Insomnia

Is insomnia unique to each person? For me, when suffering from insomnia, I cannot relax enough to fall asleep in my bed. Just the thought of going to bed makes me anxious. Having the weight of the blankets on my feet or experiencing labored breathing from my asthma causes me to climb out of bed as I have to stand up and move my limbs. Once I calm down, I am able to sit on the edge of the bed but cannot actually lie back and relax. Sometimes when sitting on the edge of the bed, I am able to fall asleep while practicing creative visualization. One morning I woke up and found myself stretched out in the bed. That was a great feeling. More often, I end up getting a few hours of sleep sitting up in front of the television or in my office chair. My office is that place of last resort because once I shut the door and recline in my chair, I am usually able to sleep for a couple of hours. I have thought of getting the equivalent of a hospital bed so that I can sleep while sitting up, but finding the money for such a purchase isn’t easy.

I had thought that I recently overcame the bout of insomnia described in my previous post. My insomnia has returned for some reason, and I don’t know why. It’s not like that I have any serious worries. I have a job and, with my wife’s income, we are able to survive from one month to another. Some people are far worse off than we are. Everyone in my family is relatively healthy. Some students of mine from last semester were dissatisfied with their grades because of problems that they created for themselves. Other students expressed how much they enjoyed my class and how much they learned over the course of the semester. I can’t say that worrying about my students is keeping me awake. There isn’t anything that I can do about those unhappy students because of winter break.

Although I usually don’t drink, I have tried drinking wine to get sleepy. I have also tried taking a melatonin. Even these things don’t work. Sometimes it’s the simplest of things—like sleeping—that create the most problems.

Exhausted but Awake

I have been absent from this blog because of the grading that characterizes the end of every semester of college teaching. Many things are pushed aside as the emphasis is placed on reading essays and compiling grades. The final two days of the semester I was awake until almost noon before I finally collapsed into bed and got about five or six hours of sleep. Now my sleeping schedule is terribly out of whack because of the changes to my internal clock. I don't know when I'll be able to get to bed earlier in the morning, say, before 2:00 a.m. Anymore, I am most comfortable sleeping when the sun is up because of the pattern that was established during the semester. There were a few weeks when I had the schedule of a normal person, that is, getting up at 6:30 a.m. and remaining awake during the day. That routine didn't usually allow me to get much work done. It was too easy to take a walk or to run errands when I should have been reading through my students' essays or typing up comments. Once the essays started to back up, I began staying awake through the night so that I would concentrate on the grading. After my kid got up at 6:30 a.m., I got his breakfast and took him to school before I went to bed for about six hours. This pattern changed on weekends. Even so, the pattern has become so engrained that it may take another week before my sleeping schedule changes radically.

Buying Nothing

I certainly wouldn't spend the day after Thanksgiving shopping even if I had lots of money to spend. My day will be spent grading essays with that time broken up by a walk in the afternoon before I come back home and start cooking barbecue for dinner. My stomach hasn't let me digest food cooked outside on a barbecue grill for about ten years now. An alternative I discovered is baking pork ribs in the oven at 350 degrees for a couple of hours after having let them marinate in barbecue sauce for a day or two. Beef ribs are equally tasty. My own homemade ribs are as good as what you can get at many of the barbecue restaurants in Kansas City. My wife agrees.

Stephan Bormann Band

Each year more jazz CD’s are released than can be reviewed. As a result, it is not a surprise that the Stephan Bormann Band's Songs From a Small Room received very little critical attention when it was released in 2005 on the Ozella label, an independent company in Germany. A professor of guitar at Dresden’s University of Music, Bormann is currently a member of the duo Hands on Strings, which has released three CD’s in Germany and which also features Thomas Fellow. Songs From a Small Room is Bormann’s third recording as a leader.

Composed of Stephan Bormann on electric and acoustic guitar, Volker Schlott on alto and soprano saxophone, Mohi Buschendorf on double and electric bass, and Jens Dohle on drums, the Stephan Bormann Band performs original material created by Stephan Bormann.

There are a range of styles on this CD, such as chamber jazz and elements of mid-1970’s jazz fusion. Even so, the music remains unique because of its adoption of several different styles, none of which dominate the album as a whole. Some of the details to listen for are the short guitar solo at the close of “Signals,” the saxophone solo on “(song from a) Small Room,” the call and response between guitar and saxophone on “(song from a) Small Room,” the saxophone solo in “Come With Me,” the bass solo and the special effects in “Journey into the Past,” and the bass solo on “Two Old People in a Maize Field.”

Although short at nearly 50 minutes, when some CD's now contain 60 or 70 minutes of music, this CD serves as an excellent introduction to these musicians. It’s unfortunate that this debut effort has not been supplemented with a more recent recording.

I discovered this CD at CD Baby when I was looking for something else, and eventually downloaded the CD from Amazon. It's music that can provide a capstone to an evening or that can break the monotony of a lengthy crosscountry drive. Of late, it’s the music that makes it possible to start writing up my grading comments for student essays.

Track Listing: Nordic Sky, Signals, Taste of Summer, Come With Me, (song from a) Small Room, five 4 two, Journey into the Past, Beyond the Horizon, Two Old People in a Maize Field.