SLEEP

Most of my life I fought sleep. Live to read was my motto and if that was under the covers well after midnight with a battery rigged with a wire coil and flashlight bulb, so be it. It's not like I learned anything in school anyway. One might, at this end of the spectrum of life, point to the fact that I slept through class but I wouldn't. Until chemistry, classes were pretty much useless. One could read the whole year in about a week. This didn't help much with math but then they wrote crappy math books way back then. They're much better now.

I used to try to cudgel the brain to sleep since that was what kept me up after I left the navy where I slept very well indeed. 20 hour days do that to one. I would lie awake at 0200 in San Diego and tell my brain that if we weren't asleep in 20 minutes we were going for a run. Usually my brain knew I wasn't kidding. I ran a lot back in those nights. Well, I might run down W. Grape St. to Harbor Drive but then I always slowed to a walk as I walked the length of the harbor to Tom Ham's Lighthouse on Harbor Island and back. Wouldn't want to overdo it. A five mile walk was about good enough to induce sleep.

I managed pretty well in this vein until another life changing event. That one went as well as expected, no complaints. I learned that one really can live, function rationally and get by quite well on about 3 hours of sleep per night. I knew that going in after my navy experience but it was an interesting discovery in later years that sleep is malleable.