Sleeping

Ordinarily, I like change. I think fighting the inevitable flow of life simply makes people upset for no good reason.

Sometimes this means letting go of the things we hold near and dear to our hearts, but that’s the price we pay for living in this modern world. As with most things, however, there are exceptions.

Like my pillow.

Somehow over the past decade or so, my pillow has evolved from a source of comfort and rest to a floppy piece of fabric unfit for man or beast. The thing has lost any source of support.

I stuck by my old friend for a long time. I would fold him up to try and make a half-sized pillow that would meet my needs, but that never quite worked. More often than not, I ended up with an arm underneath the pillow for some support, which would kind of help me sleep, but always resulted in my arm falling asleep.

We have plans to buy a new bed because our current mattress has seen better days, but we started the process the other day by shopping for pillows.

I woke up the other morning at my usual time for a weekday, sometime around 5:30. I don’t like that I have to get up that early, but my body has adjusted, and I don’t even need an alarm clock anymore.

Like I usually do, I headed right for the computer. I don’t even try to pretend to be anything other than obsessed with e-mail and social networking. It’s easier to admit you are a geek than to make up excuses to deny the fact.

So I logged into Facebook and started checking out what my friends had posted through the night. Thanks to the aforementioned geekdom and my big family and assorted other connections, I have a lot of friends on there.

At the top of my list was a post from one of the college students I knew from my last job. I like keeping in touch with them for many different reasons.

She also had just woken up. However, her status bemoaned being up “in the middle of the night.”

I had to laugh. I had totally forgotten that my usual wakeup time is an ungodly hour for so many people. I had forgotten that my college self would never believe that 5:30 a.m. would be a familiar time of day in the future.