who needs sleep?

All I want to do is sleep. (I can't because I still have class from 7:30 to 10!)

I am an ogre when I don't get enough sleep. (Though with time I've gotten better at hiding my inner ogre, from my kids and myself.)

I get dizzy and overwhelmed and lose track of time when I don't get enough sleep. Everything is much more impossible when you're tired. Stairs are taller. Emails are more cryptic and responses elusive. Train rides are longer and offices are farther away.

And I knew last night when I got home that the responsible thing would've been to take a quick shower, pack a lunch for tomorrow and climb into bed...

But after a long day of bustling and hustling and moving forward, of completing tasks and dealing with things, it doesn't feel quite fair, to have to go to sleep already. It's like, hey wait a sec -- I didn't yet get to do anything I wanted to do! It's a disappointment, knowing that all I accomplished was checking off boxes of things that "needed to get done" - no surprises, no intrigue, no spontaneous games or unexpected windfalls.

Remember when we were kids, and we'd look at each other and ask, "NOW what do you want to do? What should we play?.. I have an idea for what we could do!"

I guess that's an annoyingly universal part of adulthood... It's predictable and boring at all the wrong times, and catches you off guard just as soon as you're not ready for it... Being a grown up means staying up late, but still having to set the alarm... Being technically allowed to go anywhere you want, but you only end up going to the same three or four places with any regularity.

I guess that's the price of being allowed to eat candy before lunch, or having a credit card you can use to buy stuff, or staying up late or being able to sleep over at friend's houses whenever you want or go places by yourself. All the sought-after prizes of being a grown up came tied up with strings - two-year contracts, fine print, layaway plans. Alarm clocks. All that open space and time got cluttered up with Metrocards, pin numbers, tax forms...

Things you never needed when someone else was there to escort you around and tell you when you had to go to sleep.