X Factor

I didn’t sleep well last night. In fact, I barely slept. I woke repeatedly and tossed and turned and had very odd dreams. It’s a bad sign when I look at the clock in the dark and wonder if it’s late enough to get out of bed yet.

I woke up this morning singing Meatloaf. More succinctly, I woke to a dream where I was singing Meatloaf on an American Idol type show. And I made the next round after they decided that I didn’t have the best voice but I really expressed the emotion of the song and could learn the technical aspects of singing later. I don’t know what sort of emotion is expressed in a song with dirty lyrics but evidently I do dirty well. And emotionally. I don’t know how I would know to express the emotion of telling someone I love them by pointing to ‘my faded Levi’s tearing apart’ as an example of said love, but that’s the stuff dreams are made of, I suppose.

Shortly before the Meatloaf Victory, I was an archaeologist excavating at King Tut’s tomb. It was a clearing house of dreaming I guess. Over dinner with Paraic, I had been discussing how very much I want to go to Egypt to see King Tut since they have just lifted him out of his coffin for the first time in 50 some odd years. I’ve been obsessed with him ever since our National Geographic arrived in 1974 featuring his first world tour. And now, the museum in Cairo has found a way to preserve him absolutely, so he is going on open casket display for the first time ever. Being the morbid history buff I am, I want to see it. And Paraic said he did too. Which is odd considering he’d just lambasted me for saying I’m a fan of graveyards. I don’t know why mummies and tombs are removed from the idea of visiting the dead, that sense of mortality is intangible somehow, but, when looking at the mummy of a pharaoh, it is a dead body.

Chipper today, aren’t I?

Earlier yesterday, while waiting for him, I was having wine after spending way too much money on magazines at Eason’s. I have sincerely missed my monthly instalment of Wine Spectator and stumbled across a UK magazine that could be the replacement, so I went to find it. Indeed I did, along with Wine Spectator and Focus, a Discovery Channel magazine. €18 lighter, I went for wine and read all about a King Tut exhibition in London for the month of November, featuring all the goods from his tomb. This is to be his farewell tour, so it’s now or never or Egypt. Unfortunately, I think it’s going to have to be Egypt since virtually all my weekends in November are spoken for. I suppose the bright side to this is that a week in Egypt will cost me the same as a weekend in London, but with better weather.

So I’m a bit groggy and cranky today and I don’t really feel like sitting at my desk working, yet my concentration levels this morning are vastly surpassing my concentration levels for all of last week, when I considered myself well rested. I don’t get it. My fellow grad students always told me that I was at my most beautiful when I was completely and utterly exhausted. I was also at my most sarcastic on those mornings, which apparently was hysterical. The Universe it trying to tell me what, exactly? Sleep deprivation works for me? I’ll take the land of the living thank you. Unless it’s a mummy, apparently.