Counting Sheep

I should have been asleep two hours ago.   I will pay for that tomorrow.   Yet still, I cannot sleep. Generally I know why.   Having fallen victim to the stomach flu which left me bedridden for three days, and relying heavily on Nyquil to sleep through the achiness, I think my body is now confused into thinking it has created such a stockpile of sleep that it no longer needs to resort to such a lazy state of being.  I would go back to the Nyquil, but I have to be up at 5:15 am for my boxing bootcamp and Ny-sleep will never allow that to happen.  I do have the most vivid and wonderfully odd dreams with Nyquil though.  Or maybe they just seem vivid and odd because I am able to remember them -- if only for a moment -- as I am generally not able to do otherwise.  As is the case with much of my waking life, my vivid Ny-dreams seem to center on men.  No they aren't Ny-rotic,  well, not by standard definitions.  Okay, that sounds bad too.  They are not weirdly kinky or anything to that effect.   In truth, they are not sexual at all.  Typically they tend to play themselves out as mise en scenes of the truly mundane:  starting a day getting ready for work,  meeting up for a family event,  preparing dinner, deciding on what movie to go to,  watching a ballgame from the right field bleachers,  taking a call between client meetings.  The only constant is that they involve me interacting with a (different, though plucked from real life) man who is my presumable life partner of some sort and who is interacting with me in what I imagine is the standard loving way that a partner does in these mundane activities.   Yes, it is true, my wildest and most erotic fantasies center around being perfectly boring, normal, standard and barely-if-even-remotely-first base sexual.  (Side note:  I realize at this moment that, even after 31 years of life, I am not entirely sure what "first base" really means.  I am assuming at the time of this writing that it involves making out but with no hands involved, but I am not sure that is quite right.  Anyway, my mundane fantasies all involve a lot of hand holding, hugging and cuddling, sweet kisses, and absolutely no removal of clothing).  I suppose that it stands to reason that we tend to fetishize the unknown and the taboo, and, as such, domestic bliss would qualify as such in my life.  This is not actually a segue into my feeling sorry for myself.  Truly.  In fact, this is just an effort to clear my head so that I can actually sleep so I don't get hit in the face again tomorrow morning because I am not paying attention to the punch combinations that were called for sparring (yes, that has happened on more than one occasion).  But I think this is a segue -- if not a great one -- to a point I have been meaning to touch on, and will probably want to revisit in a more coherent way, in the future: For me, and for every one of my siblings (and there are 4 of them, so this observation, if slightly less than statistically significant, is at least slightly more than anecdotal) emotional affection is something for which we would do anything.   I don't mean "boil your bunny" type anything, but rather a more personally emotionally perilous "anything".   We are so taken with the fact that someone would profess to love us or be romantically emotionally invested enough that we lose all sense of perspective and immediately hand the other person all of the emotional power in the relationship (or faux-relationship, such that it is).  And there we all are: powerless and addicted to the affirmation from the other person, and then when things go south, as they inevitably always do, the pain sears and resonates and echoes,  far deeper and for far longer than it ought to do.   As we are all fairly different people, and as my oldest brother (who lived with us only starting in his teens and who was functionally an only child before that time) seems to suffer the least from this phenomenon, I can only venture to guess that this is a symptom of having grown up in a household devoid of emotional affection.  I *know* my parents love us, but I never *felt* it.   I know my parents did not love each other, and I saw it (and still see it) every day.  And we always saw everyone's frustrations and tension seep out and slosh around, infusing everything.   Still happens to this day.  It is why going home is very taxing.   Again this is ineloquent, and it is probably doing a disservice as it sells short all that my parents did for us, and our own roles in allowing this to be our lot in life.   As I have said here before, and as I say here now, if only as a placeholder, my parents did their best given their lot in life, and it is amazing what they were able to accomplish and all that they gave us even when times were so tough.  Their actions were expressions of love.  I recognize and celebrate that.  I realize now, however, that should I ever be blessed with children, that kids aren't so good with nuance -- especially in the midst of turbulent times, they need to hear things loud and clear:  I love you,  I love you, I love you, work hard, be respectful, and you are wonderful just as you are.   Otherwise they spend the rest of their lives simultaneously craving and doubting those very words.