When I was in high school, I was a bit of an insomniac. I remember trying many many nights to get to sleep all night, just lying there for hours, tossing and turning, trying to lie still, trying to regulate my breathing, trying to think of nothing, trying everything I could think of to get to sleep. And then I remember weeping because I needed sleep so badly and just couldn’t make myself drift off. It’s very frustrating.

I’ve had sort of a run of very very mild insomnia lately. Sometimes it’s been because my back has been hurting — not a bad pain, but the sort of irritating little pain that’ll keep you up all night because it feels as if your bones are just barely creaking. Other times it’s been I’m not sure why, maybe work stuff on my mind. Tonight I think it’s sort of both. I definitely had back pain (my searing neck pain is slowly diminishing thanks to a pretty regular dose of Aleve). But I also didn’t get a great deal done at work today, and there’s a technology I really dig but am having trouble getting my teeth into that I wanted to spend some more time in. So here I am at four in the morning still wide awake.

Since getting out of bed at a little after 1:00, I’ve done the following:

• Clicked the little moon cartoon on the Google home page to see that they’ve got satellite images of the moon. As pictured here, if you zoom in very close, you’ll see conclusive proof that the moon is made of cheese. Contrary to popular reports, the cheese does not appear to be green.
• Watched several videos about Ruby on Rails.
• Took a half a page of notes about Ruby on Rails.

Here in a couple of minutes, I’m going to try to put some of my Ruby on Rails research to good use. I think I’ve managed to clarify a few things that I was hung up on, and I’m pretty excited about the technology.

I can’t decide whether or not I’m going to try to sleep any. It seems almost a waste of time to go to bed in an hour or two and wake up an hour or two later. But it also sucks to walk around all day tomorrow feeling completely eviscerated, as I tend to feel after a rough night’s sleep. If I don’t sleep tonight, I’m almost guaranteed a good night’s rest tomorrow (the case of insomnia being mild; there was no such guarantee when I was younger; I think I went for days back then with just a very few hours of sleep).

Damn ye, Insomnia! Damn ye!