When I was a kid, I took bed time for granted. I screamed, and I begged, and I pleaded to stay up just a little longer.
(This worked, by the way. I probably had the latest bed time of any child my age. I specifically remember my brother and me begging my father to let us stay up just one more hour to watch a Beavis and Butthead episode where Beavis cut off his finger with an chain saw. That was the actual reason we gave.
Father gave us permission to stay up and watch it.
Though, I think he regretted this parental decision later when Carter cut off the tip of his finger with an electric hedge trimmer only a few weeks later).
Now, like every true Adult, I look forward to bed time.
Bed time is happy time. It's cuddle-in-the-covers time. It's oh-ma-gosh-my-feet-are-so-toasty time.
A few nights ago, I happily got into my night shirt, wrapped myself in a cocoon of covers, and started to slip of into dream land.
When I heard a strange, electronic noise in my room.
It sounded like a computer trying to read a CD.
'The fuck?', I thought.
And then I remembered the brand new external hard drive I bought and moved into my room.
I figured it must have an internal fan that switched on when I was dosing off.
I have no patience when my bed time is interrupted.
Problem solved, I poured myself back into bed...
12:40am:
'Oh, HELL NO'
The computer. It HAS to be my computer...
Crisis averted!
1:20am:
At this point, I pretty much lost it.
I turned off every thing I could find.
My TV.
My collection of knock off mp3 and media players from Cambodia.
It didn't help.
2:40am:
3:40am:
4:40am:
5:40am:
Around 6am I was convinced someone had planted a recording device somewhere in my room to watch me sleep, and that's what was making so much noise.
Who had planted it?
Vampires, of course.
I owe this theory to three things:
1) My intense fear that people are watching me
2) Sleep-deprivation induced psychosis
3) The True Blood marathon I had just finished watching before bed
At 7am my alarm went off, and I had to get up.
I'd probably had a total of 10 minutes REM sleep, and 7 hours of psychotic panic.
I could barely function.
And I couldn't remember how to get ready.
At work I was useless.
I just slumped over my desk and stared at people, wondering whether they were secretly vampiric voyeurs.
Later, we found out no vampires were involved at all.
An extensive search revealed nothing.
We tore my room apart, and found no source of the noise.
Frustrated, and confused, we ate dinner and went to bed.
The noise was gone.
Two days later, after accidentally leaving our washing in the washing machine, we figured out where the noise came from...
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