Welcome to Kiersten's Mind, circa 2:47 am, Wednesday, 26 January, year of our Lord 2011.

HELLO.

{author's note, circa 36 minutes in the future:  this post is very long, and potentially tedious and absurd, and I'm sorry, and I ask that you not feel obligated to read it all if it turns out to be nonsense or just plain boring, or for any other reason which seems conscionable to you the reader.}
{author's note postscript:  Apparently "conscionable" is not a word, and I just invented it retroactively(?) from "unconscionable".}

SLEEP ELUDES ME.
Sleep is [insert witty, poetic, and eternally quotable metaphor here].
And what did I do?
I fell asleep in the middle of writing an essay around 5:00 this afternoon.
I accidentally drank three and a half cups of caffeinated tea at 9:30 p.m.  (Because the mint tea was decaffeinated!  But it was also nowhere to be found in the labyrinth of our untidy kitchen.  Thus, I drank vanilla caramel instead.  That turned out to be a mistake.)
And now—I sit.  Awake.  Alert.  My frenetically typing fingers the only endless sound in the oddly soundless night.  (Why isn't the furnace running…?)

And now my imagination wanders bravely through a dark and stormy night, a night rife with simmering resentments; events forgotten that may have changed the world, had we only the maturity to recognize them for what they were; plots that you thought were hidden from the world; musings about spiritual wealth versus materialism; theories about the potential of dreams of inventive metaphors for our deepest fears; vicious truths about sibling rivalry and debt and the nature of guilt and forgiveness; ambiguous endings; and the ultimate dilemma between true forgiveness and spilled orange soda as a metaphor for childhood fratricide.
Don't'cha just love writing abstract essays about 20th-century college literature?
Me too, folks.
Me too.
(But not at this time of the night.)

BUT I DO HAVE a working printer!
You know, the free one that they gave me with my expensive computer way, way, way back in July!  I finally set it up seven months later so I can print documents without having to convert the file, save it to a flash drive, drive 40 miles, and wait in line for a working computer.

So i can print out all my rambles (not these, the other abstract ones, roughly in essay form, about the college literature) and give them to my peers to review in class tomorrow, and they will tell me how brilliant the writing is but that its patent subjectivity places it completely outside the parameters of the assignment.  And they will write in purple pen, because honors students have been properly warned about the possible psychological danger (to the recipient) of using a red pen to give criticism on a school paper.
I actually know none of this for certain (save the part about the working printer, though who knows how long that will last?).  I rarely jump to the same conclusions about my 3-a.m. essays as other people do. Last year I wrote a five-page essay on the pros and cons of living life as a short person.  I prefaced this essay with three-quarters of a page about stratus clouds, including one very bad pun that made for a horrifically fabricated segue with possibly abused italics.  My entire class thought it was a brilliant opener.  Four hours later, I thought it was nonsense, even if the rest of the essay was pretty decent.

I have Parmesan cheese stuck between my teeth, because I just ate about four ounces of it. I hope all the expensive protein is worth it.

I keep writing these things ("things" meaning all the rambles of my mind in the middle of the night) down, because I hope that insomnia creates something worthwhile.  I think that insomnia makes me a lot of who I am.  i used to dream about archaeologists someday discovering the lost civilization of Kalamazoo, and my journals would become the definitive source of history for the early 21st century.  Now…um, I don't think much of that idea (to summarize a lengthy paragraph, which involved my writing a will and someone committing arson, which I decided wasn't worth the effort to translate for the non-Kiersten reader who has staunchly trekked through this post to this point).

If you read this post in its entirety, you win major points.  I don't know what sort of points.  Not "awesome" points, because that sounds somewhat presumptuous because this post probably isn't that awesome, because my brain is functioning on sleep deprivation and caffeine and English literature (that prosaic fiend that consumes the mind in molehill-to-mountain analysis).  (George Orwell would be doing the polka in his grave if he could see me breaking every rule of his seven-page paper on concise writing.)  But you are awesome, so perhaps they are just rain check points.  Rest assured, you may at some future date be able to cash them in for something awesome.

Baaah.  I cannot compose poetic gems of wisdom right now, as much I wish I could.  But that's already redundant, because I essentially have two concluding paragraphs, whereas Tobias Wolff has none.  Is it too subjective to discuss the inferred fratricide/reconciliation results of the ambiguous ending in a plot abstract resolution?

That might be the one sentence I've written all night that I know meant something, even if was something boring.

G'night.