3. The Weight of the World

I swear sometimes I feel like everything going on around me in some way depends on me. I feel like everything is going to fail if I don't do my part. For example at church if I don't get the right guy to teach the lesson everything will be a catastrophic failure. But this doesn't just apply to church. Let's take school for an example. If I don't attend all of my classes and get all of my assignments done perfectly then the world has reached its end. Just thinking about school assignments is enough to keep me up at night.

In the next few weeks I will have a research project due. I am doing my paper on torture but there are a million ways I can take this. I could talk all about the CIA and their use of waterboarding as a means of "enhanced interrogation" or I could talk about military interrogation of detainees during wartime. There are a million ways I could spin it.

I could then augment my argument with some statistics regarding the views of Americans regarding torture. I found it really surprising that 43 percent of Americans find it acceptable and even encourage it. In the end, I am just thinking way too much about all of this. I think it stresses me out and maybe that keeps me up.

Who am I kidding. Even if I didn't have the assignment there would be many other things on my mind for example: Susan dumped me the other day, I have 3 dates planned with different girls, and my new niece is causing problems of her own.

Basically everything has a way of adding to things in my life to the point that I don't think I will ever have a moment of pure bliss and peace. Anyhow it sure helps that I have all the time in the world to think about these things.

2. How Do You Define Torture?

So torture, I have no idea where to begin. I was researching a paper I am writing on the ethics of torture and I tried to figure out different methods of torture. There are your basic methods of torture: waterboarding, electrocution, bamboo shoots between the fingernails, etc., but then there are your other methods. Starvation and sleep depravation. I got kind of curious when I looked at the sleep depravation.

I've been an insomniac for a few years now and lately I've been spending my nights awake rather than sleeping. I don't feel like I'm really all that different from everybody else. I still get all my school work done, but I definitely have a lot more time to do fun things. I never really thought of my sleeplessness as a problem. I just found it to give me a lot of free time. But recently I have been looking at it from a different angle.

People have used sleep depravation as a way of cracking people and getting them to talk and eventually go insane. I don't know how I feel about this. Do I torture myself all night long? Sometimes I do want to go to sleep and I just can't and it gets depressing but for the most part I just have fun and watch something relaxing.

The jury is still out as to whether or not I torture myself at night. For the most part I don't think I do, but we will see how it goes.

1. Of All the Things to Keep Me Up at Night

Generally at night when other people are sleeping I spend the night staying awake. The quiet hours of the night are often the best for thinking ,reflecting, and figuring problems out. But, sometimes there are those situations that throw you for a complete loop and keep you completely occupied for hours. One of those situations for me is dating.



So I started dating this girl, Susan, a few weeks ago. Things have been great so far, but in the back of my mind there always is that irrational fear that she will up and leave without much notice at all. When I am with her these fears aren't anywhere in the relationship, but when I lay down alone at night and get to thinking, it keeps me up.



I think about how things ended with my first few girlfriends. A sad fact is that every single time I have told a girl that I loved her she has broken up with me within 24 hours. My second girlfriend Erin is a prime example of this. After three and a half months of dating, I finally worked up the courage to tell her that I loved her. It should have been one of the most spectacular nights we spent together. In the end, it was the last night we spent together. She seemed to think that it was too early to even think about things like love. We aparently needed to re-evaluate our relationship maybe even scale things back a bit. One thing I have learned from dating though is that once you hit a point there is no going back. Either your relationship works or it crumbles. That night I found myself eating ice cream all by myself trying to figure something out. I still don't know what went wrong



I told Susan two days ago that I loved her. I am in new territory. It is exciting and at the same time I am scared that something bad is going to happen. I guess we will just have to see what goes on this week. But I think everything is going to be all right. Either way it is just one thing I think about when I lay down to sleep. I just worry too much.