fashion 2011: A discourse on insomnia, or why I wore purple suede boots

Insomnia is a sneaky beast that creeps through your bedroom window one night, nests at the end of your bed, and does not budge without high doses of medication. It will change your brain chemistry, leading you to do things you never, ever would have done on a full night's sleep. Such as foggily putting in only one contact lens in the morning, leading you to freak the hell out out with the fear that you're going blind, and making you feel like a complete moron when you eventually realize you only have one contact lens in.

Insomnia will trick you into neglecting to buy the one thing you most needed at the supermarket. It will cause you to send your kids off to school without their lunch, forcing you to return sheepishly an hour later, lunch bags in tow. It will lead you to wear matchy-matchy outfits, coordinating your shoes to your eyeshadow to your shirt to your toenail polish (I have a thing against this. It just looks too...done.) Even worse, insomnia will transform you from a mildly mannered, happy, light-hearted person into a cranky, obstinate bitch. You'll watch yourself becoming short-tempered and obnoxious and feel powerless to do anything about it. You might flip people off at the drive-through, be snide towards your husband, or give evil side-eye to the perfect looking woman in her perfect outfit with her perfect little doe-eyed children and her Ken-doll perfect husband at the dry cleaners. You will burn with hatred and jealousy, betting that she gets a full eight hours of sleep, on a $10,000 hand-stitched Swiss mattress under a fluffy white down comforter while her adoring husband fans her gently with a palm leaf.

Insomnia will gift you with a lovely pair of heavy, blood-shot eyes. You will stumble around in a stupor similar to drunkenness, counting down the minutes until you can crawl into bed. And yet, when you finally do, you will inexplicably be wide-awake. You'll send anxious, desperate prayers to God praying for sleep, promising to go to church every Sunday, to stop swearing, to cease spending money on clothes and instead donate it to charity if you can just get some sleep. The more worried you get about sleeping, the less likely it becomes that you will actually sleep. Before you know it it's six am and you've only just begun to doze off.

So, here I am, in my matchy-matchy outfit, after three nights without sleep. Sure, I'm smiling. But deep down I'm already terrified I won't sleep that night. And I'm wondering what on God's green earth made me wear these boots, and forget to cut off the little white tag from my belt.