I am a wild sleeper. When I was a kid, I’d occasionally go to sleep normally, yet wake with my head down at the foot of the bed, my feet at the top. While I owned a down comforter, I took to using it without a duvet cover, as I’d toss and turn enough in my sleep to twist the comforter down into a small ball somewhere in the cover’s depths.

As I’ve aged, my sleeping habits have smoothed over somewhat. I no longer wake up on the wrong end of the bed, my blankets make it largely intact through the night. But I still tend to toss and turn, to shift positions constantly. It only becomes a real problem when I share a bed, at which point I wake myself up by unintentionally waking up the person next to me. Though it tends to improve over time, I suspect it’s largely due to a bedmate getting used to my frenzied sleep habits, to the point where she sleeps straight through them.

Still, I suppose that nonstop-motion approach to sleep shouldn’t come as much of a shock, given I tend to do the same thing during my waking hours. Apparently, that’s just the sort of person I am.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the personalities that people project through their blogs, about how, when meeting bloggers in real life, I invariably either think “this person is exactly like their website,” or “this person isn’t anything like their website,” though rarely anything in between. And, in the case of that second group, those bloggers whose real and digital selves diverge, I wonder how intentional that difference is. Are they recreating online who they secretly wish they could be in real life? Or are they simply unaware that their web-message and their in-flesh medium somehow don’t line up?

In my own case, I’m fairly sure the real me and the digital me are, for better or for worse, rather similar. By and large, I suspect any readers meeting me in real life for the first time are likely to leave the encounter thinking, ‘yep, that’s pretty much what I expected.’ The only exception, however, might be the same lament often whispered behind the backs of famed actors seen for the first time in person: “he seems much shorter in real life.”

Which is to say, at 5’6″, I’m certainly not tall. For years, in fact, I’ve joked that I should change this site’s tagline to: “the dangerous result of a serious Napoleon Complex run for decades unchecked.” But, in truth, I don’t think of height as a big issue, nor have I for most of my life.

Certainly, through most of elementary school, I didn’t give it too much thought; though small, I was still extremely fast, and therefore an asset on dodgeball and kickball teams, as well as uncatchable enough to survive even the roughest games of ‘kill the pill’ – the consummate test of schoolyard masculinity. It wasn’t until I hit middle school, as the girls began to sprout up faster than us guys, that I even began to notice my own small size. Even then, I quickly discovered upsides – at middle school dances, for example, I was invariably boob-level on the taller girls I asked to slow dance. (“Put on End of the Road again! Put on End of the Road again!)

By high school, as we guys caught back up, however, I started worrying – in typical insecure ninth grader style – that girls might not be interested in me because of my height. So, in a solution that, in retrospect, was both extremely inane and admirably ballsy, I set about trying to prove otherwise to myself by hooking up with the tallest girls that I could. I don’t mean to sound as though I was obsessed with the idea – most of the girls I dated in high school were of average height – but, given the chance, I’d try and steal kisses from any cute, tall, lanky girl I could find.

As a result, after my Freshman year of college, I ended up making out with a UCLA volleyball player at a barbecue on a beach in Half Moon Bay. She was 6’2″. I declared victory, gave up on the tall girl search, and went back to not thinking much about height – mine or that of the girls I was interested in.

Though, to be fair, if someone were to call Everything I Do (I Do It For You) up on a bar jukebox, I’m not sure I could resist reverting, full circle, to my middle school self breast-level eyeline self, searching out the tallest girl in the bar, and asking her to dance. Old habits die hard.

For the past week, I’ve been utterly and completely overwhelmed by life. Between Bobby’s wedding, a cousin’s bat mitzvah, my parents and brother being in town for both events, and the extended process of wrangling tax returns for all of Paradigm Blue’s sub-companies, I’ve simply had no time to do the many, many other things I had hoped to fit into the week. I’ve been dropping balls left and right, constantly trying to clean the mess of those balls dropped, and overall nearing the point of admitting defeat and curling in corner in the fetal position, rocking quietly.

Now, however, having given up sleeping and going to the bathroom to free up time, I’ve finally begun to catch back up rather than fall continually farther and farther behind. The insanity, it seems, has peaked, and I’m finally gaining momentum on the long downhill slope back to the merely painful (as opposed to the current, suicidal) level of overcommitment that defines my life.

I’m in a meeting this afternoon with the investment bankers helping us put together Cyan’s film investment fund. After months of crunching numbers, drafting investment memorandums, putting together an extensive investor intranet, today we’re finally ready to move ahead, finally ready for the ibank to start heading out to their investor base.

“One last thing, though,” says one of the managing partners. “Is there anything we need to know, anything that might come up in due diligence about you as individuals or about Cyan as a company?”

We shake our heads.

“If there is, we just need to know in advance, to be ready with a response,” he continues.

I shake my head again. Yoav shakes his head again.

“Well,” says Colin, “there’s the porn.”

Our banker laughs nervously.

“No, seriously,” says Colin, before launching into an explanation, me occasionally chiming in to add detail. That, while seniors at Yale, he and I and two of our other friends started a fake secret society as a prank. That the prank quickly rose to national media attention. That the prank even culminated in our story becoming a movie for Comedy Central.

The rub being, the fake secret society, like the movie born from it, was entitled “Porn n’ Chicken”.

We weren’t actually pornographers we explain, we just convinced the media that we were. But, if you Google up our names collectively, you’ll likely stumble across something about it. So we talk a bit more about the prank, the motivation behind it, why it wasn’t really a big deal.

By the end, our bankers look significantly relieved.

“Still,” one of them asks, “porn and chicken?”

“Yes.”

“You know,” he concludes, “when I’m watching porn, fried chicken is usually the last thing on my mind.”

I am not, by any means, a baseball hat sort of guy. If you see me wearing one, it’s almost undoubtedly becuase it’s cold enough that I haven’t showered for days.

The problem with falling off the blogging wagon is, the longer you go without posting, the more you start to feel like your comeback post has got to be really, really good. So you slack off for another few days, and the pressure mounts. To end the vicious cycle, I’m jumping back into the fray, despite the fact that all I have to say is:

Yesterday, while kickboxing, I apparently got punched in the eye. I say apparently, as I have no memory of it happening. Yet, upon waking this morning, I discovered a small crescent-shaped bruise at the top of my right cheek, just below the eye-socket. With glasses on, it isn’t particularly noticeable; in fact, if I had another on the left, I’d appear to simply be significantly sleep deprived. Yet, after careful examination, I’m completely certain it’s a black eye. And I must admit, I’m absolutely thrilled.

As much as I’d like to believe I’m somewhere between Ferris Bueller and Thomas Crown, I’ve recently realized I’m much more likely somewhere between Alvie Singer and Harry Burns.