Fighting sleep. Fighting the urge that nibbles at the back of my head, the wave of somnolence that wants nothing more than to pull a soft, enveloping blanket over me for a few hours.

Would that I did not need to sleep so much; it is difficult for me to not perceive the hours passed in sleep as wasted ones. There is so much that I could do, be doing, see, or think about. Instead the hours pass in a sea of blankness, as it has almost every night since my childhood. Upon awakening I am insensate to the passage of time; it could be twenty minutes or ten hours since my eyes were last open.Tonight, older music on winamp, as the listing to the left undoubtedly shows. For some reason, tonight is a night for the studio jazz slickness and effortless perfection of Steely Dan. I originally had in mind to listen to Lindsey Buckingham's thoroughly unheralded album Out of the Cradle.

Cradle is one of the best examples I've ever heard of pop music being melded into craft. It's a pity that only around eighteen people bought the album. Untold millions of Milli Vanilli album-purchasers, I guess, can't be wrong.

Jeff and I enjoy talking about music; we are both passionate about it, from thoroughly different points of view. Although our CD collections have been alphabetized together for nearly three years now, it is very easy to tell which albums are 'his' and which are 'mine.'

His approach is from the tightly-harmonized power ballad school popularized in the 1980s. Mine is from the bardic, storytelling traditions of folk music. He wants harmony and melody; I want meaning, I want a story.

They are not necessarily exclusive—especially if you count my longstanding affection for techno/house/funk—but they tend to polarize our interests. While there's little chance that I'll ever be seen at a Journey concert, there's even less of a chance that Jeff will be turning up the next time a favored chanteuse of mine is playing somewhere nearby.

(If you can realistically picture my husband attending an Ani concert—and enjoying himself while he's there—I would greatly appreciate if you'd save some of that most excellent ganja for me, because I'll be wanting a taste.)

Should I give up and sleep? In honor, a demi-classic Andy introduced me to: Art of Noise's "Paranoimia."

To quote…"One—two—three—sleep!"
Time to try just that.