"How many times am I supposed to look up “heliotrope”?

i worked with/latched onto jenny allen at the white oak conservation center last year. She barely survived cancer and managed to create an hilariously dry and gut wrenchingly powerful one woman show out of her experience, which she previewed for us at the center.
here is a shouts & murmurs article of hers i just found in the new yorker. its drenched in her disheveled self depricating humor. her plight with insomnia happens to also be very familiar to me. which is sad, since shes fifty. and im not. but i should be so lucky as to turn my sleepless nights into a new yorker article. i find her ability to refashion her life challenges into quiet unaffected pieces, not puke-inducing overly-optimistic soap box sessions, truly inspiring.
hope you all enjoy, it just gets better and better as it rolls along.

Awake
by Jenny Allen
June 2, 2008

I’m up. Are you up?

I’m trying to go back to sleep. But I’m awake. Awake awake awake.

That’s what Buddha said. Buddha said, “I am awake.” Buddha got that idea, that whole concept, from a middle-aged woman, I’m sure.

Not that this sleepless business ends after a certain age. I think you have to die first.

If you added up all the hours I’ve been awake in the middle of the night, it would come to years by now. Fifty may be the new forty, but, for the sleepless woman, fifty is the new eighty.

Thank you, that’s a very good idea, but I already took a sleeping pill. I fell asleep right away—it’s bliss, that drugged drifting off—but now I’m awake again. That always happens! I fall asleep, boom, and then, four or five hours later, I wake up—like it’s my turn on watch, like I’ve just had a full night’s sleep. But if I act as if I’ve had a full night’s sleep, if I get up and do things, I will be pitiful tomorrow. I will confuse the TV remote with the cordless phone and try to answer it. I will not notice any of my typos—I will type “pubic school” this and “pubic school” that in e-mails to people whose public schools I am looking at for my daughter. I will say, “I saw store at the Shelly,” and then I will have to make one of those dumb Alzheimer’s jokes.

I could take another sleeping pill, but I worry about that. I worry about liking sleeping pills too much. Sleeping pills always make me think of Judy Garland. Poor Judy.

It’s funny about the name Judy, isn’t it? No one names anyone Judy anymore—do you ever see five-year-old Judys?—but half the women I know are named Judy. You would probably be safe, when meeting any woman over fifty, just to say, “Nice to meet you, Judy.” Most of the time you would be right.

I am going to lie here and fall asleep counting all the Judys I know.

Thirteen Judys. Including my husband’s ex-wife. Who’s very nice, by the way.

I’m still awake.

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