I coulda been a contender

I started this weeks ago and saved the draft because I thought it needed a third section, and SURELY I should have time to finish this soon. Riiiight. So, anyway, here's an incomplete post.

I. Suddenly everything around me is all brackets and basketball and people running long distances for pleasure. And it got me thinking about competitive sports. There are competitions for some crazy things out there (eating hot dogs, sweeping large rocks across ice). Maybe I could be a winner if someone would invent a sport involving the things at which I can be competitive. Such as:

1. eating jelly beans
2. piling paper
3. distributing bobby pins across a household

II. On the street today:

1. A man with the World's Hairiest Shoulders walking around in a tank top. And this wasn't just an "Oh, I got caught off guard by this hot weather, I think I'll walk home in my undershirt" kind of tank top. No, this was a full on "My shoulders need to breathe, I think I'll wear this sleeveless shirt" kind of a tank top. Bravo to him, I guess?
2. A different man: tall, thin, pocket protector, and a plastic bag full of tall boys of Busch. Spicing up the chess match, yo.

Clearly I need to get out more.

the calculus of sleep

I think when you get right down to it, I get to blame Isaac Newton. In order to develop his various laws for motion and gravity he had to ramp up conventional mathematics into what we now know as calculus. I haven't taken calculus since high school and I wasn't particularly great at it then. Little did I know when I got pregnant that I should have started a crash course to bone up on my skills.

I knew vaguely that once I had a kid my relationship with sleep would be altered. But I imagined it to be a basic arithmetic problem:

(the amount of sleep that I would like to be getting) - (# of times I get up to nurse the baby)* (the time spent on the big rubber ball bouncing him back to sleep) = the new amount of sleep that I would be getting.

And for the baby:

(the length of each nap) + (the amount of time he sleeps at night) = the amount of sleep he gets in a 24 hour period.

Simple, right?

WRONG. So so wrong.

Instead of basic addition and subtraction my life now revolves around complex logarithmic functions where to calculate the amount of sleep I am getting you have to find the area under that tail of the curve that is approaching some infinitesimally small number. And that's the simple math.

When it comes to the baby? I don't even know if there is a name for this. There is probably some brilliant Eastern European mathematician holed up in a garret somewhere crumpling balls of paper and pulling out his hair trying to flesh out the laws & theories behind the math it takes to deal with the sleep habits of a 5 month old.