Welcome to the funhouse

It's 1:05 a.m. Do you know where your blogger is?

Wide awake in front of the computer is where she is. She ought to be in bed; she came home exhausted from working all day and then worked some more at home, and her body would really like to be lying in bed sound asleep right now.

Her mind, however, has other plans, none of them terribly restful. It wants to take a spin in the Pre-Semester Anxiety Roller Coaster, followed by a quick gambol through the Taxes/FAFSA Funhouse. The unruly mind jumps up and down with enough force to flip the body back and forth until it gets tired of tossing and gets out of bed.

The insomniac mind won't focus on reading or thinking or writing, and it certainly isn't interested in shutting down for the night. It's just getting started! It wants to run through Monday's lesson plans while juggling ideas for an upcoming conference paper, and then it wants to count all the bills that need to be paid and the dress shirts that need to be ironed and the memos that need to be written, including this:

From: Body
To: Brain
Re: lax

But it won't listen. The unruly mind composes memos but does not read them. By the time the memo gets delivered, the mind has moved on to the next ten things that desperately need to be thought about, all of which deserve undivided attention, but does it have to be right now?

Tomorrow your blogger's body will feel drained and wasted, but the mind? It's a terrible thing to wake.