The morning I arrived, I literally crashed onto a couch and had a beautiful, deep, profound sleep. I woke all muddled, but rested, after about six hours.
That was the last unbroken sleep I had. There are a couple of problems: the heating in all apartments is externally controlled, and mine gets appallingly overheated at night. That naturally leads to some tossing and turning. Secondly, if you open the windows, you get lungfuls of night air, which is composed largely of smoke, and eventually you get the sensation that you've been standing around a coal-fuelled bonfire for too long. And I guess there's all the mental stuff - culture shock, the stress of a new and unfamiliar environment, the pressures of teaching new curriculum. You know how that goes. Life seems to flow from how rested I am. If I'm not getting enough sleep, the rest of life suffers - you know how that goes, too.
I want to have energy to form relationships with students, colleagues, friends. I want to have energy to be excited about being here and exploring far and wide. I want to have energy to pour myself whole-heartedly into this new endeavour.
Schleep...I wants it.
I always found the heating in Ithaca made the atmosphere unbearably dry: my skin started cracking everywhere come winter. My solution - and this may help a bit for cooling the room, too - was to place small dishes of water near the heaters. The evaporation moistened the air a bit and it was more bearable afterwards.
ReplyDeleteDunno - might help.
I hopes you gets some schleep schoon.