Much Better, Thanks

Well, as per design, my bod has been healing itself from Friday's exertions. :-) I can feel my shirts fitting differently; I'm sure it's just from swelling and inflammation, but it's like a promissory note of things to come. Metabolism has been all over the place, from torpid to hyper, and between the two I'm recovering belt notches, so I'm sure this is all the equivalent of "under construction" animated GIFs. Advil is cutting the discomfort nicely, now, so citizens concerned for my safety need no longer worry.

In other news, Tripp has given his blog a makeover! Be warned, it's pretty opaque in terms of ecclesiastical pondering, but then when isn't he? ;-) He's also spawned a spinoff page devoted to devotions, i.e., poetic and contemplative meditation and prayer from many different traditions. Heck, give 'em a whirl!

Yet more news, or rather a plug: Wendy's recommendation of the book The Promise of Sleep by William C. Dement and Christopher Vaughan has been a good one; I snagged the book, and after just a little reading I feel sleepier already. ;-) Seriously though, one of the frequent wellsprings of argument between my ex-wife and myself was sleep: I have always seen the need for sleep as an imposition, and she makes more of a hobby or way of life of it. Between the two of us we had all sorts of odd theories about sleep, and neither of us had any idea what we were talking about, there being few non-scholarly works to which to refer.

In any event, Dement (who's obviously the primary voice of the book) has had a lot of experience pinning down the phenomenon of sleep over the last several decades, and writes with authority, if a little too much zealous flair from time to time. I'm getting a lot out of the book, and now that I know for a fact that I've been sleep-deprived since age 18 or so, I'm hot to get myself back up to scratch.

By the way, one popular myth floating around is that you "can't make up lost sleep," which has never quite squared with my experience. According to Dement, not only can you make up lost sleep, you have to, or your body'll do it for you by threatening to put you to sleep at the wheel, making you drowsy at work, or generally rendering you listless and inattentive. Dement's got a website that mainly deals with sleep apnea, but also has some interesting articles on "sleep debt" and other cool things, if you dig deep enough.

-Rich