Counting sleeps

Strange as it might seem for somebody who writes stuff like this, but I do get bothered at times by things that just doesn’t make sense.

Which is why a new trend I’ve noticed over the past while has really started to bug the hell out of me.

It’s a new measurement of time called – a sleep.

And here’s the thing, while half the time I think I could be a mathematician, the other two thirds of the time I’m pretty certain that I wouldn’t really be cut out for it.

Especially when there are all sorts of new measurements to have to deal with, like umm, a sleep.

If you have reached this point and are a bit lost, don’t worry cos this is a normal enough reaction to my writing and it usually wears off in around six months or so.

Oh yeah, back to the whole sleep thing. You might have noticed that people have been measuring time using the word sleep in recent times (or should that be in recent sleeps, I just don’t know any more).

You know the kind of thing – “five sleeps ‘til my birthday,” “sixty nine sleeps ‘til Christmas,” all that jazz.

But it doesn’t make any sense, because - and here’s the science bit as they used to say in the adverts – people have different sleeping patterns.

And no folks I’m not talking about what’s on their duvet covers, I’m talking about the amount of time (or should that be sleeps) they spend sleeping!

Okay let’s just run with the person who gets up at 7am every day, goes to bed at 11.30pm every night and sleeps soundly for the rest of the hours but only those hours. A person like that might be justified in counting their time in terms of sleeps.

Why they would want to do that when there are perfectly good terms like day and night around, I just dunno. I mean these are terms that have stood the test of time, people know what they mean and they don’t mean something that they are not.

If somebody told you they would be away for a day, you kinda knew how long they would be gone for. If they tell you they are away for a sleep. Well now folks, come on, how are we to know?

I mean what counts as a sleep? What about the person who sits down in the evening with the tv on and with the fire blazing and wakes two hours later with a big slobber mark on the side of the sofa cushion? Did they sleep? Sure they did. Does it count? Umm, I dunno.

I mean some thought has been put into the day and night thing and we have seconds and minutes and hours and stuff. But if you have a nap for fifteen minutes in an afternoon where does that fall into play in the whole sleep thing?

Even thinking about it now has started to hurt my head.

I think I’ll go lie down and have a wee day to myself.

I’ll be gone for at least a sleep.

Now I’m a Twit as well

I am now a Twit. Or I think maybe that should be I now Tweet.

Man, I can’t really get used to all this new fangled technology talk – anyway I’ve joined Twitter.

To be honest, I’ve been aware of Twitter for quite some time now, and yet because I had somehow found myself sucked into the whole Facebook thingy that has swept across the country, I had convinced myself that I didn’t need to be on Twitter too.

I mean, come on now, it’s just some kinda big teletext machine with people putting all kinds of random stuff up that is mostly of no interest whatsoever.

And then I went to a talk by Ireland’s top blogger Damien Mulley last week and suddenly found myself thinking on my way back in the car – umm, random nonsense eh, that Twitter thing might right up my street after all.

But there was a snag.

I have, in the past, been known to ramble a while before finally getting to my point – all in the best interests of building up suspense and getting in as many bad puns as I possibly could of course.

But Twitter will stand for no such messing about and beatin’ about the bush.

No. Twitter gives you 140 characters and if you can’t get your nonsense, umm, I mean message, across in that, well tough.

And yet, I joined.

I sat at the computer for half an hour or twenty minutes or whatever and got the whole shebang set up.

And then I realised I knew nobody on Twitter. I mean when I joined Facebook somebody suggested I join, so it was a bit like going to a wake or a party or something. As long as you knew you weren’t going on your own, it was never so bad.

But here I was, without even a Mass Card tucked under me arm or anything, stepping bravely into the whole Twitter world thingy and not knowin a bein’ in the place.

And after that I had to think on something to write. I mean anything, something cool and funny and interesting. Something that would say to these people on Twitter already that I was here now and they all should be delighted.

But all I could think on was - Now to embrace this whole Twitter thingmebob.

It was probably the Twitter equivalent of the old ‘do you come here often’ chat-up line, and I desperately sought a delete, undo, take back button and couldn’t find one.

But hey, at least sitting behind the screen you don’t see the thousands cringing at your stupidity, so as soon as you can think of something else stupid to say, you can go ahead and post it right up there.

So long as you can manage to keep it all within that magic number of 140 characters that is.

And to be honest, I think that might be a bit of a problem for me.

You see, I never really mastered the art of short text messages because I like to use real words when I write.

And because I do, I send most of my texts from my computer where, if I have to use a madey up word, I like it to be one I madey uppy myself, not some kinda weird combination of letters and numbers.

You know the stuff – gr8 and B4 and all the stuff you see in text messages.

And with all that in mind, I’m really not sure how this whole Twitter thing will work out for me.

And yet, at least it did manage to kick start me back on the blogging trail again, thanks to a perfect Twitter post from one of my girls who watched me struggle with the whole character count thing.

“Well, if you can't get your nonsense to fit into 140 characters it's about time you re-started your stoopid blog again. You big Twit!”

Umm, you know, I think she had a point...

(After a good old break I hope to post here now once a week) - Liam