My friend Sam around 1am. Providence, RI. 2006.

I’ve discussed here before the fact that I don’t sleep much. Most of that is natural short-sleeping; I sleep through the night, it’s just a short night – usually around 1a-7am. However, sometimes I just can’t get to sleep, or I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back asleep. I would hesitate to call it insomnia, because it doesn’t happen often, but it happens enough that I have a strategy for dealing with it.

You see, if I can’t sleep, I simply don’t. If I roll around in bed for more than half an hour after turning the lights off, I just get up. There are few things less productive and more frustrating than rolling around in bed trying to fall asleep, so why do it?

When I lived in Korea, I kept my laptop on the floor underneath my bed, within easy reach. When I couldn’t fall asleep, or woke up with a thought-worm (similar to an ear worm, only it’s an idea I can’t stop thinking about), I would pick up my lapop and use it in bed. Now that I have Marc next to me in bed most nights (he works graveyard shifts on occasion), I usually try to get up and sit in the reading chair instead, so that the light and sound are less bothersome. When I was in college, I even sometimes went so far as to get up and go for a walk around campus!

Self portrait taken around 3am at Hampshire College, during my thesis-induced insomniac days. Amherst, MA. 2007.

Whatever tactic you choose, my general point is this: if you can’t sleep, use that time to do something else. Write a blog entry. Read a book. Look at lolcats. I don’t care; just do something other than pointlessly turning over and over in bed. Not only have you turned unproductive time into productive time, but it will likely tire you out as well, leading to deeper, better sleep once you do go back to bed. If I get up and work on my blog for an hour, by the time I’m starting to lose steam, I also find that my eyes and body are beginning to get tired enough that sleep is possible. Almost invariably I wake up the next morning feeling as if I have slept really intensely, and while I do occasionally feel more sleepy than usual for the first 15-20 minutes after I get up, I end up feeling more rested than if I had tossed and turned all night.

If you have even one night a week that you have trouble sleeping and instead choose to get up and write for an hour or two, that can end up being 2-4 quality blog posts a week, or 8-16 a month. If you choose to read during that time, it will add approximately two books to your “finished” pile a month, or 24 books a year! Not only that, but since you will likely feel more rested the next day, your productivity for that day will likely be increased as well!

So, if you can’t sleep…don’t.

(I am actually writing this post on such an occasion. I went to bed at 10pm, slept until midnight, woke up, used my laptop in bed on a low-light setting for an hour and a half, tried to go to sleep for half an hour after that, then got up and am now typing away in the living room. It’s now 2:45am and I’ll probably be back in bed by 3:30. Since I’ll be getting up around 9am, that means I will still have gotten around 8 hours of sleep.)

Independence can mean different things for different people. For a college graduate still living at home, independence might mean how to feel like an adult while still sharing a wall with mom and dad. For a divorcee in their forties, independence might mean how to positively embrace their newfound status. For still others it might simply mean feeling free to behave/dress/think/act/live as they want to, not the way other people want them to or the way the world suggests they should.

As you can see, independence is a complicated and multi-faceted topic, and one I will touch on frequently, as it sits at the core of my life philosophy. I have some post ideas on this topic in the works, but I would love to get some input from you, my readers, as to what you would like to hear about from me regarding independence. What areas of life are a challenge for you in terms of independence? What struggles with independence have you had in the past and what do you foresee in the future?

Let me know in the comments, and your input will influence my later postings on the subject. And, as always, if you have a specific question a la “Dear Abby”, feel free to pose it to me, and I’ll to my best to turn your question and answer into a post in itself. Have at it!

I have generally required far less sleep than my friends, and it has baffled many. My natural sleep pattern, when left to my own devices and without obligations, is from about 2am until 8am. I wake up energized and find that I can be fully productive within about 2-3 minutes. I don’t really nap during the day unless I’ve had a very physically strenuous or psychologically stressful day, and I have generally seemed to have more energy in general than most folks. When I was in middle school, I went for about a 6 month period only sleeping from midnight until 2 or 3am. In high school I used to sleep from about midnight until 4am.

I’m glad to see that this is not entirely unusual. It’s rare, but at least I now know that I’m not utterly destroying my health as so many people have suggested that I am, over the years. It’s not insomnia – believe me, there are nights when I have had that, and it’s different – it’s just that I naturally wake up after a shorter period of sleep than most people, and am more energized when I do.

For those of you who have wondered how I live a life where my average daily to-do list contains 18 items (recently I had one with 42 items on it), this should shed a little bit of light on the answer.

Climbing aloft on the Elissa.

I don’t often speak of my pre-college (or hell, pre-Korea) life on this blog very often, but I really should. Something most of my readers probably don’t know about me is that I used to be a professional tall ship sailor. We’re not talking sailboats, we’re talking ships like the one on the right. I sailed for about 7 years and I consider my experiences on ships to be some of the most formative of my life. I learned a lot of lessons out on the high seas, and I feel that it might be a helpful thing to share some of them with you. This will be the first of a couple posts. Enjoy.

1. Your ability to do something is directly tied to your motivation to do it. The more you want something, the harder you will work to accomplish it. When you haven’t showered in a week and you have the choice between a 60 minute wait for a three minute shower in an army tent or no shower at all, no matter how tired you are or how much you usually like to luxuriate in your showers, you will find a way to soap/shampoo/rinse in three minutes, I guarantee you. When I hear people say “I could never do that.” about something, I frequently have to suppress the urge to say “No, you just don’t want it bad enough.”. With the right motivation (disregarding physical ability, of course), you can do almost anything.

2. Learn to prioritize, or the decision will be made for you. When you have to shove all your belongings into a hole in the wall about 12 inches square by 2 feet deep (that is frequently blocked by someone sleeping in front of it), you learn very quickly what you need, what you don’t need, and what you only need in an emergency.

Looking up from the bowsprit. I took this on my first sailing voyage, when I was 11 or 12.

What I just described were the personal storage areas on one of the ships I sailed on. They were nested in front of the bunks, frequently had about an inch of water in the bottom, and I’m convinced they were designed to make it as difficult as possible to get anything out of them. Consequently, you couldn’t really count on easy access to the whole of your belongings, so you had to prioritize. Foul weather gear was thankfully stored elsewhere, but you definitely wanted your sweater, a clean pair of underwear, a pair of heavier socks, and a book on the top of the pile. Anything else (clean shirts, your camera, etc) was good to have, but didn’t really need using immediately, and you could wait until a convenient time to retrieve it. If you didn’t think ahead about how you packed that little locker, you could end up very cold and very bored, with the items you needed at the bottom of the box, sitting in water.

3. You’re more adaptable than you may realize. The largest bunk I’ve had on a ship was about 6 inches wider than my shoulders on each side. The smallest was so narrow that if it hadn’t been for the netting holding me in, I probably would have rolled off it when I turned over in my sleep. Some (in fact I’d probably say most) people I’ve told this to have had a reaction along the lines of “Oh, I could never do that. I need at least a double bed to sleep comfortably.” or similar things. The reality is…you don’t. You don’t need a lot of the things you think you do. When faced with having something sub-par, something really sub-par, or not having it at all, you learn to deal with sub-par conditions. Sure, the bunks felt cramped at first, but you learn how to move in them, and over time it doesn’t even matter because you’re so exhausted that you could probably sleep on a bed of nails. This ties a little bit back into lesson 1, about motivation.

Folks sitting near the bowspirt on watch in the early morning. It was around 40 degrees (F) and raining when I took this shot - pretty much the definition of miserable.

4. If you think your assigned task is pointless, ask why it needs doing, and never assume your work is unimportant. One of my least favourite parts of sailing is standing watch. When I first started sailing, I hated having to wake up at midnight, after only 3 hours of sleep, only to be told to go stand at the front of the boat and watch for other vessels or other items of concern. My thought was “The other ships in the race are so big that we’d definitely see them long before we hit them!”, and I used to grumble considerably when I was chosen for this task. Bowsprit watch is miserable, because you get the brunt of the wind and the spray, meaning that even in mild weather, you end up cold and wet. For evidence, I have posted one of my old photos of this exact activity, on the right. However, one day, while sailing on Lake Huron, we came across a giant freighter, rusty and crumbling, sticking up at an angle about 30 feet out of the water. It was an unnerving sight, and I realized that I was not up there just to watch out for other vessels (vessels that would be well lit enough to see at a great enough distance to change course), but to look out for things like this decrepit freighter. If we had been there at night, and there hadn’t been anyone on watch, we could have easily hit it and been added to the pile of thousands of ships at the bottom of Lake Huron. ¹ I had felt like my job was a pointless waste of time, when in reality it was a matter of life and death. Never assume your work is unimportant, and if you feel that it is, ask your superior why you’re doing it.

That’s all for now, but I have plenty more where this came from. I hope this at the very least made you think!

When I started blogging 10 years ago the idea of professional bloggers didn’t even exist.  When I started my current blog while living in Korea, I had no idea that one day want to be a part of that group.  I started my blog, DriftingFocus, as a personal travelogue about living on Jindo, a very rural island off the southwestern coast of South Korea.  Eventually, it evolved to include personal content, and when I moved back to the USA in May of 2009, the topic diversified into all my interests: reenacting, lifestyle design, travel, motorcycling, photography, etc.  This gave me a wide audience, but it also made it difficult for me to feel focused in my blogging.  I noticed that a lot of my posts centered around the theme of lifestyle design, and so on a whim, I created Kick in the Breeches Verson 1.0.

Unfortunately, my first version didn’t really capture my blogging creativity the way that my main blog did, and I eventually let it go defunct.  One of the main problems was that I couldn’t find a clear focus or theme for the blog, other than the general sentiment of lifestyle design, and I had a hard time figuring out what posts belonged on which of my blogs.

Recently, though, I have been speaking with several prominent bloggers in the fields of travel and lifestyle design blogging, and I have come to decision to resurrect this blog, with a more clear focus, hopefully embodied by the tagline I have chosen, “Get out and live!”.

One of the biggest griefs I have with both the travel community and the lifestyle design community is that there seems to increasingly be a single vision for both.  I feel that success in life should be determined by achieving what you want to do, not what someone else thinks is best, and I want to give as much advice as possible on this blog in order to help as many people as I can do achieve their goals, whatever size and complexity they may be.

Welcome, and thanks for reading!

I will be posting periodic updates on my progress. Wish me luck!