Insomnia… if you can call it that?

I will start with a quote from one of my favorite movies Fight Club. “When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep... and you're never really awake.” I think I might have insomnia, but I’m not sure because I don’t know enough about it. Sometimes I’ll try to go to sleep at a decent time and I cannot get to sleep no matter how hard I try or how tired I am. It’s really strange though because it only happens while I’m at Virginia Tech. I’m not sure if it’s the beds or the rooms or the whole “college” attitude but it’s very difficult for me to catch Z’s. However, while I’m at home I can sleep for 12 hours straight with no problem. But at school I can barely get 5 hours of sleep at a time without waking up. Sometimes though, it helps me out a lot because I will be restless in the early hours in the morning and I will decide to go study or do homework instead of wasting time. There are no distractions that late at night which is great. It feels sort of weird knowing that your most productive hours during the day besides being in class are between one and three in the morning. Even facebook is a useless distraction at that hour because there is nobody online to talk too. During the day I feel fine most of the time and I’m rarely ever tired (excluding the few minutes after I wake up and before I get in the shower. I think everyone feels like a zombie that early in the morning). However, I am slightly worried about the possibility of health repercussions of not sleeping well, but I’m the type of person that lives in the present so I’ll worry about that later. Also, one of the coolest parts of sleeping lightly is I can remember my dreams a lot better. For instance, last night I went to China, saw The Who in concert and they played a Michael Jackson song and somewhere in that mess there was some sort of physicist or magician doing tricks with magnetic fields and stuff. It was really weird, but awesome.

Some of the Randomness in the back of my head

This week I have two thoughts that have recently been rattling around in the back of my head. First, as a musician, I am normally tuned in to recent news in the music community to find upcoming shows, local or mainstream, find new artists and album releases. However, over break I did fall back on the current happenings and didn’t have the time to focus on this. Once back at school I read some very disheartening news. One of the world’s most innovative drummers, James Sullivan, you may know him as the Rev from Avenged Sevenfold, died a few weeks ago in his home from natural causes at the young age of 28. Although you may not listen to alternative metal (their last two albums) or core metal (their first two albums), I am asking fellow readers to appreciate the amount of skill he possessed, the precision in his style, and his ability to inspire fans and musicians alike. It was truly amazing what he had accomplished in his short life. Since I am an amateur drummer, he was and still is one of my influences and ranks second in my mind as the greatest drummer who ever lived next to Keith Moon.

The second thing that’s been on my mind, is the weather in Blacksburg. I don’t like it. It’s cold and raining all the time. It’s inconsistent and dumb. Maybe I should move to Florida or California. As for now, I am seriously hoping the weather will be better in the spring so we will no longer have to use the term Bleaksburg. However, I do like the snow. That part is kind of nice. It mostly worries me though because the weather limits my driving capability. I make an effort to take good care of my car so not only do I have to make the walk all the way to the cage to cover my car during any inclement weather, it also means I can’t drive anywhere thanks to rear wheel drive. Although I am complaining, I wouldn’t trade my car for anything. It’s pretty much the greatest car ever, hands down.