Dreaming awake, tweaming asleep, and memories of Tetris

It's been a strange week for me. So many factors have robbed me of sleep that I've spent most days in a near-hallucinogenic state of rummy bumbling.

Today, a lady selling Girl Scout cookies with her daughter, just outside the grocery store, said, "If you are wondering why your stroller is moved, it's because it started to roll in the street. We nabbed it in time."

"Thanks," I said. "I hadn't even noticed." She said that it was not only in a different spot than I'd left it, but turned the other way.

"You wouldn't make a very good eye-witness," she joked.

True. I nearly wore two different shoes on Tuesday.

My nights, on the other hand, have been far too awake. For one, baby girl has been waking up more times than I can count. Every time I'm just about asleep, she wakes up. It would feel like a form of torture if she weren't sweet as strawberry pie.

I've also been worried about one friend, and having a difficult time with another. I'm far too thin-skinned for personal disagreements or criticism. Now politics, philosophy, and barbecue; I love to argue the major and minor points and prefer it if the person opposite me has the opposite opinion. It's more fun that way.

But when it's personal my skin turns tissue-paper thin, and my insides become a bowl of twisty turny worms. Those worms won't let me sleep until they've worked their way out of my head and body.

Then there was the night I thought I'd brewed decaf Earl Grey tea. At 3:45am, eyes wide open, I made a promise to myself to drink less caffeine.

Lastly, we come to Twitter. Many of you know that I have a love/hate relationship with this "platform" of social networking. On one hand it's fun and so easy to meet people with your interests en masse. On the other it can feel so raw and exposed. Who are these people and why are they following me? How can I get to know anyone in 140 characters? It doesn't help that I've recently read Feed and Twitter seems far too near to the apocalyptic future of that novel.

Last night, however, I experienced a whole new level of sleep deprivation. I twittered and e-mailed for about an hour before bed. After a few baby wake ups we finally settled down to sleep. In half-sleep I dreamed in twitter. Tweets rolled past my eyes like a reader board. I never quite felt like I went to sleep.

In the morning I decided to call it Tweaming. Then it hit me. It's just like Tetris. Did you ever play Tetris? I played a lot of Tetris in college (sorry dad). Whenever I had a paper due, or an exam to study for, I'd procrastinate all night by turning and placing those geometric shapes into place, row after row. When I went to sleep, however, the shapes didn't stop. They continued to blip down in my mind, as if there were a screen just inside my eyeballs.

Eventually, I had to quit the game entirely. It became impossible to sleep. I'm not sure whether Twitter is quite as intense as Tetris, but I do know that tonight, no matter how much I want to tweet about tweaming, I'm going to bed.

Oh, the ribs. I did four different rubs, and finished them with a Blackberry-Chipotle barbecue sauce. I'll post the pics, rub review, and recipe tomorrow.

Sweet dreams.