{"id":29742,"date":"2015-01-21T02:00:51","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T07:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29742"},"modified":"2015-01-18T20:51:20","modified_gmt":"2015-01-19T01:51:20","slug":"napping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/01\/21\/napping\/","title":{"rendered":"Napping"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Lileks<\/a> takes a nap. It therefore (of course) provides the basis of a “Bleat” posting:<\/p>\n

Another item of no surprise to any readers of this site is my enjoyment of, and insistence upon, and devotion to, difficult sentence structures. Also naps. I love naps. Didn\u2019t use to; then we had a child. At first I napped on the floor, thinking it Spartan and manly, but eventually I saw the case for sleeping on a surface that did not leave flat indentations on my skill if I slept for more than 20 minutes. I don\u2019t believe in napping on the sofa, Dagwood style; I don\u2019t believe in napping while reclining in a chair. There\u2019s a reason we sleep in beds. No one ever says \u201cI don\u2019t know how much sleep I\u2019ll get tonight, so maybe I\u2019d better sit in a chair and see how it works.\u201d Bed. The humidifier for white noise. Phone on Airplane Mode. Set the alarm, and see you later.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s never occurred to me to study my naps, or chart them, or pick them apart for quality. There are good naps and bad ones. There are short naps that leave you refreshed, and short ones that leave you groggy. Long ones that seem to add a year to your life, and long ones that make you feel as though you emerged from a bog of tar. To be fair, long naps never leave me logy. Short naps can make me feel angry, because they weren\u2019t longer naps.<\/p>\n

But. I read a review for an app called Power Nap HQ, and it seemed interesting: it took nap data, based on your movements. You entered how much time you wanted to sleep, set a backup alarm, chose a sequence of sounds, and laid it next to you. It would report back on your movements, indicating the depth of the nap, and it would also record any abrupt sounds you made. Nicely designed, too. A buck. Bought it.<\/p>\n

Calibrated the device, set all the options, and pressed the button to start the nap. Laid it next to me.<\/p>\n

Got itchy. Dry skin. Scratched a little, and wondered if this would register on the device. This was the signal for my upper lip to report in as \u201cslightly chapped,\u201d requiring more minor motion, and I thought I might be confusing the app, which thinks this is light sleep. Or perhaps it doesn\u2019t take any motion seriously until I\u2019m inert for a long period of time. So I laid still.<\/p>\n

Then I thought: now it\u2019s going to think I\u2019m asleep.<\/p>\n

This nap wasn\u2019t working out very well. You start to think about napping, napping doesn\u2019t happen. You start to wait for the between-two-worlds moment when you\u2019re aware that you\u2019re having a dream, or are thinking of something you certainly did start but grew out of something you\u2019d already forgotten, then the moment never comes. But the next thing I knew I was awake.<\/p>\n

Sort of. Half awake. The alarm had not gone off, so I had not reached the desired quantity of sleep. I was up because my body was done with the noon ration of Diet Lime Coke, and wished to offload it. This I did, wondering how the app would read my absence. It would detect the motion, then the absence of motion, then motion, then – providing I got back to sleep – the absence of motion. I did what a man\u2019s gotta do, then returned to bed to complete the nap. Fell back asleep. No dreams.<\/p>\n

Woke, and thought: damn, I beat the alarm. Must be close. If I have one superpower, it is the ability to gauge the passage of time; if I knew what time it was 35 minutes ago, I can tell you what time it is now within a minute or so. This extends to naps: if I wake before the alarm, I usually know what the time will be. I laid there, waking, considering how the rest of the day would play out, then realized that the app would interpret my motionlessness as sleep. THE DATA WOULD BE IMPRECISE.<\/p>\n

So I picked up the phone to see how long I\u2019d actually slept.<\/p>\n

I had overslept by 40 minutes.<\/p>\n

The alarm had not gone off. The backup alarm had not gone off. It had not collected data. Other than that, best dollar I ever spent. Now I can remove it from my phone and sleep without worries. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Lileks takes a nap. It therefore (of course) provides the basis of a “Bleat” posting: Another item of no surprise to any readers of this site is my enjoyment of, and insistence upon, and devotion to, difficult sentence structures. Also naps. I love naps. Didn\u2019t use to; then we had a child. At first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,73],"tags":[27,92],"class_list":["post-29742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-randomness","tag-iphone","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s2hpV6-napping","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29742"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29743,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29742\/revisions\/29743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}