Ooo. I just learned that hotels have little washing machines and dryers downstairs sometimes. This makes my life much easier.

I really do suck at this "rest" thing. After Sunday's "sleep at 1:15am, wake at 2:30 for 2:50 pickup for 5:25am plane" adventure followed by an afternoon of boating (mostly involving my utter failure to catch and throw a frisbee or a tennis ball, and making wild lunges into the lake instead - fun!), you'd think I should be tired. And I was, a bit. I was able to get to sleep sometime around 11-ish, which is extremely early for me.

And then I woke up at 4. Nah, too early, I thought. Managed to lie back down for another half-hour. You're supposed to be tired. I kept myself in bed until about 4:45, when I gave up, flipped on the lights, and started reading. Made it through about a month of archives before my 5am meeting, did laundry, read some more, and then tried to lie down again in a futile effort to force myself to feel more tired and get more rest. Shut the blinds, turned off the lights, closed my eyes, relaxed... after what seemed like a very long time, I jumped up and went "okay! Surely this must have been a nice 30-minute snooze, at least!"

Less than 10 minutes had passed.

At this point, I'm just giving up on being tired. I'm going to leave room and space in the evenings so that if I have to crash sometime, I can, but this hardly seems imminent. I've been trying to use more of my "you're supposed to be resting, but you're not tired" time as "let's pay attention to your body now" time, because that's where the wear and tear shows up - more stretching, more exercise, that's always good - but I'm not there yet. I can't scan myself physically like I can scan myself mentally; I can't adjust and fine-tune what I'm doing with my body the way I can quickly reconfigure sections of my mind.

It's such a nifty problem, really. So many interlocking parts that I keep learning about; my limbs are knotted, but they don't un-knot themselves well because I have such low muscle tone, which can be fixed with careful exercise, but that's difficult to do because my lung capacity is shot, in part due to scar tissue and constricted muscles - and my brain doesn't know how to coordinate everything right, and I can't program in physical intuition that I can't intellectually understand. (That last part is the easiest in some respects - I can read a lot of books - but it's also the hardest to link to everything else.)

I'm hoping that stabilizing my sleep and food patterns will help, but that's still a lot to tackle. It's gotten much better in the past few years, though - particularly in the last year. I love spiral learning! This is one of those slow-and-steady things; it's teaching me a lot about how to wrangle longer-term problems that can't be solved by intense spurts of excitement, which is my usual tactic (and really the only one I'm truly fluent in right now, although I am trying to change that). Ah, the physical world; thou hast inertia, and sometimes this is good.