Yawn

The last twenty-four hours has been something along the lines of: sleep, and then sleep, on top of sleeping with some sleep, and adding in a little sleeping sleep while taking a sleep and a short nap.

This schedule is actually getting to me. Honestly if someone had told me so, I would’ve laughed, with not a little trace of mockery, at that. Sleep has never been anything I needed a lot of. Naps, yes, those are simply part and parcel of Kaatness, but actual, hours-consuming sleep, like where you lie in one place breathing slowly, not moving…wasting all of that time…

Heck no.

Five or six hours a night is more than plenty.

But piling on top of each other like this, night after night of working until two in the morning and then getting up with the kids at seven, I find myself, on a day where I don’t work either job… well, sleepy. It’s impossible to fall asleep right at two, unless I drug myself well beforehand. Since I haven’t taken any kind of drugs for two months

(WHAT WHAT WHAT? No DRUGS?

That’s right. No drugs. I TOLD you I was getting healthy.)

…anyway even if I did fall asleep right at two, five hours of sleep a night for five days in a row isn’t apparently enough, even for a dyed in the frickin stay-up-late feather night owl like me.

Which brings me to the subject of luxury in bedding. Not everyone’s favorite topic, but certainly one of mine.

Looking at my house, you’d think the White Trash McTrashsters live here. My husband is not what anyone would call “handy” (at least in the way “handyman” is used, although he’s remarkably adept in other, more important ways...but not when it comes to holiday gift-giving. This another very UN handy part of him). I have no time, or even the tiniest inclination, to strap on a pair of overalls and, hefting a hammer, climb up to fix a tilted rain gutter. Our house was probably last painted when Michael Jackson was still a black man. And the whole thing sort of, well, leans. Not so you’d notice, unless you wanted a perfectly round object to stay on the floor where you left it. I’m sure all of this could be cured with a hard working handyman and a big bag of money, but since I have neither, we continue to live in the crappiest house on the street. That’s including the one down the block where the crazy bachelor lives with a hell of a lot of cats and paints one side of his house each spring…all of them a different color.

Inside, it’s a different story. I have a flair for decorating, I am the Ebay Queen, and I can smell a sale within ten miles. So, even on our ridiculously tight budget, I have managed to make the inside of our house look exactly opposite from the outside. You’d never know it was the same place….if I blindfolded you before bringing you inside, you might actually think we were in a different building. All of this was done on the smallest amount of money, lots of ebaying, and paying superdy-doo high interest on furniture payments when our credit died. Died like someone had ripped its throat out and gobbled it for dinner….but that is a different story. And not an interesting one.

Oh I know, this isn’t very interesting either. {pah}

My children have told me, in relieved/embarrassed voices, that their friends have almost all GASPED when through the door, and all of them have commented on how “nice it is in here". In disbelief. That pretty much tells you how bad the outside is. I tell them to inform their friends that we are a family that appreciates contrast in life, and leave it at that. I went through shame in extremity while growing up poor, so I know that my kids don’t have it that bad AT ALL. They don’t know what poor really is.

Thank God.

There is one place I don’t scrimp though, and that is my bed. The sanctuary of my home, my place of peace and quiet… my bed is a haven. It is the place I love most in the world. I think about my bed and sigh the way other ladies sigh over Brad Pitt’s sulky mouth. Trust me, Brad’s lips have nothing on my sheets- nothing, babay.

I have a memory foam mattress. I have 1000 count Egyptian cotton sheets covering the mattress pad (made of more billion-count cotton). The goosedown comforter and their mates, goosedown pillows, are like snuggling into a cloud. My bed is the most comfortable place in the world. There is nothing I like better than to grab a good book and climb into my bed, going AHHHHHH over the sweet sleekness of the sheets.

Is it worth it? Why yes, yes it is. If I was fleeing a house fire, I would undoubtedly go into my bedroom and vainly try to tug my bed out after me.

I could listen to a white political rapper go on about the need for equality in the colors, brothers, all day long, if I had my bed to lie in.

Napping is almost orgasmic in its beauty, in my bed. It's a frickin art form.

I was way behind in doing the laundry the other day. I had put clean sheets on the bed, but I was short one pillowcase. Figuring my husband wouldn’t notice, but kind of curious to see if he did (he thinks I am insane for spending so much money on bedding and there have been plenty of discussions about it), I put a “regular” pillowcase on his top pillow. It was dark blue, close enough to the color of the rest of them.

Of course it was vastly amusing to watch him that night, get into bed and lay his (bald) head down on that pillowcase. His eyes popped open, he had the expression a man would wear if he had just laid his head down in a wet puddle. I could see his mind racing the same way a man would wondering, why was it wet? Why was it warm and wet? Where is the puppy?

“There is something wrong with this pillow!” he finally announced, with all the gravity of a man pronouncing that the world has come down with an incurable STD. “It’s rough and ....hard. What the hell happened to it?” Seeing my smile, he got pissed. “There is! Something! WRONG! With this pillow! I’m not kidding, feel it! There is something wrong with this pillow!” He tried futilely to grab my hand, to force me to feel the wrongness of this evil pillow.

Sometimes the very best revenge in the world is a shrug and a smile.

I smiled quite a bit that night.

....Forgot Valentine’s day huh? How do you like that hard, rough pillowcase, huh? Maybe that’s the only kind you’re going to get from now on. How do you like that? Maybe I’ll just find some half-n-half sheets, and you can have “normal” sheets on your side. Huh? Would you like that? Your pillow is wrong? Well, how wrong is it to forget Valentine's Day, buddy? HUH? Maybe you’re going to get a foam pillow from Kmart next! Forgot Valentine’s day, huh? Well I forgot your bedding!

It is a small satisfaction but we must take our joy where we find it.