Blank Noise

I yawned for the umpteenth time at work today and immediately checked the computer time stamp. It read 11:01, 07.07.2011. And I wished it was more like 16:20, 07.07.2011. I wanna go home!

Didn't sleep well last night. Stayed up till 12:44 talking to VJ and watched an episode of BONES. All the while hoping that I would get drowsy enough to sleep, but to no avail. By 1:00 I knew that it was going to be one of those nights. I switched off the light, switched on my bedside lamp and shut the laptop. I wasn't going to let the empty house and the confusion in my head get to me. I blame it all on the empty house. My land-lady with whom I share the apartment is on a 10 day road trip across Germany. With Juli, the golden retriever who also shares our apartment. Empty houses give me the creeps. I need people around me.

I willed myself to fall asleep. Sheep counting never worked for me. So I picked at random thoughts from my head and tried to figure out the story behind it. Here goes...

a)

I am not an insomniac. I never was. Nocturnal maybe, but insomniac? No! I was fondly calledKumbhakarni when I was a kid. Yes, I was that kid. There are times when I need complete silence and darkness to sleep. Even a slight sliver of light through the dammed blinds would get me all irritated. Even the sound of Chand or Mridu on the phone outside the room in my PG in Bangalore would make me so restless that I would ask them to please go to the kitchen and talk. And then on some days, I can fall asleep even in the dead center of Forum Mall. Lets just say I have sleep issues and leave it at that.

b)

To make matters worse, I am not at all a morning person. No matter how many hours of snooze time I get, I always feel grumpy in the mornings. My favorite office wallpaper was Garfield in PJ's with the caption: I'd like mornings better if they started later. My colleagues thought it was hilarious. Seriously. Because I was invariably in office by 8 AM. The reason was nothing else but the fact that I hate Bangalore traffic and the transit from Koramangala to Whitefield is no joke. Nothing to do with the fact that I was a model employee or whatever.

c)

But I digress. However, lets go back to that Garfield thought. It's been quite sometime since I even thought of Garfield. And that again brings me back to IKEA. No, not the store. My panda, IKEA. Whom VJ threatened to behead. I don't know why. But yeah, IKEA is (or rather was) my sleep pillow. I had another one in Bangalore which I think I gave to Radz before I left. And that was a real pillow. I mean it was a baby pillow that was gifted to me. My sister gifted me IKEA once I got here. On nights when I can't sleep at all, it's only IKEA that helps. I named him so cause my sister bought it from IKEA and I was too jet-lagged to come up with a name when she thrust him in my arms on the first day. I checked the label and decided to just go with IKEA as she demanded that I name him at that very moment. So yeah, cuddling IKEA was the only solution on most nights when I was sleepless. He was too big to pack for the summer. So I had to leave him behind. I think he is packed away in some box sitting somewhere in a closet in NC state. Before IKEA, my sleep buddy was a Garfield I had at home. And by home I mean Pondichéry. I loved that Garfield! Again a gift from some relative in the US. Orange, big, cuddly and with whiskers! I tried to bring him with me to the US. But somehow Mom would find him and kept throwing him out whenever I tried to sneak him in one of the suitcases. I miss them. All I have here is another normal pillow. Which is no fun, if you ask me. Not cuddly, not furry, not cute, no bright colors and no whiskers :(

I gave up around 1:30 and switched on the laptop again, queued up 10 episodes of F.R.I.E.N.D.S on WMP and set the volume to the lowest possible. The noise soothed me. I was about 15 minutes into "The one with the birthing video" when I started feeling drowsing. I quickly switched sides, grabbed my pillow and woke up at 5:30 in the morning.

When I am creeped out, lonely and over-analyzing stuff in my head I sometimes need a kind of blank noise to soothe me. Be it on my iPod or just plain old TV. While in college when I used to do all-nighters for exams, I used to leave the TV on some channel on low and study. The noise helps. Sometimes. Because the blank noise helps drown out the noise in my head.