Man, I'm beat. Just like this guy. He sat down next to me and started reading the paper...somewhere between "Moore Could KO Bush Re-election" and the comics he just faded out, his chin on his chest.
I see alot of that on the train. About a quarter of the American adult population is sleep deprived...getting less than seven hours of sleep a night, down from a national average of nine hours in 1910. I doubt we've evolved into Homo Sapiens insomnium over the past 95 years...we probably still need that nine hours, but alot of us don't get it. Strange fact: sleep deprivation can cause glucose metabolism to fall by up to 40%, which mimics the early stages of diabetes. It's also linked to depression, anxiety, and road rage.
I've got to wonder just what the hell it is we're all doing that's so important. The world's largest GDP might have something to do with it...or maybe that's due to the paltry number of vaction days we take. Italians take 42 days a year for wine and sun. The French bugger off to someplace with fewer transit strikes for 37 days every year. Germans take 35, Brazilians 34, the British 28, Canadians 26, and South Korea and Japan tie at 25 apiece. Americans? 13 days a year. Less than two weeks. And, while we work 3.5 hours more a week than we did 20 years ago, European folks have cut back to work weeks between 32 and 36 hours.
Of course, their economies are in the crapper. But I look at the traincars full of the undead that I ride with during the week, and I often think that there's something lacking in our quality of life. I certainly feel a certain lack of a certain something in my own life, even though my work week is decidedly more European in length. Often, when I stagger out of bed in the morning, I find myself looking forward to getting on the train so I can go back to sleep for a bit.
That just ain't right.
And now, it's off to bed, which, having written the above, is the only proper thing to do.
