I had to plan around it on distance days. I’d get ready in the cool of the morning, filling my water pack, putting trail mix and cookies in my fanny pack, reloading the backup battery and connector for my phone, choosing an audio book that would last four hours, applying sunblock, and starting my GPS tracker. When I came back from running as many as seventeen miles, I wouldn’t have much energy. If I let myself sit down before eating something, I was in trouble. I had to resist it for at least long enough to take a shower and eat Second Lunch. What was waiting for me was The Plunk. I would plunk down on the couch and more or less melt into the cushions. I’d become a sentient pillow. I would be exactly like my dog, who comes back from a run and drops onto the tiles, legs splayed out in every direction. He can run six miles and be asleep four minutes later. Most of us aren't sleep experts like Spike, but we certainly feel that same urge to plunk. Everyone should plunk sometimes. It’s a good thing. Everyone should have a safe and peaceful place to relax completely and forget the cares of the world. I especially recommend the group plunk. My pets are enthusiastic supporters of this system. We all signal that it’s time and the plunk is here. The apes read a book, the dog sleeps, and the parrot preens and cleans every single feather, which is a lot of feathers indeed. We reinforce each other’s sense that the world has paused for a little while, and none of us are going anywhere until those pages are turned, those sleeping paws are twitching, and all the feathers are in the correct place. The trouble is that the plunk doesn’t work properly when anything important is left undone. It’s impossible to blend into the upholstery properly when a nagging thought lingers in the mind. Open loops are the enemy of the plunk. I may be pretending to plunk, I may be attempting the plunk, I may be making my best effort to set a new plunking record. It’s not going to happen if I’m really spinning my mental wheels over something I know I should have done. The key to plunking properly is peace of mind. That starts with eliminating the most important task early each day. I have to recognize resistance in myself and crush it. Anything that makes me dread taking action is automatically the most important thing of the day. Anything that gives me a feeling of extreme reluctance, exhaustion, anxiety, disgust, annoyance, or desire to enter the Witness Protection Program and change my name? That’s the thing I have to do. I know I can never get a decent plunk if I’m stewing over something that serious in my life. The other key to a truly satisfying plunk has to do with situational awareness. I can’t plunk right if the room is in disarray. Entropy is the heart’s desire of the universe. It’s possible we were given free will, language, and the ability to use tools specifically to combat entropy in our personal environment. I want to be able to look around at a glance and see that all is well. I know where to find my keys, phone, sunglasses, wallet, and shoes, even though I won’t be needing them for a while. I can’t see any unfinished work. I don’t have a stack of unsorted mail. I don’t have a pile of unfolded laundry. I know from long experience that my life is easier when I spend the requisite fifteen minutes a day putting away laundry, five minutes sorting and processing the mail, and sixty seconds collecting my Important Daily Items. That stuff is done, and therefore, I can plunk freely. The final plunk of the day happens after the sun goes down. It’s bedtime. It starts with the Fluffy One, who starts getting edgy at 8:00 PM. She needs twelve hours of beauty sleep, and nobody is plunking when she starts calling for bedtime, that’s for sure. Our little woofie insists on getting his teeth brushed. Another day is done. We know it’s time to wind up shop for the night. Start the dishwasher, check the locks, turn out the lights, floss and brush, and go to bed. A steady routine helps prevent those sit-straight-up, facepalm moments of forgetting important details. A few minutes of attention to a list of habits is reassuring and comforting. We can lay our weary heads down on our pillows and drift off into the ultimate plunk, knowing we’ve done everything that was asked of us for the day. Time to rest and spend a few hours in the land of dreams, where the cares of earthly life are not allowed to enter and don’t technically exist. Even if you’re Vicki the Robot from Small Wonder, and you spend every night in a cabinet, you need this book. If you’re a human being, then you definitely need this book! I can’t possibly recommend it enough. Shawn Stevenson is hip, funny, and deeply knowledgeable about sleep. Even complicated charts and medical terminology are accessible through his engaging, witty prose. I’ve followed sleep research closely for at least the last decade, and I learned a great deal from Sleep Smarter. I can also validate a lot of the information as crucially important for healing sleep problems. Before I talk more about the book, I’ll share a bit about myself. I started having problems with insomnia at age seven. At fourteen, I woke up one morning and couldn’t open my mouth because I had clenched my jaw so tightly. I wound up cracking four mouth guards, and I wore through a set of amalgam fillings in eighteen months. I also had restless leg syndrome; sometimes it would start early in the evening, before I even went to bed. In college, the clinic sent me to the school psychiatrist to make sure I didn’t have a neurological problem, because I was only sleeping about three hours a night. Garden variety stuff. The real issue I had in my thirties was pavor nocturnus, or night terrors. I would wake up in a different room, shaking and crying, with no memory of how I got there. My poor husband would have to chase me and bring me back to bed. I don’t have sleep problems anymore. If someone like me can learn to sleep eight peaceful hours every night, then it stands to reason that anyone could. I’m also including a thumbnail of my sleep issues in case Shawn Stevenson reads this. If he does, HI! In the second edition, which you know is inevitable with a book this great, would you please consider including an appendix on insomnia and parasomnia disorders? Sleep Smarter includes short, fascinating chapters on sleep research. At the end, there is an easy set of micro-habits to try out over two weeks. It would be pretty easy to start with the chapter that seems most relevant; they don’t necessarily have to be read in order. For instance, anyone who has ever tried to share a “full” sized mattress with another person knows to start with the chapter on beds! If you’re reading this because you have annoying sleep issues, attend closely. Stevenson and I both make magnesium deficiency the first priority. If you can’t handle dietary change at this point in your life, you can buy a spray-on topical supplement. At least 80% of Americans are deficient in magnesium, so if you have any kind of sleep problem, be objective before you rule it out. For restless legs, talk to your doctor about an iron supplement. (Or you can keep a food log for three weeks, look at your micronutrient consumption, and make your own judgment). For tooth grinding, my dentist leveled out my bite by replacing my fillings. It changed my life. For pavor nocturnus, I discovered that it was related to blood sugar levels. I make sure not to eat for three hours before bedtime. I also became a marathon runner, and I believe that this changed my body’s ability to store glycogen in the muscles. This most likely helped my body to regulate blood sugar more efficiently, as I never get hangry anymore. I also quit getting migraines at the same time that I quit having the night terrors, which is now over two years ago. I took melatonin for five years, and it helped me learn to sleep properly. About three weeks ago, I quit taking it, and was astonished to find that my sleep is the same quality and duration! I was very worried about experiencing sleepless nights, but it didn’t happen once. To me, this is verification that all the other changes I made really did have an impact. For everything, I quadrupled my cruciferous vegetable consumption. What Stevenson has to say about nutrition and fitness is completely true. I was also extremely interested in his personal story about battling degenerative disk disease as a teenager. He asked his doctor if his diagnosis “had anything to do with what [he] was eating, or if exercising a different way would help.” His doctor completely blew him off. That was precisely my experience with talking to my physician about my thyroid disease when I was 23. Stevenson’s disk disease had nothing in common with my thyroid disease, but the bogus, unscientific professional opinions we got were the same. I believe in medical science, but I seriously question whether doctors are keeping up with the most current research before they convey life-changing opinions to people. That’s before we even begin to consider nutrition and exercise, which few doctors seem to take seriously on a personal level, much less a professional one. Please read this book. Please take the quality and quantity of your sleep seriously. Please believe that improving your sleep truly does have the potential to revolutionize your life. Oh, and PS: Noelie says that if you have a pet parrot or other bird, please make sure it gets twelve hours of sleep in a dark, quiet room every night. We planned our day in Gibraltar. The bus to Sevilla left in the afternoon, so we needed to be circumspect in how we used our time. We’d climb the Rock, come down and have lunch, and walk back. If we had time for anything else, great. It was hard to limit our schedule, because my husband is a huge history buff and knows a lot about Gibraltar from several different eras. How do you choose how to focus when an entire landmass is so saturated with fascination and relevance? Serendipity smiled on us again. To start, though, there was a little problem. I have pictures if you like gross stuff. I got up in the night, slipped into my flip-flops, and realized that my damaged toenail had finally cracked after six months. Bad timing. By the time I got out of the shower the next morning, it was clear that it was going to be causing me problems one way or the other. My husband is an emergency medical responder, and he’s lost toenails himself. He said it was time to cut off the broken part. I wasn’t happy about this, but the loose nail was digging into my skin, and it was a lose-lose situation. When we set off for the day, I was missing a third of the nail on my big toe. Most of it was tender skin, with a little bit of thin, soft new nail. Not great conditions for the remaining six days of a walking vacation, or the start of a serious hike. This is when GRIT comes into play. I have a very low pain threshold, and my stamina is not so great, but nobody can beat me for pure perseverance. I will go until my legs collapse under me, and then I’ll quote Winston Churchill to myself until I can make myself get up again. Gibraltar happens to be a good place for Churchill fans. We needed somewhere to ditch our backpacks for the day. We could have worn them as we climbed the Rock – we’ve both hiked steeper inclines to higher elevations over a longer stretch of time – but time was of the essence. There was also a question of how sweaty we wanted to be when we stopped for lunch. We took a cab back to the bus station, where getting lockers was a bit of a linguistic and logistical issue. From there, we were easily able to walk to the Spanish/British border. Stamp fans, they don’t give out passport stamps at Gibraltar anymore due to “abuse.” I have trouble imagining what that might have meant. We were essentially waved through due to our American passports. Walking into Gibraltar is funny, because the sidewalk crosses the airport runway. It’s very apparent that we’ve crossed from Spanish to British culture, with red phone boxes and English street names everywhere. The hike up the Rock is paved all the way to the top. The first half goes up stairs and ordinary city streets. At the top is a park with an entrance fee of one euro. For some reason, the WWII tunnels were closed for the day, but we were able to tour the old Moorish Castle. We continued on our quest, steadily gaining elevation. The view and the balmy weather helped to distract me from my sore toe, which was not doing me any favors other than not turning black and falling off. One thing that is impossible to miss on Gibraltar is the pervasive presence of warning signs about the monkeys. They are tailless Barbary macaques, introduced by the Moors at some point during the medieval period. Their population was deliberately maintained during WWII due to a legend that there would be Brits on Gibraltar as long as there were still macaques. They’re commonly referred to as “apes” because they don’t have tails. The signs show ferocious fanged monkey faces and warn against bites that can require hospitalization. There is a £4000 fine for feeding them. “They can touch you but you can’t touch them.” When we saw our first monkeys, we were thrilled, excited, but wary. We wanted to look at them and take pictures; we didn’t want to be permanently maimed. There is no facial expression more serious than that of a macaque grooming another macaque. I doubt I look that intense even when I’m working. As soon as we saw the first pair, they were everywhere, leaping in the shrubbery, walking in the road, climbing around. We continued up the road, where a couple dozen people were watching the monkeys at their feeding station. Then we saw a man helping tourists hold a juvenile macaque and pose for photos. It was clearly a highly habituated animal. It looked like it was bonded to the man (a cab driver/tour guide) and that it was literally working for peanuts. My husband stepped up to ask if he could pay for me to hold the monkey, but the guide ignored anyone who was not a part of his tour group. Made sense. The group ascended a staircase to look at the view, and the little monkey ran after them, scrambled up the stair rail, and jumped on the man’s shoulder. I’m pretty good with animals. This involves one part observation, two parts sensitivity, and three parts protocol. Every creature down to a single-celled amoeba reacts to stimuli either through Attack, Approach, or Avoid. AVOID is a great strategy. It can be harder to differentiate between Attack and Approach. Is this creature trying to make friends, scare me out of its territory, rebuke me for infringing on the appropriate etiquette, pass by me as it happens to travel in my direction, attempt to mate, or perhaps eat me for lunch? APPROACH is the least likely outcome. In this case, I had sized up the situation and seen a habituated individual who seemed to appreciate human contact. Monkeys spend almost all their time in physical proximity with one another. They are constantly, constantly touching each other, grooming and embracing. The young are carried everywhere. A reptile will generally find touch stressful and annoying, in the same way that my dog likes to be rubbed but not hugged, and my parrot likes her head touched but not her belly or her feet. A primate is biologically wired for snuggles – and also face-biting. We saw a couple gnashing their teeth a tenth of an inch away from each other’s snouts, and it’s very scary and dangerous. Just like us, monkeys are equally capable of rending, tearing, blood-dripping physical violence, as well as exquisite tenderness. Which was it going to be? This is what happened. It happened in ten seconds. I looked up the stairs at the little monkey and wondered, will it come down to me if I stand by the rail? It’s looking for attention and everyone up there is distracted. I strode a few steps to the bottom of the stair rail. INSTANTLY the macaque clambered down the rail, LEAPT onto my shoulder, and put its arm around my head. Whatever I had done with my body language and my facial expression, the macaque had taken a reading of my subconscious signals and chosen APPROACH. I was frozen. I can’t see you. I can’t see your face. What are you doing? Is this okay for you? I was expecting a primate interaction to be scratchy and smelly. Instead, I found that the little macaque was unimaginably soft, cuddly, and clean, like a teddy bear that can actually love you back. It had the gentlest touch. If a human ever touched me as softly as a macaque, I would not just melt but weep. It was so far from the terrifying image on the warning signs that it was like portraying a koala as a carnivorous predator, except that I hear koalas have coarse fur. I was astute enough to take off my sunglasses, but I hadn’t thought ahead far enough. I was wearing my new Moroccan earrings from the day before. Like any young lady, the little macaque thought they were pretty and wanted a closer look. She tugged and tugged at my earring. That was pretty sore. I wanted to remove it without offending her or scaring her by moving my hand. I gingerly reached up, took out my earring, and held it out on my palm so she could see it. She reached for it and almost grabbed it, but my hand slipped and it hit the ground. If she’d taken it, that would probably have been the end of my nice new earrings. Now, instead, they are Earrings of Legend, representing both our first trip to Africa and my first contact with A WILD FREAKING MONKEY THAT JUMPED ON ME. Now, I’m “good with animals,” but my husband is a real Dr. Doolittle. It’s uncanny. Remind me some time to tell you the story of the Skunk Whisperer. He had been standing there taking pictures of my macaque encounter, and it was clear that the gregarious little creature would be open to more contact. I simply leaned over to him while he held his forearm in front of him, the way we’d seen the cab driver instruct the other tourists. She went to him right away. Then she pulled his collar aside and solemnly looked down his shirt. “You’re hairy like me.” She cuddled up and looked like she would be perfectly content to chillax with him all day. While I smiled nervously throughout my encounter, because I couldn’t see the monkey wrapped around my head and playing with my hair, my husband maintained a complete poker face. “Smiling” looks aggressive to primates, who show their teeth when they want to intimidate and warn others away. A flat, serious expression is a relaxed expression for monkeys. “How do I get rid of you?” As much fun as it would be to sit in a monkey cuddle pile for the rest of the night, or maybe our lives, we did have an agenda. Another tourist was standing hopefully nearby, waiting for a chance to hold the macaque. My husband passed her to him, where she stayed politely for just a moment and then tactfully bounded to the feeding area and picked up a carrot. “Oh, it’s not you, I was just totally hungry.” It really seems like using language to communicate is going backward; if we were more like the macaques, we’d probably have more friends and better relationships. Excluding the face-biting part.
We took the funicular down the hill, which was ludicrously expensive, but walking down would have taken at least an hour and been tough on my toe. We stopped for lunch at a tiny veggie Indian place that had been highly rated in TripAdvisor. I told the owner, “a man left a rating that he wanted to stay in Gibraltar an extra day just so he could eat here again.” You know what is the cutest thing in the world after a baby macaque? A grown man blushing. We had just enough time to meander down Main Street and through Casemates Square. Then we passed back through the border checkpoint and headed to the bus station. When we got there, it turned out they took only cash, and we didn’t have enough! I watched our packs while my husband sprinted a couple of blocks to a tourist agency, making it back with moments to spare. We got our bus to Sevilla. We arrived late at night. Barcelona is alluring, Valencia is fantastically pretty, but Sevilla… Sevilla is captivating. Sevilla is one of those “if I could only live in one city the rest of my life” kinds of places. We were hooked in two minutes. We walked down the street from the bus station, gaping at all the gorgeous buildings, and had barely made it a few yards before we found ourselves eating a vast Lebanese meal at an outdoor table. We watched all the university traffic going by: people on foot, people on bikes, people with strollers, people walking dogs, people laughing and chattering and talking on their phones. Every city in the world should send an envoy to Sevilla to take notes and pictures, and then try to replicate a bit of that energy back home. After dinner, we were back in the place of uncertainty, needing to figure out where to sleep and how to get there. There was a Starbucks up the street that was still open, even though it was nearly 10 PM. We found the camping in the next town, we found the bus schedule, but we failed to find the bus stop. It turned out we weren’t distinguishing between the city bus and the regional bus, and we were one street off. We caught a cab. The camping gate was shut, but someone opened it as soon as we pulled up, and we got registered. We found a spot, we quietly began pitching our tent, and a querulous older German lady came out of her RV and lectured us, although the official quiet hours had not begun. (If we’re really being too loud, don’t add to the noise and thus annoy others who might otherwise have slept through it). We were now sleeping in the fourth new location in four nights, or the fifth in six nights. The last couple of days had gone really well, Sevilla had captured our hearts, and we were settling in for a few days of fun and relaxation. Or… were we? There are three things that are inevitable: death, taxes, and the fact that young people will make a 15-20 year commitment to a pet the minute they get their own place for the first time. I did it. I bought a kitten as a high school graduation gift to myself. Six weeks later, I was on my own, not earning enough to pay for cat food and not able to afford a pet deposit. Jackson was a great cat. He lived past 18, and he was my parents’ responsibility for about 99% of those years. My decision was a classic young person’s mistake: taking on a major commitment without understanding all the ramifications, then dumping it on someone else. Debt is the same way. (We just dump the consequences on Future Self). Pets and debts are two of the biggest strings tying us down when we contemplate travel or relocating for career purposes. We’re planning a trip to Europe right now. Choosing flights and booking tickets are as nothing compared to the stress of finding a reliable pet sitter for our dog and our parrot. It costs $55 a day to board them at the vet in our old city. The local cheapie option is literally a kennel, where all the dogs sit in cages and cry. It’s one rung above “I’m reporting you.” Ms. Feather Pants is simply not welcome at most boarding operations. We think it’s because she’s gray. Blatant discrimination. First World Problems, I know. At least they’re cheaper than kids. Think about it, though: on some of our trips, we’ve paid more to board our animals than we’ve paid for our own hotel accommodations. Sometimes we bring them with us, and then there is a room surcharge. Spike is turning 8 this week, and Noelle will be 18. Hopefully, they have a lot of years left in them; the fluffy lizard might outlive us all. That means we have to continue to plan around them, not just for short trips, but for major moves, as well. If we want to relocate internationally, there are all kinds of complicated, ever-changing regulations regarding permit applications, vaccinations, health certificates, and microchips. It turns out there is such a thing as a “pet passport,” even for parrots. Many countries require a lengthy quarantine, which is a pretty big bummer for lonely little animals. I don’t even want to think about the bill. This is where debt comes in. We’ve reached an interesting cultural moment when many of us regard our pets emotionally in the same way we do family members. Certainly many of us would rather hang out with a creature that bathes with its tongue than with our biological relatives. We refer to our fur babies as fur babies, as kids, as grandchildren, as best friends. So, when they get sick or injured, we’ll pay whatever it takes to give them the best care possible. I’ve seen vet bills rack up thousands of dollars on people’s credit cards even when they are destitute and/or unemployed. We want to give “forever homes” to strays and feral cats, but we don’t care as much about feral men, aka “the homeless.” I know several people who have four cats, and some who have more. (Cat ownership has tripled since the 1970s). A common topic of conversation in my social media feed has to do with people who are forced to move and can’t find a place that will take all their pets. Invariably, their friends urge them to lie. This is part of what raises rents and pet deposits and causes ‘strictly no pets’ policies. Look at it from the perspective of a landlord who has to do an expensive remodel because the whole place is soaked in urine down to the subfloor. Having pets (yard chickens, goats, horses) can seriously restrict where you are allowed to live. Our dog barely meets the 25-lb weight limit imposed by most property managers, and if he could open the cupboard with the dog cookies, he’d surpass it. He’s also not on any lists of restricted breeds; whatever your opinion on those lists, they are indeed up to the landlord to enforce. We once spent an entire day looking at five houses rented by the same property management company, only to learn that Miss Sneaky Beaky counts as an exotic pet. Donkeys were not on the list but parrots were. Back to the listings we went. Rent/mortgage is the single biggest expense for most people. Paying hundreds of dollars in pet deposits over the years can really add up, in the same way that storage units and pay cable can. We see these as fixed, non-negotiable expenses, so we shrug them off. There are going to be many occasions when that $250 or $500 lump sum would have been really helpful. We don’t have it, thanks to our furry little ingrates, so we put unanticipated emergency expenses on the credit card. The credit card. The card-zuh. Plural. Most of us don’t know exactly what we owe to the last penny, because we don’t want to know. There is only one thing as scary as an accurate, up-to-date balance sheet, and that is stepping on a scale and finding out how much we weigh. We never stop to calculate how much we’ll pay in interest for every pizza, set of new tires, or vet bill that we charge. I did, and that’s part of why I paid off all my consumer debt 10 years ago. I still owe on my student loan (at 40), and that’s bad enough, but at least that is fixed at 3.2%. Many of us are travelers at heart. We want to see this big old world. We’d go right now, if it weren’t for two things: who’d watch our critters and how we’d pay for it all. It is absolutely possible to finance the travel dream by getting a menial job over there. I know several people who’ve done it; one came back with the experience to vault himself into a new career with a much higher salary. I would have done it myself, after college, when I found myself single, childless, and with no strings. I was going to teach ESL in Japan. I studied Japanese for three years, and I was sure I could pass whatever certifications were necessary to teach English. It turned out, though, that I’d have to pay for my own flight, my visa, and my rent and expenses for the first month. I owed money on two credit cards and I had zero savings. Incidentally, I also had a pet, the dearly departed Mr. Puffy. I put aside my maps and applications and spreadsheets – a whole sheaf of papers – and resolved to get a temp assignment until I had saved enough. The second day on that job, I met the man to whom I am now married. Still haven’t been to Japan. Do it while you’re young. Everyone says that. There was a brief period when I could have, if I’d known what I know now. I found out about a year too late that I could have worked in Europe as a nanny until age 26. If I had the information, if I hadn’t bought that kitten in the pet store window, if I had known how valuable just a couple thousand dollars would have been – I would have done it. I’d probably be well into a career at the UN by now. Now I’m trying to pretend that a two-week vacation is anything like living abroad. I already know I’ll be sound asleep every night before the best nightclubs even open, because I’m middle-aged and dancing all night doesn’t even sound like fun anymore. There are always going to be pets in my life. I probably should have been more intentional about which pets and when, though. When I decided to buy a kitten, it was pure, 100% spontaneous impulse. If I’d given it any thought, I could have waited a year or two, and just spent more time with my cat-mommy friends. It wouldn’t have been the same specific cat, but I’m sure it would have done just as good a job of barfing on my carpet. Our current canine love-ball will probably be our last personal dog. The plan is to pet-sit, volunteer at a shelter, or borrow running buddies when we need dog time. There are lots of ways to enjoy animal companionship. Then there’s the one sitting next to me with the silver feathers and the golden eyes and the ruby-red tail. She requires a multi-generational contingency plan because she could live past 70. That tends to put pet ownership in a different context – the context of retirement planning. If we’re going to give them “forever homes” then we need to think about our debt, our savings, and our ability to give ourselves forever homes. Wherever in the world those homes may be. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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