Morning, y’all. I is a…

Morning, y'all. I is a little sleepy, but I have resolved that I am tired of recounting the details of how badly I've been sleeping. Just take it as written that almost every night of the third trimester offers new and interesting patterns of sleep deprivation. For example, last night, went to bed at 10, woke up at 11:30, came downstairs hungry, had Kevin make me a scrambled egg and buttered toast and juice, hung out a bit with him and newly-arrived houseguest Alex G., went back upstairs, chatted with Kev in bed for a while longer, fell asleep again around 1. After that, slept pretty well until 7, aside from the getting up every hour and a half to pee which is now the order of the night.

See? Not that interesting a not-sleeping story. The egg was good, though.

I'm not sure how much I'll be seeing of Alex while he's here this week -- he's working during the day, and tonight I have a Rasaka meeting and tomorrow I have dinner at Satya's and I think he leaves Thursday. Hopefully we'll get to chat a bit, though. It's good to see him, even if briefly. He asked whether I'd be up for a board game after the Rasaka meeting tonight, and though I dearly love board games, esp. with Alex, I just don't know -- I may be falling down exhausted. Or I may be just fine.

One of my students yesterday commented on how much energy I seemed to have, for someone at this stage of pregnancy. One of my other students (hi, Lori) commented, "Not if you read her journal!" It's true that if you just see me for a few hours of the day, it's probably very misleading, because at any given point, I can be up and bouncy and cheerful and energetic -- yesterday, I was on campus from 4 - 8, and was just fine through that whole period. Had good advising meeting with a student, went to a really good reading by Scott Spencer, visiting writer, taught enjoyable fiction class. Fun was had by all. But of course, I was crashing on the couch immediately before and after, and had to really drag myself off of it -- most of the world just doesn't see that part.

Interestingly, this is a similar pattern to when I was broken-hearted in Utah, the year Kev and I broke up, and when I was really falling apart and depressed a year or two ago -- even when things are horrible, I can usually pull myself together for a few hours for public appearances, and generally do, so most people have no clue there's anything wrong with me. I can even, sort of, forget that things horrible. And then the event is over and it all comes crashing down again.

Later on, when I'm doing better and able to talk about it, friends have been upset that I was falling apart and they didn't even know. But I promise, it's not me trying to fool my friends about how happy I am, or how well my life is going. It's just a coping strategy, and it happens entirely automatically. I'm sort of surprised everyone doesn't do this, to be honest. Maybe I'm better at partitioning off the broken bits of my brain that most people are. I don't know.