SST: Everybody Sleeps

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

I'm nearing the end of my sleep study, so sleep has been on my mind a lot. This song has entered my mind more than once in the last week:



When I was little, every time I saw this clip I thought, "Wait, wasn't it 'Everybody Eats'?" Indeed, there is another Sesame Street song with the same music called 'Everybody Eats'. And when I'd see that as a little kid, it confused me even more: "Huh? I was sure it was 'Everybody Sleeps!'" Those Sesame Street mind games.

I thought it befitting to accompany a sleep-themed post with a new post on my dream blog. You can read it here.

Appreciate!!!!

This flyer appeared in various locations in our building a few days ago. I kind of love it.

Lodgers

Many of you may not know that we had an Italian roommate for a month. A lot of the time I didn't notice he was there either.

Matteo is from Rimini, Italy, located right on the Adriatic sea about an hour away from Bologna, where he goes to school. His English is extremely enthusiastic but not always the most intelligible, so I'm a little hazy on some of the details of why he first came to America and what he was doing before he came out to Michigan. (Although I do know that he met an Italian woman somewhere - Phoenix? - and they got married in Vegas shortly before he came here. She went back to Italy and is going to meet up with him back in Bologna.) He eventually came out here to the University of Michigan to do some research (engineering?) for a month and and somehow (I don't feel like giving the whole big explanation right now) he found us and rented the empty room in our apartment.

Most days he would leave bright and early to head to school, come home really late, and talk on the phone in rapid Italian. I would go several days without ever seeing him, but once in a while he would come and hang out with us as we watched T.V. or sat around talking. He was always super-nice and really considerate the whole time he was around. He was so grateful for anything you would do for him. A few days before he left I asked him how he was getting to the airport and he said he was going to take a taxi, which would have easily cost $50 bucks or more. He was astonished when Peter and I volunteered to drive him, and he thanked me profusely for days. He even gave me a pair of nice running shoes that fit me perfectly as a gift (well, mostly because he didn't have room for them in his luggage). By now he should be safe and sound back in Bologna with his Vegas bride.

My only regret is that I didn't try to speak more Italian with him. I consider myself fairly functional in Italian since it is similar to Portuguese, plus I took a third-year Italian class at the University of Utah, I read the entire Book of Mormon in Italian, and, believe it or not, there are a number of operas written in Italian. The few times I did try to speak to him I would start out in Italian but quickly slip into Portuguese, which he couldn't understand, and then I would get embarrassed and switch back to English. I could understand him pretty well in Italian, but spoke really fast and a regional accent that I wasn't used to. However, listening to him speak English was like an Italian lesson because you often had to take what he said and mentally rearrange it to make sense in English, thereby inferring principles of Italian grammar. Here are some of my favorite Matteo-isms:

• One day he asked us if he could use our "vacuum generator." I assume he was directly translating the name of the object from Italian, but I found the name quite amusing. After all, doesn't the machine generate a vacuum in order create suction? (The scientists and engineers in the audience may correct me if necessary.)

• He was a really big baseball fan and played for an amateur team in Rimini. Who new baseball was popular in Italy? He liked to watch baseball "matches" on T.V. and he even went to a Tigers "match" in Detroit a couple weeks ago. I would say things like, "I like baseball games too. I want to go to a Tigers game someday." I thought he might parrot me, but he persisted in saying "match." Perhaps his English teacher/textbook was British?

• Right before he left he told me that he had "one shahm-poe" (emphasis on the first syllable) that I could have, referring to a leftover bottle of shampoo.

So Addio, Matteo. His departure makes room for yet another temporary lodger, my friend Nick Johnson. Nick is in medical school in St. Louis (I stayed with him and his little family on my trip back from Utah in May) and he is coming here to do a month-long external rotation in plastic surgery at the University of Michigan Hospital. I'm stoked for him to live with us, but apparently he will be at the hospital at 4:00 a.m. every morning and in bed by 8:00 p.m., so like Matteo I may end up not seeing him around very much. But at least I should be able to understand him.

Blood Embargo Lifted/Sleeping Lessons

The Blood Embargo has finally been lifted. The last time I was able to donate blood was in May of last year, right before my trip to the malaria-risk zone that is the Amazon, which landed me on the donation deferral list. I was eligible to start donating blood again on July 8th, but when July 8th rolled around I had a freshly broken arm. I figured that it would be a good idea to have at least one functional arm at all times, so I planned to wait until my arm went back to normal before donating again. But once my arm got back to normal I started working with Seth at the Art Center, and all of that heavy lifting day after day precluded blood donation. But on Saturday, none of the aforementioned obstacles could stand in my way any longer and I got back in the blood donation game. It's good to be back.

In other health-related news, Seth and I are both participating in a study about how alcohol affects sleeping patterns. No, we're not going to start drinking to be a part of the study. They needed healthy, non-drinking males as part of the control group, and midway through my initial interview the researcher said, "Man, you Mormons make really great control group members!" Today I went back for a second visit to have a physical and pick up my stylish new wristwear that will record my motion and exposure to light for the next week. I have to keep a sleeping journal for six nights and then I have to spend three nights in the sleep clinic with electrodes glued to my head. After the last night in the lab, they'll hand me a check on the way out the door. Making money for sleeping sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.

But this sweet deal comes with one big asterisk: I have to maintain a strict sleeping schedule of 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. from now until next Wednesday night. If I don't keep the sleep schedule, my wrist monitor will give me away and I may be ineligible to continue in the study and pick up my money. However, I am actually somewhat looking forward to this week because for years I have been both going to bed and getting up far too late (after hitting snooze a half dozen times). This could be like sleeping lessons to help jumpstart a lifestyle change for the better. I know I'm capable of it - during the two years of my mission I went to bed at 10:30 every night and I would cheerily pop right out of bed the second my alarm went off at 6:30. But today I can't even remember the last time I was up that early, so my question is: what on earth is there to do at 6 a.m.? I guess I could go running or read or learn to put little wooden ships into bottles, but after that I'm out of ideas. If you have any suggestions for early morning activities, let me know because I've got a week and a half worth of early mornings coming up.

Scare Tactics

Yesterday in the middle of my voice class, one of my students raised her hand, said she wasn't feeling well, and asked if she could go to the bathroom. The class all turned their heads and watched her make her exit. As soon as the door swung closed behind her, the whole class leapt out of their seats and made a bee line for the bottle of hand sanitizer in the corner. I them say such things as "I think she may have coughed near me!" and "I nearly rubbed up against her backpack!" I guess that means the hygiene campaigns and media frenzy surrounding H1N1 are working.

P.S. - Turns out the student just had a headache. She was fine.

SST: 12 Cans

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

I spent much of the last two weeks working alongside my roommate Seth at the Ann Arbor Art Center. Seth works as the do-everything/fix-everything guy there and since they had an unusually large number of big projects to tackle, Seth hired me on as an helpmate. I spent the whole week lifting really heavy stuff, painting new shelves, knocking out walls, and getting generally filthy.

However, it seemed like we spent most of our time undoing and then redoing the work we had done previously. For instance, last Monday we rented a U-Haul truck, went to a really grody warehouse, loaded up a lot of really grody (and heavy) junk, and then stashed it away in a spare room at the Art Center. On Thursday, however, we found out that there supposed was to be a drawing class complete with a nude model in that same room where we had worked so hard to stash all that junk, so we had to move it all out into an adjacent room. As we were restacking everything in the new room, I thought about this modern-day Sisyphus from Sesame Street:



A few hours after we finished relocating everything, Seth and I were working on rearranging the cubicles in a downstairs office. A man stuck his head in and said that the model for the drawing class didn't show up and couldn't be contacted. He asked if either of us would care to model for the class, either with or without clothes. Since we were working on a project where I was basically stepping on Seth's toes, I volunteered to model.

When I went up to the class the teacher asked if I felt comfortable getting naked and I told her I would be just fine with clothes on. Did I want to just take my shirt off, since it was warm in the room? No, really, just fine with the shirt on.

This was my second experience as a model (well, technically my third). My first experience was very different - I posed for an oil portrait and the artist wanted to chat with me during the whole 2-hour sitting. He didn't mind if I moved around, and he even said that a small amount of movement from me helped him inject some life into the portrait. However, for this drawing class I had to keep perfectly still for thirty minutes at a time, which is not an easy thing to do for a hyperactive person like me.

But I got the hang of it and the last two 30-minute poses seemed to go by a lot faster. It's nice to know that if all else fails I have my modeling career to fall back on. It even pays slightly better than moving heavy things back and forth.

New Dream Blog Post!

After a three month hiatus, I have finally updated my dream blog again. Over the summer there were two main reasons that I lapsed in my dream-blogging: 1) My new laptop doesn't have a mouse, making it difficult to do the MS Paint illustrations that I make for each entry; and 2) a general dearth of interesting dreams. But my new roommate Peter just gave me a mouse for my laptop and I've started to have some fairly interesting dreams again lately. (Perhaps the two events are connected?)

The new dream post is actually a dream I had back in April when I was visiting my sister Emily in Minnesota. I had always meant to blog about it but I didn't feel compelled to follow through until I heard a piece of news yesterday during my visit to a screenwriting class. I am in the final year of my doctorate and I have officially finished all my coursework, but the university is allowing me to take a free class of my choice just for fun and I chose screenwriting. I went to the first class yesterday and I was in waaaaay over my head. The class is supposed to be taken by juniors or seniors in the film department and it requires a ridiculous amount of work that I'm unequipped to execute. Nevertheless, the class was enthralling and the teacher said he wouldn't mind if I wanted to come to just observe class during the rest of the semester.

During the class last night the head of the screenwriting department made a cameo appearance (cameo is a word us screenwriters use) to tell us that tonight (Thursday, September 10) the University of Michigan is hosting the world premiere of the locally-made indie film Whip It (featuring a cameo by our very own Katherine Downie), and that director/star Drew Barrymore is going to be present to answer questions afterward. How awesome is that? Drew-Freaking-Barrymore! And it's free! So if you are interested in going to the screening tonight (it starts at 6:00 but I think it would be smart to get there really early), give me a call soon.

P.S. If you want to know what the connection is between the Whip It premiere and my new dream post, you'll just have to read it. (How's that for a hook? Hook is a term we talked about in screenwriting last night).