced with the choice of an unknown/unfamiliar mattress and the floor, the floor was often the better choice for me, in terms of being able to fall asleep and wake up feeling comfortable and rested. Because of this I never fought for a bed when they were in short supply... I knew I could make do with the floor. I never had much trouble falling asleep on a hotel floor; I often had trouble falling asleep in a hotel bed.
Before the fall of 2009, it never occurred to me that I had an easier time sleeping on hotel floors than I'd ever had in my own or any other bed. When that clicked, it was a revelation and I am not exaggerating when I say it changed my life. Now I sleep on the floor. If the last three words of that sentence are jumping out at you and weirding you out, I'm sorry for you, but it's the one right before them that is important to me. I can lie awake in a bed to suit your expectations, or I can sleep on the floor.
I realize that if I never mentioned the fact that I sleep on the floor nobody would ever be able to call it into question, but I've had so many different people try to give me sleep-related advice that worked great for them/their partner/their cousin/whoever that I really feel the need to emphasize 1) how far I've already gone pursuing a good night's sleep, 2) how in tune I am with my body and its needs when it comes to sleep, and 3) how different my situation likely is from anyone else's.
7. How much I care about some of the things that make me raeg.
Really, I don't enjoy being angry or frustrated. There have been periods in my life where I've grasped the secret of not caring, of letting go, of letting things wash over me. As time goes by, with a lot of work and introspection and meditation, those tranquil periods have gotten both longer and deeper. I feel quite a bit less raeg typing this up than I would have a year ago, or probably even six months ago.
Note: I started writing this last night when I couldn't sleep, so some parts of it refer to that. The first section (on errant pedantry) was not actually inspired by the preceding anti-pedant rant... that's just something that's always on my rant-dar.
1. Errant pedantry. See any of several other entries on this subject.
Language is memes.
Not in the LOL I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER sense, but in the original, very cool and slightly scary sense: ideas as living things. Ideas as genes, as organisms. Ideas as things that can grow and reproduce and evolve and transmit themselves.
Imagine a virus that is fragile and generally damaging to its host. It has a high mortality rate, but some hosts it doesn't kill... it adjusts to them or they adjust to it, and they become carriers, and through them, it spreads.
Now imagine that there are supposed "rules" of language, mostly products of the 19th and 20th century, but invested with the force of authority by people who spoke authoritatively enough. These particular rules make no natural or intuitive sense. They run roughshod over the way language is actually used and the needs of language.
For instance, the prohibition against "singular they". We need a third person gender neutral pronoun. Our language cries out for one, especially in modern society. "They" is perfectly suited to answer the need. Its double-duty as a singular and plural pronoun perfectly parallels the second person pronoun "you", even down to its history ("you" was originally a plural). This is why it keeps cropping up, why people keep trying to use it as a singular pronoun independently. This isn't a meme that started in one place and spread. It crops up again and again, through parallel evolution. If it were stamped out completely, it would be back in a generation.
The idea that "singular they" is incorrect? It must contend with this reality, with a habitat that is much more naturally hospitable for the competing meme of "singular they" itself. This environment is not conducive to its long-term survival. So what does a meme... a thought-organism... do in this circumstance? It evolves a defense and propagation strategy, or it dies.
The prohibition against singular they hasn't died, obviously, so it must have a survival strategy... and in fact, the same strategy used by all the rules that I term "errant pedantry": the mutual less/fewer total mutual exclusivity, the prohibition against splitting infinitives, the American placement of all punctuation inside enclosing marks, the non-adjectival fun, and so on.
This strategy is a viral one, and I don't mean like a viral video... I mean something more nasty. For a class of 30 people taught English by someone who carries these memes, a small number of the students will manage to internalize the errant rules at a significant level. These will be most of the self-professed English nerds, the people who love language and writing and want to have a career as a teacher or writer or editor.
These people? They become the carriers. There doesn't have to be many of them. Just enough to fill out the ranks of teachers and writing industry professionals for the next generation.
Of the remainder, some people will be naturally immune by virtue of not really caring... but then there are the people who might have loved language, who might have cared, but that fire, that spark is killed by the virus. When faced with one too many metaphorical hand-slap for something that doesn't make sense, they would rather just give up... rather not bother than bend in an unnatural direction.
And that just makes me sad. I feel sorry for them and for the carriers both.
Now, perhaps more than one person reading this thinks I'm being a bit melodramatic with my talk of viruses and carriers. But please, stop and think: how much does it bug you to see me breaking these rules I talk about? If you know and care about these rules, then chances are that one or more of them is a major English pet peeve for you.
Why is this? The same teacher who taught you that these things are wrong taught you that many other things are wrong. You were probably told not to use slang in writing assignments, either... you were able to learn and internalize that to the point that you could do your assignments and do formal writing now, but do you forevermore gnash your teeth at all slang, everywhere?
Why do some things become pet peeves and other things don't? There are a lot of factors at play, but the harder something had to be drilled into your head for you to accept it, the more "wrong" the alternative will seem to you. It's human nature, and it's what the memes exploit to survive in the face of harsh and unforgiving reality. It's harder for them to lodge themselves in a given head than a rule that makes sense or is arbitrary but makes no less sense than any alternative, but once they're lodged there, they're sitting in the catbird seat... they're there to stay.
At the moment I'm really not raeging about this, though. The future looks pretty bright to me. The revolution is here. It's not happening overnight... etymology is faster than geology and biology, in most cases, but it doesn't move at the speed of our lives. Things seem to be on the right track to me... and if the shift won't be completed in my lifetime, I've still arranged my career in such a way that I can do what I like regardless.
2. People who insist that their pet "fanon" theories are supported/implied/suggested/proven by the text.
I could probably give specific examples for all seven items on this list, but I'm just going to give one particularly illustrative one.
There are some readers of Tales of MU who figure that Mackenzie's misadventures are best explained by assuming she has an Aura of Attraction that's always on. She has five or six pretty decent friends, maybe a dozen people she could call friends if she were to count them, three lovers, a variety of people who don't like her or want to make her life miserable, and an unknown number of people who pass by her without noticing or being noticed by her.
I think it's the "three lovers" thing that gets people, honestly. Poly is outside many people's experience, and thus, it must be explained.
The specific things that are pointed to seem specious at best. Like, she's not described as being drop-dead gorgeous, therefore, something must account for her sex appeal. Okay, so anybody who's kind of plain or average must be using mind-melting magic to get a lover or three? Amaranth made a speech near the beginning of the story about how much of that stuff is subjective... I didn't really expect that to sway many people who didn't already believe it, but I figured it must be a massive raging clue that I the author who is writing the thing doesn't believe in a strictly linear hierarchy of beauty/sexual appeal.
(Or, alternately, that the text which contains Mackenzie doesn't support the existence of such a hierarchy within it.)
I'm not going to go into any further detail debunking (or bunking) this, because honestly, it's not an invalid reading. That is to say, there's nothing in the canon I can point to that outright says Mackenzie doesn't have an aura of attractiveness. But that's the most that can be said about the text supporting its existence: nothing says otherwise. Pretty tenuous, no? In a story where quite a bit of information is insinuated, implied, suggested, written between the lines, or otherwise left for the readers to work out, there's no hint of it. There's no mention of anybody seeing anything strange in Mackenzie's aura. People who stare at or scrutinize her... whether with their eyes or through mystical means... don't uniformly fall in love with or obsess over her. Some people do, and these people tend to recur in the story more so than people who examine her and move on, for obvious reasons. But no one's ever examined her aura and said so much as "Hmmm, there's something weird and unexplained there. I wonder if it will perhaps be important later? Also, you're pretty."
To put it in short and simple terms: there is no there there.
If folks were just advancing this as their pet theory in the comments, it would be one thing... it's the fact that they'll sit there and claim that the story "heavily implies" or "strongly suggests" it that put this item on the list. No. This is conspiracy theory level of thought: "I have this pet theory. Facts that do not conflict with it are proof. Facts which align with it are proof. Facts that do conflict with it will be ignored or reshaped until they are proof."
Like, here is something that the text does establish: Mackenzie is delicious. Any kind of human-eating predator finds her smell and taste tantalizing. This is important. It has mythic-backstory significance. It affects the plot in the present day. It has been implied in places and made explicit in others. It is well-established. It is canon.
And yet here's some dude in the comments claiming that no, she doesn't actually smell tasty... that's just her aura of attraction that the story totally implies she has coming into play and affecting predators.
No.
This isn't me speaking as author coming out with Word of God from on high. Leaving any special knowledge I have that exists outside the text aside, I will say again: no. The aura of attraction isn't in the text. The aroma of appetizingness is.
The fact that some people take their fanon theories and not only elevate them to the status of canon but then argue against canon with them really ticks me off.
3. People who ignore what the text of the story says when it conflicts with how they want to view a character.
This is sort of a special case for 2. I've railed in the comments against people who want to defend The Man on the basis of "What has he actually done that's so wrong?", seemingly because they find him charming/cool/whatever and therefore want him to be good, or at least not evil. By the same token as people interpreting the story based on their desire for The Man to be right/good, there have been quite a few comments here and there from people who are clearly spinning things based on the idea that the characters they find annoying/stupid (Mackenzie, Steff, and Amaranth, mostly) must be wrong. About everything.
I'm not demanding that everybody who reads the story revile The Man. When I introduced him, I expected him to be a popular character... popular as a character. I'm also not demanding that everybody like Mackenzie. Part of my whole "let's do everything wrong" experiment that was underlying the launch of Tales of MU was making a protagonist who is not necessarily likable in the conventional ways in which a protagonist is supposed to be likable. The people who like her anyway tickle me. The people who hate her and keep reading also tickle me. But then somebody who hates her says something that's kind of at a 90 degree angle to what actually happened and is only supported by the fact that they hate her? Raeg.
There's a bit of overlap between The Man's apologists and Mackenzie's haters. One of the most common pieces of evidence brought forth for why The Man can't be all that bad is that Mackenzie doesn't trust him, and Mackenzie has poor judgment.
Yes, it's true that Mackenzie doesn't have good judgment. It's also true that there have been third person omniscient (or at least not-unreliable) narrated-stories that depict The Man doing some truly skeevy things involving a minor. Is Mackenzie so unreliable a narrator that her dislike of The Man makes everything he did in those other stories okay? I don't think so. Some people do.
Raeg.
4. People who do not understand the many, vast, and considerable differences between the myriad hats that I own.
They are many, vast, and considerable. Any hat I'm considering buying is clearly also very different from any other hat I might own or be wearing, or else there would be no reason for me to consider buying it in the first place.
QED, Jack.
QED.
5. Internet-based sleep specialists.
I understand the phenomenon whereby somebody is so relieved to have found the solution to a problem that plagued them that they become an evangelist for their solution... but when you do this, you become something like a Scientologist: "whatever your problem is, I know my answer fits it." It's annoying. I get it all over, as many people with chronic/congenital health problems do, but I get it most often with my sleep issues, perhaps because more people have (or know someone who has) sleep issues.
I live with insomnia. I do not have sleep apnea. No matter how convenient it would be for me to have a sleep-related breathing disorder in terms of allowing you to supply me with a solution, I am afraid I simply don't have one. Nobody I've slept with/in the presence of has reported me breathing weird. I don't go to sleep and then wake up in the morning feeling mysteriously fatigued. There are rare occasions when I sleep for 6-8 hours but it's low quality sleep and I'm groggy the next day, but they are rare and they usually correlate to something like I drank caffeine too recently. Generally speaking when I am able to sleep for more than four hours, it's good sleep and I wake up feeling refreshed.
And much of the time when I wake up after four hours I feel (temporarily) invigorated... it's the boundless energy in my brain that's keeping me awake. It's only when I go through a stretch of time of not being able to sleep more than four hours (or I'm worn down by other things) that I start to feel the effects.
This is among the reasons why I am not a good candidate for a sleep study. Those are used for when you go to sleep and you wake up tired. They are not indicated for people who can't sleep in the first place. I can't even imagine how many sessions it would take for me to actually fall into anything like a normal sleep. You put me on my back with a dozen or more wires and things to measure my breathing and movement and I will lay there for eight hours without falling asleep, I guarantee it. What does that tell anybody? That I don't sleep on my back, I don't sleep with devices hooked up to me... I don't sleep lightly or easily in general, period, and that is not something that a sleep study is designed to diagnose or suggest treatment for.
How do I sleep?
Mostly on my side or stomach.
Under twenty pounds of blankets.
On the floor.
None of that guarantees sleep, but its presence all makes a big difference. A valerian-and-melatonin cocktail also helps. There are nights when my brain just won't shut off, though, and on those nights nothing I do will let me get to sleep (this night is one of them). If you are also a floor-sleeper who needs twenty pounds of blankets to sleep soundly, and there is something else that you've found makes a great addition to your sleep routine and really helps you sleep, I would love to hear from you.
If you are otherwise someone who had your own sleep problems or knows someone who did and you've found something that fixed it... I am tremendously happy for you. I also hope you are able to enjoy your triumph in its own right without evangelizing it to me. If your situation is not my situation, why should your solution work for me?
And I'm editing this just to make it clear: what I am saying is that I do not want advice about getting to sleep or dealing with insomnia from people, in general. I've hit my lifetime limit. Someone who can actually say that they're in the same situation as me (i.e., sleeping on a hard surface under a heavy weight)? There's a good chance that you might have something to say that helps me, and even if it's not anything new to me it's nice to know that someone else out there is dealing with the same things. Anybody else? No. The odds that you're going to have something to suggest that is not common sense, something I've found out on my own, something I've been told about a dozen times, something I've tried that didn't work, something I'm doing now, something I haven't tried because it doesn't actually apply to my life... it's vanishingly small.
You might think "Well, it won't hurt to suggest it."... but it does. It wears me down. If you want to help me sleep at night, don't give me another thing to keep my mind racing around in circles when I lie down. Don't be the person who says "I bet she's never thought of a white noise generator."
6. The person who's going to read the part about sleeping on the floor and comment or contact me in horror at the idea.
Yes, I know the importance of finding the right mattress. That's why I sleep on the floor. My right mattress is broad, and flat, and sturdy. It doesn't move when I move. That's very important, as I'm prone to hypnic jerks when I'm falling asleep if I feel any movement that doesn't originate within me... see, I've studied my own sleep habits. My mattress doesn't need to conform to the contours of my body... I have twenty pounds of blankets and a pile of pillows that can do that.
The how and why of me ending up sleeping on the floor isn't important (or anybody's business in particular), but it goes back to something I've known for years: when faced with the choice of an unknown/unfamiliar mattress and the floor, the floor was often the better choice for me, in terms of being able to fall asleep and wake up feeling comfortable and rested. Because of this I never fought for a bed when they were in short supply... I knew I could make do with the floor. I never had much trouble falling asleep on a hotel floor; I often had trouble falling asleep in a hotel bed.
Before the fall of 2009, it never occurred to me that I had an easier time sleeping on hotel floors than I'd ever had in my own or any other bed. When that clicked, it was a revelation and I am not exaggerating when I say it changed my life. Now I sleep on the floor. If the last three words of that sentence are jumping out at you and weirding you out, I'm sorry for you, but it's the one right before them that is important to me. I can lie awake in a bed to suit your expectations, or I can sleep on the floor.
I realize that if I never mentioned the fact that I sleep on the floor nobody would ever be able to call it into question, but I've had so many different people try to give me sleep-related advice that worked great for them/their partner/their cousin/whoever that I really feel the need to emphasize 1) how far I've already gone pursuing a good night's sleep, 2) how in tune I am with my body and its needs when it comes to sleep, and 3) how different my situation likely is from anyone else's.
7. How much I care about some of the things that make me raeg.
Really, I don't enjoy being angry or frustrated. There have been periods in my life where I've grasped the secret of not caring, of letting go, of letting things wash over me. As time goes by, with a lot of work and introspection and meditation, those tranquil periods have gotten both longer and deeper. I feel quite a bit less raeg typing this up than I would have a year ago, or probably even six months ago.
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on 2011-02-18 09:05 pm (UTC)Those are horrible, but I would personally expand to "people who have read this one article about whatever chronic condition you have and want to ask you about whether you tried it, etc., etc., ad nauseum."
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on 2011-02-18 09:08 pm (UTC)I might have got an uptick when House did an episode on "ragged red fibers", but since the real focus of the episode was John Larroquette and his unrelated persistent vegetative state I dodged the bullet.
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on 2011-02-18 09:10 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-18 09:13 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-18 09:16 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-19 05:58 am (UTC)If I had a nickel for every person/book/etc. I've wanted to throw across the room because for them The Only Migraine Triggers Are Food, I could take you out to a very nice lunch.
My migraine triggers are hormones, swift changes in the weather (particularly the barometric pressure), and fine particulates (barbecue smoke, aerosols, etc.). I can do a little about the latter, but the former? Are out of my control.
Sorry. Didn't mean to vent at you. But again I say amen.
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on 2011-02-18 09:11 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-18 09:12 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-18 09:29 pm (UTC)Also, anyone who uses the term "Grammar Nazi" deserves my ire.
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on 2011-02-18 09:41 pm (UTC)But "errant pedant" is just classy.
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on 2011-02-18 09:25 pm (UTC)Protagonists also just tend to be anoying.
4. Your tiny impotent rage about this will always amuse me.
I keep trying to do this meme, but it starts with pride and I'm not good at that.
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on 2011-02-18 09:42 pm (UTC)4. But they aren't even the saaaaaaaaaaame, Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack.
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on 2011-02-18 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-19 11:47 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-19 02:12 am (UTC)The only thing I've found that helps at all (other than melatonin, which you already use) is controlling the light I'm exposed to with a combination of blackout curtains and a SAD lamp.
I've also noticed a correlation between the weather and the times my brain won't shut off: sudden drops in air pressure, especially when accompanied by a rise in temperature are sure to result in a sleepless night. Sadly, I haven't found any way to fix this, but I've found it's a good thing to know if I'm ever lying awake trying to decide whether to keep waiting for sleep to come, or give up and do something else.
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on 2011-02-19 12:06 pm (UTC)I have not weighed my blankets (yet), I estimated their weight by finding the listed weight of some of the specific blankets that I've purchased recently and approximations for the other ones that I've had for years.
Melatonin has changed my life.
on 2011-02-19 03:03 am (UTC)She's not on the floor with 20# of blankets. . .yet.
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on 2011-02-19 06:29 am (UTC)I've had sleep problems my whole life that (like you) are just due to my being unlucky, and not something diagnosable or treatable, so I try to stick with the simple stuff above. (Ironic, me writing this after 1am, but it's Friday night). I in no way am claiming that any of this will fix you, but if you decide to try it I hope it helps; it helps me most, but not all, of the time.
P.s. I've read that sleeping on the floor is excellent for your back.
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on 2011-02-19 11:55 am (UTC)Edit: I know you're not couching this as The Ultimate Solution to all my problems, and maybe that's all it seemed my rant was about... I was writing for emotion, not clarity. But, seriously, I'm touchy about this because I've found that even if I make a post that comes out and says in bold "Please do not reply to this with advice.", I'll get at least one response going "I know you said no advice, but I just wanted to let you know..." or even just jumping into it without the disclaimer, and really, that sort of thing is the reason that this made my wrath list.
I just... some of the advice I've got in the past has been helpful, but most of it is stuff that strikes me as being common sense or is really easy to find, and so I've found it and tried it and am doing it or found it didn't work or didn't try it because it doesn't fit my life/situation in the first place, and it's just... the 100th person to tell me about lavender bath salts and chamomile tea doesn't know they're the 100th person, but there's no reason to imagine that they're the first.
It's frustrating. I want to be able to talk about my issues without having to turn off comments* but without hearing the same advice repeated again and again.
*Especially since that would just make the same people comment elsewhere with "I know you don't want comments on the _____, but..."
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on 2011-02-19 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-19 04:32 pm (UTC)I used to sleep on the floor sometimes, and - particularly on my old king-sized bed - I found that sleeping diagonally helped me fall & stay asleep. All I'm saying is that people are weird & in a world this size, even unique people are bound to repeat. (I can't decide if that last sentiment is special or spechul. But I like it.)
"May what works for you, continue to do so."
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on 2011-02-21 11:19 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-22 12:57 am (UTC)