Adam Oster, Novelist

I’m going to go right out and say it. I’m tired.

Like, legitimately, uncompromisingly, tired. And although I’d like to blame this all on the fact that I recently turned 40, the reality is that I’ve pretty much always been tired.

And this causes me one pretty significant question: Why?

I’ll admit right off the bat that I’ve long questioned the reality of the need for sleep. Maybe it’s some sort of government conspiracy, right? Like, I know that science has all these reasons they claim that sleep is important, but it’s not like we’re robots. Do we really need to recharge? Why in the world haven’t we evolved past the need for sleep already? What actually happens while we’re asleep anyways?

Tooth fairies and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny certainly seem to appreciate the fact that we become absolutely comatose for a few hours every day, so maybe that’s a part of the conspiracy? Like, maybe we have to sleep so magic can exist in this world?

All of that above, of course, are the ramblings of a tired man who really actually just finds himself wishing he had time for more sleep even though he spends a significant amount of time trying to figure out whether he should actually need it at all.

Of course, when I was a younger man, the reasons for needing sleep were a lot more obvious. I was not kind to my body about sleep. I would stay up for all hours of the night, catch two winks before moving on to the next day and starting it all over again. Rinse, repeat, until I’d finally collapse into a heap of drooling human for 20 hours before I’d get back into the bad habit of avoiding my body’s call for sleep.

I would fight sleep so hard that I finally started having significant issues with insomnia because I had trained my body that sleep was the devil.

But now that I’m older and have kids and a pretty boring social life, well, I don’t have quite the excuse for being tired anymore. I don’t stay up all night, in fact, I’m generally in bed reading by 10pm, and most nights I don’t make it past 11 before I have to put the book down and finally succumb to the call for rest. That means that with the 6am wakeup call for school for the kids (and the fact that my boys don’t like sleeping later than the sun), I get approximately 7 hours of sleep a night…which is pretty good.

Sure, I might wake up here and there due to back pain or dog barking or kid waking up in the middle of the night with a bloody nose, or what’s the weird sound, or I drank too much water before bed, or–

Actually, come to think of it, I’m probably not much better at taking care of my sleep needs as an adult as I thought. Here I’ve been really disappointed in myself for getting to the age where 11pm is the latest I stay up on a standard night, but, well, I also get up way earlier than I used to and have far more items that keep me awake throughout the night, even if they generally choose to bother my wife instead of me (she’s a far better parent than I am).

So, I guess what this all means is that I’m really not that indulgent when I decide to take a nap.

If anything, it’s for my health, right?

And so the Santa Clauses can bring me presents?

Seriously, I’d probably sleep a lot better if I knew there were presents on the line…Someone work on that.