New Years Resolution

In my current lodgings, I am obliged, just before going to sleep, to stand up from my bed, kick the cardboard box on which I keep my laptop out of the way, lean over about a yard, and switch of the light before repositioning myself in the bed and going to sleep. This is terrible, because it is causing me to leave reading minutes on the table. I noticed this when I was home over Christmas, and slept in a room whose light switch was less than the length of my arm away from where, in prone reading position, I kept my arm on the bed. I would read until I was just about to fall asleep and drool onto my book, and then at the last second fling the book on the ground, smack at the light switch and go to sleep. Often, the next morning I would discover my flinging to have been overzealous, not be able to find that particular book, and be forced to go find another one, but that was a small price to pay.

The worst part about those minutes in which I feel as though I could -- not should, but could -- be reading is that my anxiety that I have misestimated how long it will take me to fall asleep often itself prevents me from falling asleep. I am constantly curious whether I had, say, another chapter's worth of wakefulness left in the tank, and I feel as if I find myself waiting up to see if I will wait up long enough to have read that chapter, a process which, if it makes sense, is absurd. Sometimes I will even capitulate, turn the light back on, survey my books on the floor and on their shelf, and attempt to happily read myself to sleep again. Of course, at the end of this process is the ominous truth that at some point I will again have to estimate that reading time is up and that the standing and kicking and toggling must be got through again, an ominous truth that not only prevents me from sleeping but prevents me from being at all attentive to whatever soporific reading I thought I was going to be doing, and fills me with even more potent metaphysical doubts that I will ever even really sleep again in my life.

When I was a child, and lived in a room with my brother Connor in twin beds with a toybox/bookshelf thingum between us, I used to take advantage of my status as sole literate member of the room (he was two years old) by monopolizing all of the books we owned for the night. I would arrange them in a stack, with the most entertaining books on the bottom and the least entertaining books on the top, and read every single one of them, every night, and fall asleep triumphantly at the end of the stack, lights on and all. I have surveyed the books currently on my floor, and do not think that a return to this practice would be a good idea -- it would take too long, for one thing, to read through the whole stack, and also I have got to a point in life where the burden of assigning entertainment value to all of my books (or even all of the books I have recently flung on the floor) is too great for me to bear, as I always wind up feeling really sorry for the books adjudged least entertaining.

Given all of that, my New Years Resolution for 2010 is to buy one of those things that will turn the lights on and off by clapping.