The Schoolyear of Scott

I am a very light sleeper. Even when I was little, I was a light sleeper. I remember on at least one occasion waking up when the tooth fairy was visiting me…needless to say that charade didn’t last long. I blame being a light sleeper on why I wake up at the crack of dawn almost everyday, no matter how late I stay up, and that is when I sleep in my own bed, so you can imagine how hard it is for me to sleep in a strange place.

That was the problem I had during my trip to Chicago last week.  I was sleeping on my friend Vasu’s sofa and, well, things did not go so well.  Let me explain.

I arrived in Chicago last Thursday at my buddy Vasu’s apartment and he gave me the option of sleeping on the sofa or on an air mattress.  I told him the sofa was fine, so that he didn’t have to go through the trouble of setting up the air mattress, and we went on our way to visit some bartender friends of his who were working that night.  Now I should not that the night before I arrived in Chicago, I was out fairly late and wasn’t really in the mood to stay out late two nights in a row.  Unfortunately, for me, that isn’t exactly what happened.  After returning to his apartment around 2:30am (which was really 3:30am my time, due to timezones) I fell right to sleep on the sofa.  Things were great I thought!

I thought wrong.

Vasu lives in an apartment that was built in 1920.  Needless to say, the walls were paper thin.  Vasu also has two roomates, one of which has a girlfriend.  They are all very nice people, but they have to be at work at 8am.  So starting at 6:30am, I had the priveledge of hearing 3 different alarm clocks going off in two different rooms.  This is of course in addition to the sounds of the L train that rush by his window every five to ten minutes.

(I should note, at this point, that one of Vasu’s roomates is an accomplished chef at a restaurant in Chicago.  He claims to only be an actor, and I’ve never actually tasted any of the food he’s cooked, so he might be telling the truth, but only a chef would spend 20 minutes every morning cooking up God knows what in the kitchen waking everyone up with his orchastra of pots, pans and spatulas.)

After spending the weekend visiting my brother at Indiana U (where we thankfully stayed in a hotel, ie Great Sleep), we were back in Chicago, where I was back on the sofa.  It was a repeat performance of Thursday the next few days until Tuesday night when I decided that it was time to break out the air mattress.  My other friend Mark was in town by then and he took the smaller mattress and I took the bigger one.  Again, the joke was on me.  By the time we returned home from that evenings activities, my mattress’ air was at 80% and I it was like sleeping in a valley (we have pictures of this which aren’t uploaded yet).  Luckily I was able to pass out on it anyway.  Unluckily, when I woke up at 6:30 with the rest of the apartment, there was no air in the mattress.  So I was sleeping on the floor.  Worse, that night, the temperature was in the 20’s and they don’t keep the heat on at night.  And I was using a glorified bathmat as a blanket.  Not fun.

Morale of the story is that I discovered that I am too old for trips that involve sleeping in something that is not a bed and involve going out more than three nights a week.  I am thrilled that my Summer Vacations are all over and I can focus on moving into my new condo now, which, if everything goes as scheduled, there will be some news on tomorrow afternoon.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 11:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.