Restlessness

Sleep onset insomnia: when you have difficulty falling asleep. This is the newest fun aspect of my life. For the past few months (aside from one week where I was sick and pounding the Benadryl every night), I can not fall asleep. I stay awake until ridiculous hours of the night, only to be surprised when I oversleep come morning. And the time I can fall asleep keeps pushing itself later and later. I was pretty good at the go-to-sleep-around-midnight thing for a good while. Then it started to stretch to 1, 2, 2:30...and now we're up to 3 or 4. It's great socially on the weekends, but other than that, it sucks. Saturday morning, I woke up at 11:45. 11:45! From the girl that used to bound out of bed at 8:30 (without an alarm!) on the weekends, feeling refreshed and eager to start the day.
The thing about the insomnia is that even though it's every night, I can't bear to incorporate the extra time into my day. So I do useless, unproductive things from 9 o'clock on, thinking it's only a couple hours before I go to sleep. But it's 6. 6 hours that I could devote to learning another language, cleaning my apartment, reading the stack of magazines that has piled up in the living room...but, alas. I sit in front of the computer and tell myself this is the night I will put myself to bed at 11, or even 12, and fall asleep quickly. And I can't do it. I'm so alert. It's only in the past week or so that I've toyed with the idea of taking something. I knew when I was taking all the cold medicine that I had to stop sometime. The last "happy" happy hour I had, I fell asleep at a reasonable time. However, I'm more keen on the idea of taking Tylenol PM than I am with drinking myself to sleep every night.
Admittedly, I am not doing everything I can. I don't detach myself from reading or media for the recommended 30 minutes before going to bed. My bedroom is not a haven of relaxation, what with the 4 baskets + 1 giant hamper of clothes that I haven't gotten around to folding, not to mention the dirty things on the floor or the folded clothes that I've stacked in neat piles throughout the room. I don't always avoid caffeine at night. I definitely don't avoid nicotine. In fact, I'm smoking more and more like a chimney every day. So do I have any right to complain? Is it so wrong to expect being able to sleep when I need it?
With the exhaustion has come a complete lack of motivation for doing anything other than sitting around with JP and Tim every night. I can be social on occasion, but I'm relieved to go home and just sit at the end of the night. Surprisingly, I'm not all that interested in TV, either. Last year you couldn't pry me away and now I have to convince myself to watch an episode. My head is just as full of thoughts and ideas as before, but I neglect my blog in favor of youtube videos with fan art montages. About as mindless as it comes.
Robert Frost knows what I mean.
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep/But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep."