lack of sleep

my father has said that in the years he lived with my mother, he never saw her sleep. she has a tendency to wake up very early (and maybe in her younger years she went to bed late too).

i seem to have inherited some of that "i'll sleep when i'm dead" attitude genetically.

i think i associate my sleeping past sunrise with being ill or being depressed and end up feeling weak if i don't get up with the sun.  as a kid, if i woke up after my siblings, i felt like i had missed something incredibly important - what had they been doing while i was asleep?! waking up "late" gave me anxiety even when i was little.

i function efficiently with about 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night. i think i would do best sleeping 5 hrs at night with a one hour nap in the middle of the day; but ever since i stopped working in daycare that daytime nap has gotten harder to come by...

more recently i have been waking up at 3:30 in the morning. sometimes i can go straight back to sleep and other times i absolutely can't.  this has a similar effect on my psyche as my sleeping late does. i end up thinking that something is wrong with me; some part of me is malfunctioning. why did i wake up when the world is dark and quiet? another kind of anxiety is created there.

sleep is such a mysterious thing. we spend anywhere from a 3rd to a 4th of our lives asleep (7-10 years for me thus far). and while i enjoy the nebulous understanding we have of our dreams and what they mean (there is so much room for interpretation and discovery!) on a practical level, i don't always like how mysterious my sleeping patterns are and how they effect my mood.

i appreciate that my body may be trying to tell me something. i'm just not sure what it is.

return to sasha/return to BAM

the image above is from sasha waltz's new piece entitled tides (gezeiten). unlike her piece entitled bodies (korper) which i saw in college, this one didn't change my life.

perhaps it was due to the fact that in my older age i find it harder to stay completely awake past a certain hour; or maybe it was the gin and tonic before the show that did me in; but it might have just been the way the piece spiraled a little off course that inspired me to nap at 8:30pm in the gilman opera house.

it was a shame. the opening of the dance was so incredibly beautiful and original, and then it became predictably abstract and chaotic. and it made me think - this is why no one comes to see modern dance....

to be totally honest (not a lot of people know that i think this.....) i believe that for the most part, modern dance is annoying and pretentious. there have been only a handful of choreographers/works that i thought were truly wonderful. typically, i prefer performance that utilizes several parts of the human instrument, like the voice and the intellect. i can't get excited about art unless it is presenting some idea/emotion for me to consider, challenge, experience...

typically, straight up "dance" doesn't do that for me. except when made by people like sasha waltz.

despite not loving the piece as a whole - i thought tides had a gorgeous beginning half hour. i remember thinking, "how is it possible that she can still find these new and beautiful things to do with human bodies on stage? when do we run out of 'new' things to do?"

and then i started thinking about how eventually, won't we run out of new dances? new book titles? new recipes? new movie plots?

it was around that time that i started to nod off