I whore, therefore I am

I have trouble sleeping.  I go to bed around midnight and wake up around 5 am.  Everyday.  I think its left over from when I worked for the bank in SF.  I was up early to support the traders in NY.  During this time period, I was rather social and stayed out/up very late, often getting no more than a few hours of sleep.  I found that this is all I really needed. If I didn’t go out, I was still up all night.

At the time, I had a doctor who seemed to think Ambien was a miracle drug and prescribed loads of the stuff when I told him my early morning woes, late nights and insomniac tendencies.  At the time, he believed they weren’t even remotely addictive.  It’s a good thing I don’t have an addictive personality or I’d be chit chatting with Eminem in group therapy at Promises in Malibu.

Well, these days, as a lady of leisure, my late nights involve more books than bars.  I don’t need to get up early.  But I still don’t need that much sleep.  I have a ton of leftover energy by the time I hit the sheets and usually talk Sparky’s ear off.  If I really can’t sleep, I ask him to explain fusion/fission or some physics theory.  It keeps him interested enough to stay awake long enough for the subject matter to bore me into zzzz.

Last night, as I laid there, fidgeting, we worked on my German verbs.  Usually, I don’t do this with Sparky because there is not one thing I can say without a whole boatload of corrections and frankly, I’m afraid to speak as it is, without all the constructive criticism.  Earlier in the evening I had simply stopped asking him to help me with my home work because every word I spoke was not up to par.

So lying there, in the dark, to help me sleep (Sparky has no problem sleeping) Sparky gave me an English verb to which I would respond in deutsch present and past tense.  

After going through verbs such as to kill, to rot, to beat, to fight I asked for more common words like speaking and walking and running.  

“To hear”, he says.

“Horen”, I respond.

“Uh, Jen, you need to work on the umlaut.  It’s heowren.  Put…”

“God damnit Markus, stop critizing me.  This is what I’m talking about.  I got the word right. Just leave my pronunciation alone.  Jesus Christ…” Blah Blah Blah.  The rest of what I said is not important now and deny I said anything mean or defensive.

It was bedtime. I never have more energy in my day.   And I was pissed.  You can probably imagine, five minutes into the lecture he wanted to kampft, schlagt, tötet me. Ten minutes into my diatribe he quietly says, “Jen, its important with that word because you just said to whore.  I thought it might be important that you didn’t tell your teachers if you couldn’t whore them or that I never whore you.”

“Oh.” I said, about 100 decibels quieter than the last few words I had spoken.

The silence in the room was deafening, but we both whored it.