Flat Tired

I haven't gotten enough sleep this week. Partly it's because I'm trying to 'live life', which includes trying to not let my need to get 8 hours sleep a night dictate so many of my actions. You know, you want to go to bed, but you realize that you've been getting 8 hours sleep a night for weeks now and you suddenly get a flash of 'Dead Poets' Society' that you're "food for worms, lads" and you want to ride your bike down the hill and scare the shit out of the flocks of birds down there, all the while shouting "Carrrrpaaaaaaaay Deeeeeeee-emmmmmmmmmmmm!" and thinking dirty thoughts about your professor (c'mon, "O Captain, my Captain!" should probably be said over said 'captain's' lap, shouldn't it?). Maybe it's just me.

At any rate, that's part of it. But another part of it is just bad luck, getting woken up by various stuff. And part of it is still anxiety, I think, which causes me to have nervous sleep. Working on the anxiety stuff, but it's slow coming, and I may never really rid myself of anxiousness altogether, which, of course, causes me some anxiousness.

I've long known the connections between sleep and moods, especially for me. It's not that a lot of sleep equals happiness, but it is the case that lack of sleep pretty much causes unhappiness. Sleeplessness pretty much has no long-lasting good effects for me. I become listless and angry, in turn. I am easily distracted.

So last night, I thought I had fixed a flat on my bike, and I played some video games with K, and then checked my work on the tire and...sure enough, I patched a hole but I had missed a hole. And with my neato new bike, taking the wheel off is really easy, but taking the tire and tube off of the wheel well is a lot harder--I'm sure there are good reasons, but it doesn't matter at the moment; I have the right tools and some experience, and it's still not easy to do. Hopefully I'll get better, but for now...it's time-consuming and frustrating and it makes me wonder why I bother patching tubes at all and don't just buy a bunch of spares, really, because...well, there I go getting frustrated.

Thing is, I have some new tools, mental tools, to keep me from going totally batshit about it, even though I have a lack of sleep. And some of those tools come just from experience, but some of 'em are coming from therapy, and I'm glad I'm going. Because here's the thing: Even though I had to fix the damn thing again last night at midnight (thereby adding to my lack-of-sleep problem), I got angry, and then pretty much let it go, because I could 'go-meta' and realize why I was angry. And even though I got another flat this morning on the way to work, I understand that my anger/frustration have a lot more to do with my lack of sleep than my lack of ability to properly patch a tube--if I had been 'well-slept', I most likely would have just laughed my ass off about the flat this morning, and recognizing that helps. As it was, I could at least focus on being happy and thankful that I made it most of the way to work before I lost my tube again, that it wasn't pissing rain this morning, and that most likely I'll wait until Saturday to fix the damn tire.




Filed under:
Biking and Therapy