No rest for the (occasionally) wicked

I need to get more sleep. A smiling doctor in a white coat, with pens in his pocket and a clipboard, informed me of this yesterday evening while I was doodling around on the internet waiting for an email. His picture appeared next to a chart with the title “How much sleep you need — by age”, which informed me that I should be getting about 8,25 hours a night. That’s a few minutes short of 58 hours a week, and at the moment I’m running almost a whole day behind.

I have no noisy flatmates, no screaming baby, no one choosing to dig up the road outside my house at 1am (all reasonable excuses used by others). I realise it’s my own stupid fault. I don’t have to sit up watching A Fish Called Wanda just because it’s on. The same goes for Dr Strangelove, and I know that renting a three-hour long DVD when I know I’m only getting home after 11pm is a dumb thing to do (especially when I know that I will want to see at least part of it with the director’s commentary — geeky but true). But even this doesn’t account for all the wasted hours that I could have spent blissfully snoozing and behaving like a proper grown-up who has some appreciation of the effect that adequate rest has on brain function.

I think it started when I moved to Jo’burg. I thought I had arrived in the land of plenty far as live music, places to go out and one-off parties went, and pretty soon sleep on weekends became this abstract, vague idea that sounded nice when other people talked about it. I thought that afternoon naps (viva la siesta) would solve the problem, but my next door neighbour decided, at about the same time, to take up the trombone — and of course quiet, lazy afternoons are the obvious time to practise.

If there is one thing worse than exhaustion, it’s exhaustion accompanied by a noise-induced headache, so I chose to spend those lazy afternoons in a coffee shop, replacing sleep with the caffeine that would see me through the rest of the weekend. By Sunday night I would vow that the next weekend would be different, but something would inevitably come up during the week that would ruin my plans.

It hasn’t changed much since I moved here (although my neighbour has progressed to playing scales, and is improving every day). Saturday nights are generally a write-off, I’m still seeing sunrises from the wrong side on a regular basis and I can’t really remember what Sunday mornings look like (although I do know what they sound like, as the church bells wake me up just as I’m dozing off).

The past few weeks have been especially hectic, with birthdays and travelling and an especially good run of interesting gigs, not to mention the Art Fair. The long weekend is approaching and it’s looking like a beacon of hope, because many places are using My Cokefest as an excuse to close down for the weekend, or haven’t planned anything especially interesting.

It’s only one weekend, though, because next week the brilliant Cocorosie-esque duo Cabins in the Forest arrive for a string of gigs to launch their debut album, and some interesting international bands will be following the week after that. But that can wait. This weekend means no make-up, plenty of sleep and lots of fruit juice. Unless something really good comes up.