Awake.

Since my early teen years, I've endured crippling insomnia. For a long time, I functioned daily on about four hours of sleep or less. Then college hit and I was introduced to the wonders of prescription drugs and illegal substances to keep me awake for days on end (I was president of a sorority, section editor of the campus paper, and taking 21 credit hours -- do you honestly think I ever slept that semester?).

Then I had a baby, which was the perfect valid reason to stay up nights on end. Then the baby started sleeping through the night (mostly), and now that I'm no longer in college and no longer tending to a newborn, I'm stuck being the weird lady who can't sleep.

Since A. is one of those people who have things to do in the morning, like work, he goes to sleep, with apparently little/no trouble, and I'm left wandering the house at 1 a.m. with nothing to do, so my OCD goes into overdrive and I wind up furiously cleaning the house. Hey, any mother can agree -- it's rare to have two hands free and nothing else to tend to so that you can actually clean. And then I start finding new things to do. Like change all the pictures in all the frames around the house. Yes, this is a good idea.

It should be noted that Kinko's (or whatever the hell it's called now) employees who work the 3 a.m. shift are not hired for their interpersonal skills. I arrive at Kinko's, chatty and cheerful, and why yes, it's 3:30 a.m., and I swear I'm not on the nose candy right now, and... oh. You aren't amused. Okay then. Yes, just print my PDFs please.

When you're out driving around at 4 a.m. on a Friday night, police tail you very closely, because pretty much the only people out that late are criminals, drunks, and sad housewives who pray for sleep but still it won't come. I drive like an epileptic monkey most days anyway, so I pretty much had a police escort from Kinko's to home.

And of course, in the cruel joke that is fate, my bitter resentment of my neighbors gets rolled up into one big shit sammich when I finally started feeling sleepy and had laid down with my newest David Sedaris book. I've mentioned how our next-door neighbor, Kidney Boy, parks his car -- complete with overpriced, obnoxious sound system -- in his driveway literally five feet from my slumbering daughter's bedroom window, right? Well, now, because we live in a neighborhood of such high crime rate (I've left the house unlocked by accident multiple times, and I rarely lock my car, with absolutely no burglary or theft -- either we're low-crime, or our shit isn't worth stealing), he's installed a car alarm on his late-90's Alero.

A very sensitive car alarm, that goes off whenever one of our other neighbor, Crazy Cat Guy's cats jumps on the car... right outside Punky's window... at 4 a.m....

You can imagine the hilarity that ensued there.

So after rocking Punky back to sleep after she was startled awake by the ENH ENH ENH ENH WOOOOOOOOOO! WOOOOOOOOOO! of the neighbor's car, it was 4:30 and I finally went to sleep next to my still-happily-slumbering husband, knowing I will get to repeat it all again tomorrow night.

At least my house is spotless.