Exercise makes me lucid, sleep-deprivation makes me…uh…what was I saying?

November 11, 2003

When you wake up at 3:30 in the morning and can’t get back to sleep, the smallest thing gets bigger and annoying. Sounds and lights you don’t notice during the day can become infuriating and can prevent your return to blissful slumber. Example 1: the clicking of the second hand of the clock in my room at night becomes a booming thud in my ears. Example 2: the VCR clock in my room at times becomes so bright to my eyes that have adjusted to the dark that I have to turn over away from the light. I finally had to shut off my lava lamp a couple months ago because I couldn’t sleep with it on in my room and it takes awhile to get back up to full strength. That is, if I don’t leave it on all the time, it’s worthless for half the day when I turn it back on again in the morning. Creaking from parts of the house and sounds coming from outside become very interesting when you lie in bed for a long time, anything to take your attention away from the fact that you’re not doing anything else aside from lying there not able to tell at times whether your eyes are open or closed. I mean really, how do you force yourself to go to sleep? Most of the time that’s my undoing, and it’s only when my mind starts wandering that it finally shuts down. When you think too much about getting to sleep, you stay up even longer.

And so I switched on my light and read. I still have the book that my mother gave me for my birthday to read, but I didn’t want to start it at 5 AM when I knew I couldn’t focus my full cognitive attention on it. I had reread my copy of Sphere by Michael Crichton in the last few weeks, and I remembered that I hadn’t read Congo by Crichton in probably even longer. At least six or seven years, I’d wager. So I started it around 5 AM, got a ways in, and shut my light off around 6:15 AM to try sleeping again. At 6:45, I said to hell with it since I was hungry, got up, and had breakfast. I kept reading while I ate, though, and by the time “ER” rolled around at 10 AM I was done. Yeah, I read it that fast. I’ve read it several times before so I could skim over some of the more technical stuff.

I did have a realization about Michael Crichton at some point this morning, though. I’ve always known that he writes a certain amount of “pulp” fiction in the sense that his plots and characters, both thin and flimsy, are grounded in real science and real people. Crichton takes existing fears, stories, and technology and adds a “What if?” factor similar to “Law & Order’s” Ripped From the Headlines claims you see in the weekly previews.

Take some of his better-known works, for example. Jurassic Park came at the beginning of a massive biotechnology push throughout the world, and while the specific technology to do what he described didn’t exist at the time (mid 1980’s…about 1986 I believe), it’s now becoming a reality and there have been plans to clone extinct animals such as wooly mammoths. Dinosaurs…not so much since I don’t believe complete DNA strands have been recovered, but there is certainly enough wooly mammoth DNA floating around to do it. The Andromeda Strain, Crichton’s breakthrough (though not his first novel, I’m fairly certain) novel, came at the height of the Cold War and played upon the fears of both bioengineered and naturally-occurring illnesses–remember, the deadly smallpox virus was still out there in the early 1970’s–even though the bacteria in question from the novel came from outer space. Rising Sun came when Japanese-American business relations were at their worst, and it put neither “side” of the capitalist war in a favorable light through the course of a murder investigation. His latest novel that I have yet to read, Prey, deals with nanotechnology and some of the potential dangers with creating microscopic machines.

I think that’s one of the reasons I enjoy his novels so much, is that while remaining works of fiction, they’re always grounded in some sense of reality. I can’t understand the technology behind the works in Jurassic Park even despite his overly-technical and obviously-researched language, but I know that the potential for it exists in the world. I know that time-travel can’t possibly exist, but that dimensional shift as described in Timeline is a distinct possibility given modern theories in mathematics…well, at least Crichton says it is thanks to a full five page bibliography. Frankly, the technology in some of his earlier novels like The Terminal Man is now in regular use throughout the medical community, despite being published almost 30 years ago. I guess that comes from being a graduate of medical school without becoming an actual medical doctor.

That being said, his works of fiction are always interesting and mind-bending, but his works of non-fiction are even better in some ways since they’re not just rooted in reality. Of course, I’m enjoying his most well-known project as I write, to which of course I refer to “ER”. Created and executive-produced by him, and influenced by his experiences while on rotation in med school. maybe that’s one reason I’ve hooked on to the show so much for a long time, even though I never watched new episodes throughout most of the 90’s.

Being tired makes me lose my train of though, especially with the television on in the background. I don’t remember anything else I was going to say, so I’ll sum up:

1) Sleep good.
2) Fire bad.
3) I’m making pizza this week.
4) I need a job.

That’s really all I can think of. It raining last night but it’s cleared up a bit, so I’m going to try jogging again today. My knee ended up aching a bit later after the jog, but it was gone by the next morning. Getting better.

The real question for the day is, should I take a nap before or after exercising today?

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