Prelude to a Nap

There's this really great early-nineties movie starring Alec Baldwin and Meg Ryan, which you should see if you don't mind watching two men kiss (and not at all in a homoerotic way, but it would ruin the story to explain that). But I digress. Two men kissing isn't what I'm going to talk about. In the movie, Meg Ryan claims she hasn't slept since she was fourteen, or something. And that is what I would like to use as my thesis to prove that Hollywood doesn't know anything.

Meg's character is consistently fresh, cute, witty, quirky, and darling, as only Meg Ryan can be.

Without sleeping for fifteen years.

Right.

I'm currently on my eighth day without sleep, and let me tell you, friends, I look nothing like Meg Ryan. Okay, so I looked nothing like Meg Ryan before, but my point is that if she hadn't slept in fifteen years, she should at least have looked a little haggard and acted a little insane. Here's what the director should have researched and added to her character:

1. Sleep-deprived people have baggy, dead-looking eyes, and dull skin.
2. Sleep-deprived people are cranky.
3. Sleep-deprived people are irrational.
4. Sleep-deprived people cannot complete an intelligent thought.
5. Sleep-deprived people do not go dancing, nor do they cook delicious meals for their families/love interests. They can barely lift their arms to eat. Or type.
6. They are not physically interested in their boyfriends/husbands. At all.
7. Basically, all they think and talk about is sleep.
8. They cry a lot.
9. They don't use all the extra time to write volumes of scintillating journal entries. They spend it tossing and turning and popping melatonin pills and cursing the night.

Ol' Meg just made it look so fun to go without sleep, and it's not. It's hell, quite simply. My only hope for my exhausted body is that I'll switch souls with a tired old man, and he'll finally get me to sleep. Hey! It could happen. Hollywood says so, and I hear they really have their finger on the pulse of reality.