Procrastinet

Power Naps

filed under: Idle Chatter

Naps are a strange thing. The act of lying down (or propping oneself up) to take a nap is a wonderful sensation, suffused with the awareness that you're about to take a little break, refresh yourself, treat yourself well. There's something a bit decadent about a nice nap. Which almost makes up for the act of waking up from the nap, which is an object lesson in life's fleeting pleasure. If you take a short nap, it's such a sushi-sized bite of time that it's over before you're aware of it. If you take a long nap, you end up feeling mugged and groggy.

I am lucky to have a built in "nap" mechanism: every time I go to sleep, I wake up fifteen minutes later. If I've gone to sleep for the night, I just roll over and go back to sleep in a few seconds. If I'm napping, I get a nicely timed fifteen minute power nap. Most of the time, I actually feel better afterward.

Naps are much on my mind right now because, with the show opening, I haven't been sleeping much. Saturday into Sunday became an all-nighter to work on the set, and Sunday was already full of things to do: a rehearsal, run throughs of the one-acts, notes on the one-acts, more tech, final dress, notes on final dress. Around 6:30pm I slipped into an office to grab a nap - there was no room to stretch out, so I grabbed someone's sweater off of a hanger on the door, put it on the desk and put my head down on it. I subsequently, of course, drooled on it - sorry, whoever.

I woke up my habitual fifteen minutes later, at least mildly refreshed. The only problem was: with my head on my arms, something must have been pressing on my left eye. I napped so hard that I mooshed my eye, and for an hour afterward my vision was all blurry.

Which continued a minor sub-theme of the weekend - a more graphic than usual awareness of the eyeball as, well, a ball. The set designer got a fragment of copper pipe in her eye at about 4am on Saturday/Sunday, and I had to squirt it out with a ketchup bottle full of water. As we tried to determine if it was gone, she held her eye wide open and swiveled her bloodshot orb around in a fairly disturbing manner.

Naps are also on my mind today because I spent the morning in an exhausted, maudlin funk (good band name: "and now, MAUDLIN FUNK!") until I grabbed an upright power nap in the one comfy chair in the work cafeteria. It worked like a reset button. I was much relieved.

Also: over the course of the weekend, I have re-learned how to properly use a sewing machine. The fact that I only successfully re-learned this AFTER stitching two major and prominently placed hems in the upstage curtain we're using will have to be addressed some time before we open on Wednesday.

That is all.

Posted by rjt at January 23, 2006 02:46 PM