alexandraerin

I really don't like being angry and frustrated and worked up over things, but I have a brain that has a tendency to latch onto a thing and not let go of it. There may be some people for whom "letting the anger out" is helpful (though my favorite medical journal suggests otherwise in item #6 of this exhaustively and rigorously peer-reviewed study), but I'm sure not one of them. Anger leads to more anger which leads to more anger which leads to more anger which leads to more anger which leads to Vader theatrically checking his watch and then playing with a yo-yo or paddle ball in the background or having a montage of boring housework or something which leads to more anger...

I have a variety of strategies for dealing with and avoiding this situation, but they are evidently not always enough.

So I'm going to try something else. When I get fixated on something that riles me up... and possibly just when I feel like I need a boost... I'm going to make a post about something that makes me happy. In the future, I'm not going to preamble on about what I'm doing, because reminding myself that I'm feeling down or angry is counterproductive. I'll just use the same tag as I'm using on this post.

So, here we go... today's Thing That Makes Me Feel Happy...

Finding Other Floor-Sleepers

There are few things about my life that I'm as self-conscious about as where I sleep, so it's always nice to get a reminder that I'm not the only one. Sleeping on the floor makes me happy to begin with, for a variety of reasons and one of the most important one is at the start of this sentence. Sleeping.

Then there's the rather homogeneous quality that floors tend to have. Some are more or less even, some are carpeted and some are wood and some are tiled, but just as "wherever you go, there you are"... wherever you go, there's the floor. It's there waiting for you in every hotel room you stay in. It's there at the house of the friend you stay over with. It's there waiting for you when you get home.

And then we get into the sappy sentimental stuff... when you lie alone in a bed, you almost can't help but know it. When I lie on the floor here in Omaha, not only could I very well be lying on the same floor I laid on in Hagerstown, but there could be a bed next to me and Jack could be on it. This isn't the case, but I don't feel the conspicuous absence the way I would in an empty bed.

So, yes, sleeping on the floor has become one of the sources of pure and simple joy in my life. (Once again, see also: sleeping.), but I feel self-conscious about it because it seems so weird and completely out of bounds. We have beds - they are for sleeping in. Right?

I've said before I don't have guilty pleasures because I don't find guilt pleasurable. Sleeping on the floor is almost a guilty pleasure, insofar as I enjoy it a lot except when I'm feeling all conflicted about the weirdness/wrongness of it. So finding other people whose experiences match mine is... well, it's not so much that it causes some kind of deep and transcendental joy or anything. But it reassures me that the joy I feel for floor-sleeping is okay.

What's interesting to me is how much overlap there seems to be between "people who prefer hard, flat surfaces to sleep on" and "people who need to be held down by great big massy blankets in order to sleep well".

So, anyway... hooray for the floor. Hooray for people who sleep on it. And now I'm going to go lie down for a cat nap near the front door, so I won't miss my package if it comes.