Awake

As anyone who has been tortured can attest, that personality of yours, the one you think of as the fingerprint of your humanity, is in fact only a superficial Magic Shell coating over a nougaty center of dull desperation that is exactly the same across all humans who find themselves in bleak circumstances.

How do I know this? Possibly it is due to being screamed awake by a small, twinkly infant several times a night for the past 150 days, an infant who requires a magical and elusive confluence of events to occur before she will return to sleep, which includes the nearly impossible feat of keeping a pacifier balanced in her half-open mouth while she rolls around the crib like an 18-wheeler.

If you do not have a child, imagine this: your dog will only sleep if you balance a dime on his nose while he is still awake and pacing nervously up and down your hallway. It is best if the dog doesn't see you place the dime on his nose, and also that, when the dime falls, you replace it as immediately as possible, perhaps so the dog himself doesn't realize it has fallen. If you screw up any part of the dime ritual, the dog will howl to wake the dead. Note: It will not help to say atheistic prayers at the foot of his dog bed, not that I have spent countless nights crouched by a crib with my fingers crossed, muttering sleep incantations to the tune of the white noise machine and off-key, battery-drained Brahms lullaby mobile in hope of influencing possibly non-existent holy forces to keep my child from screaming.

I assume that I used to have personality attributes like the rest of well-rested humanity before I became a blinking, desperate mole-like creature with blood-shot eyes and a deep obsession with the logistics of napping, but those quirks and preferences are long gone and only the squinting mole remains. Thus this post has no point or purpose, and is careering off the track like Danica Patrick on Ambien.

P.S.: This is not a mom blog.

Good night.