I’ve always had trouble sleeping. I wake up several times a night, often sleeping very lightly and generally a very restless sleeper. But I got this new iPhone app last week, and while it doesn’t solve the restless sleep problem, it does ensure I wake up feeling refreshed and not at all tired.
How? It’s called the sleep cycle alarm. I was dubious at first, but after a week I am convinced. It’s just another alarm, but it somehow factors in your movement over the course of the night and wakes you up at the peak of your lightest sleep, at the latest point before you want to wake up. For instance, I set my alarm to 5:30am these days, but it woke me this morning at 5:07, and I felt great. Usually I stumble around and take fifteen minutes or so just to wake up properly.
The cool thing is you get these little graphs to look at the next morning:

Yes, its a paid app, but it’s worth the $1.19 I paid for it. And yes, I went to bed at 7:45pm. I am old.
I’m sure someone much more intelligent and philosophical said something like this a hundred years ago, but it occurred to me whilst driving yesterday that religion is just a construct created by the human mind to compensate for it’s inability to compute the notion that one day it won’t exist. I think our primitive, caveman brains are hard-wired in such a way that they simply can’t cope with the idea that it won’t be anything one day. We die and that’s that. So our conscious minds invented religion, the concept of a higher power, a creator, reincarnation, immortal souls, or whatever - anything to make us feel less alone in preparation for the moment of death.
Personally, I’ve started to like the idea of Gaia. The spirit of the earth. Yes, it sounds hippie-ish and kind of stupid, but logically, when we die, we just turn back into the elements: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen. While my body melts back into the earth, I like the thought that my soul will join Gaia. And that’s about as religious as I need to be.
according to this here list, apparently I:
- am a blog enthusiast who thought wearing a keffiyeha was awesome
- bought checkered sneakers in the 8th grade
- got my boyfriend to watch Me and You and Everyone We Know
- don’t understand boys
- drink shitty beer without ironic intentions
awesome. I finally fit into a stereotype.