::A Geek in Korea::

Today happens to be the technical end of the semester for classes. Level testing is being completed, and students should get their books and start their next semester. Of course, in several of my classes, everyone gets a free pass to the next level regardless of actual skill, so if they all have their books we started in on the new material right away.

Students return to elementary schools and their vacations are over. It’s time to forget all the fun they’ve had and get their heads back in the books. This was probably the third time in each of those classes that I needed to make a thematic lesson without any book material. At least those classes are disappearing from my schedule next term.

If the classes were finished and wouldn’t been taught by me next term, they got a “farewell to summer” lesson. We did some light filler work and watched a video with a summer theme. It just so happened that the students that I had to prepare this material before hadn’t seen some of my favorite Youtube clips that I use for summer.

Now that the new schedule takes effect tomorrow, we’ve got all sorts of new students, new books, new classes, and lots of new headaches. For example, you have to tell students, new and old, that the hand sanitizers they’ve installed outside of every classroom do not dispense water to drink! I’ve probably saved several people from being poisoned today already.

It’s been almost two months, and we’re starting to get this “parenting” thing under control. Perhaps it’s Glow’s willingness to sleep for a change letting us escape a sleep deprived haze, or me finishing intensive classes, but we’ve had a much easier time of it the past few weeks. It’s still hard and exhausting, disproportionately more so for my wife who stays home, but at least we have bath time figured out now.

We gave a bath time ritual established. 10:30 PM, we start. My wife prepares the baby, while I prepare the water. I wash out two containers. One is a metal basin, and another is a baby bath. She wraps up Glow so that her hands don’t get in the way as she washes her hair and wipes her face. Then my wife handles shampooing and rinsing Glow’s hair in the baby bath and basin, only getting her hair wet at this time. Then, I set in the baby bath seat, and help remove the wrapping.

The baby then gets washed by my wife while I hold Glow’s hands. She is comforted by me holding her free hand, and she doesn’t splash and slide everywhere. Then we switch hands and I hold her other hand as she gets cleaned on her other side. Then, I remove the seat and my wife washes her backside. While she’s washing her back, I’m checking the basin to make sure the rinse water is warm enough. If it needs replacing, I swap it out before she’s put into the basin. Again, I hold onto her while we get her rinsed off. Then, while my wife is finishing up, I grab the baby’s towel and wrap her up when she’s all washed and rinsed up.

We’ve got this four armed, well timed machinery working pretty well. We can take a dirty baby and have her washed, fed, and ready for bed in under thirty to forty minutes, depending on how hungry she is. As long as we do it at night and keep to the schedule, Glow also tends to sleep for a few hours before she needs either a changing or a feeding. It’s been wonderful. She’s sleeping longer and longer too these days. It’s getting better now that we’ve got an evening routine that prepares us for bed too. It’s also a lot of fun, and the baby doesn’t cry at all. I can’t wait for when she starts splashing around and actually playing during bath time too. We’ve already got rubber duckies waiting!

It’s rare when something monumental happens. It’s even more rare when two important things happen. Today THREE important events happened all on the same day. Weird series of spiraling coincidences sometimes stack up. Today was my wife’s (solar calendar) birthday. To bad we were so busy with other stuff we hardly got to celebrate until later in the evening. One reason we were both busy was we both had separate appointments to meet other parties to celebrate important events that were also happening today.

I went to the wedding of a friend of mine. I’ve got a whole cadre of married friends now. I wanted to make sure that my foreign friend getting married had at least ONE other non-relative foreigner in the pictures for his wedding. We’ve got to stick together from time to time! Turns out it’s a good thing I made that vow to myself and stuck around through the ceremony, because I was the only one. His family came, so it’s not like he was alone or anything. It’s not to say the friend I went to see get married doesn’t have other friends that wanted to come to his wedding. It’s just that through one complication or another, none of his other foreign friends were able to be there despite their best wishes to be there. I congratulated him personally and was happy to have my picture taken next to him with the large number of Korean people in attendance.

My wife and daughter didn’t attend the wedding because today also happened to be her second eldest uncle’s lunar birthday today too. The eldest uncle is my wife’s maternal grandmother’s favorite, so now “great-grandma” was in town to celebrate with her favorite son’s lunar birthday. You know he’s a conservative Korean man when he still used the Lunar calendar for birthdays. It’s so annoying to try to work that out on the common calendar that only older people bother. My wife had to take Glow with her to that family gathering, and I was very thankful to attend my friends wedding to miss out on all of that baby gazing and ribbing by my uncles in law. The food probably wasn’t as good either.

We had friends over to celebrate my wife’s birthday. They taught me how to play Settlers of Catan. It’s an amazingly good game that will never play the same way twice. For that alone I’m tempted to find a copy for myself. I can track down a copy if I must. The book store has some German copies with Korean rules inserts. I’ll pass, because they were ridiculously expensive, on top of the difficulty of the language barrier. Maybe if they ever go on sale I’ll pick them up. Settlers of Catan is what a board game should be. I’ll never have any desire to play Monopoly ever again.

We had cake and chatted, the babies played and everyone had a good time. The only gift we ended up getting for my wife was a “family gift”. We got a steam vacuum so that she can keep Yoshi from giving Glow (when she begins to crawl) anything he picks up when he goes for walks. We’ll get something more personal for her tomorrow, when it’ll just be the family celebrating a quiet birthday like we normally do.

I learned “Call Out Bingo” years ago from a Korean coworker at my second school. Any time you need students to learn a lot of vocabulary words and how to say them properly, you can use this word game to help them review. All you need is a word list, paper for each student and you are finished preparing.

Fold a paper in half four times. Make this a challenge, to see who can listen to directions best. “Fold it in half. Fold it again. Again. Again…You should end up with a bingo sheet of sixteen squares. Did you do it correctly?” Always fold one yourself in front of the students, and when someone messes up their folds, replace theirs with yours. This also shows students how small the paper should be when correctly folded, and makes setting up the game much, much easier. Otherwise students will expect you to fold every paper for them, which is a total waste of time. I usually spend 1 to 2 minutes setting up the game and explaining the rules, and the rest is all about playing.

Next, either give them a word list, or tell them a page they need to review and the valid words. We pulled out a review section today for a class with 16 students. The potential word less was 50 to 70 words, which means that as long as students aren’t working together to subvert the game, their is very small chance everyone will finish at once. Explain each box on the paper gets one unique word, and those words can not repeat. “Oh, look, one of the review words is ‘Eat’. I can write ‘Eat’ once, but I can’t write ‘Eat eat eat eat eat eat…’ many times.” Once that is clear, you let them build their own bingo sheets. I usually just let them work out if they have a valid board or not. No boards with erased or crossed out words are accepted if they claim to win suspiciously.

The students in regular Call Out Bingo just say a word on their list and everyone else scratches off their paper. When the paper is finished, they win. The twist I’ve added to Call Out Bingo is that two players at the same table do Rock-Paper-Scissors to start the game, and only the winner calls out a word. Then, the winner attempts to go on a streak by challenging the person sitting at the next table. Each time someone wins, they are the person that gets to call out a word on their paper.

I’m also toying with another variation. If you go on a streak of five successful won calls, you get a bonus call, so you get two words off your board for winning! This builds tension, and it also makes the Rock-Paper-Scissors part of the game more important overall. Students down the line will cheer on someone if they stop a streak, and friends will root for each other. This “streak” addition is new, but it’s worked in the classes I’ve tried it with multiple students.

While the students are calling out their words, I’m listening and writing them on the board or displaying them via the projector and a word document. I need confirmation of what people said in larger classes, and it also keep students from cheating as I go back through the list displayed for everyone to see. They also get to see the words spelled and heard, which is another review technique. I also need something to do in class, since this game basically runs itself after the first round.

Typically games last 15 minutes. As soon as someone wins the entire board, I tell students to flip over their paper, start over with another batch of words and play again. The second game goes a little faster, as students know what to do, and I’ve completed two games in every class every time with just minutes to spare on each class. I would advise against starting any game when you know you can’t finish it. Students would rather keep you after class than let one of these games go unfinished, so depending on a schedule it might be a problem.

I figured out that with two months to go on my current contract, and not a chance in the world that I was going to resign, that there was going to be a terrible schedule in my future. They have me for as long as it takes to bring the next teacher or two months, which ever comes first. Of course, after hemming and hawing about it for three days, I’ve finally got my hands on what my next two months will look like and it lived up to my expectation. Everything I’ve heard about the direction the school was moving lead me to believe I’d be starting later and staying later, the exact opposite of what I consider a “good” schedule. The next two months are going to be terrible!

Only two months? Yes, I’ve gone and given my resignation notice officially. I gave it several days before seeing the schedule, but I didn’t even need the next schedule to drop to know it’s going to be harder to stick around each consecutive schedule. I told them a few days ago that the schedule was simply incompatible  with my life now, and I needed to have a schedule that worked out better for me and my family.

It’s unacceptable and they’ve shown an unwillingness to work with me to change it. They’ve actually made every single day of my next schedule worse than it is now. I’m the guy that goes home first, and I’m still complaining about how late I stay. They’ve made, and broken, similar promises to the Korean teachers as well. Everyone else has to be rolling their eyes about hearing me complain about bad schedules when I work the lightest load as a part timer, but to me it’s not a “shared sacrifice, we’re all in this boat together” sort of situation anymore. I’ve waited around working at that school too damn long, and it’s time to make a change.

I’ve got a recruiter or two working for me, with offers from friends to help me find work, or even give me jobs if nothing comes my way. I’ve even had an interview or two lined up already in the first week of looking. I turned down the first job offer I had because it wasn’t the level of material I wanted to teach despite it being a good fit for my schedule. The program was garbage! The middle school program could be completed by any of the elementary school kids I teach now. I’m happy to turn that down because I’d be miserable if I was forced to teach it. Okay, that wasn’t my only reason for turning it down, but it certainly didn’t endear me to have to start teaching students not up to the caliber I’ve been accustomed to for the past few months. If I get desperate for work in the future I’m more than willing to cast aside some of my picky requests that I gave my recruiters.

Another interview I had got canceled by the director out of fears that there might be a swine flu outbreak that closes the school in a few days. That’s a new twist to the employment search. Even if you find a school now these days, depending on who is working there it might be shut down for weeks because they test positive for swine flu. The entire staff has to quarantine themselves! At least swine flue scares favor people searching for work from inside Korea. It would be awful to get hired, fly all the way to Korea, then find out you don’t have a job because your coworker tests positive for Swine flu. If a school shuts down, I’ll know through the grapevine immediately.

Since I have a two month lead time, and every important decisions is always made within an ridiculously small window of opportunity in Korea, I’ll just take my time and apply and interview all around town. When someone hears something, or the word gets passed to the right person, I’ll be able to get a connection that sets me on the right path to good employment.

The benefits of being able to look for work and set up a flexible schedule that suits my life as a parent will greatly benefit me. I’ll be suffering through my terrible schedule while I look for work, but that will only motivate me more to find something better than my current situation. Since my resignation happens the week before my parents arrive in Korea, I’ll even get vacation out of switching schools if I do it right. I was considering switching just to spend time with my family anyway, and if I can land a sweet job on the side? Fantastic! It was the right time to make this decision, and while the economic climate and job market aren’t as hot as they used to be, I still think I’ll find something that’ll provide for all my needs if I look hard enough. I’m lucky to be in a position to say this, and I don’t take the idea of looking for work lightly. I took a lot of crap to get to this point, and I’m not going to take a decision about future employment lightly.

I’m pretty good about following traffic rules. I have one street to cross where there is no crosswalk when I walk to work, but other than that, I stick to the sidewalks and follow all the traffic guidelines for pedestrians. I don’t make mad dashes across 6 (!) lanes of oncoming traffic, or stop at the yellow line and wait for cars to go zooming past before I cross the street. I’m safer than 90% of the people around me in my general observation of Korean traffic laws.

If that’s the case, why do I keep getting hit by cars?

Today I was walking to work on my usual path. I had a choice of meandering around a cart that is parked on the sidewalk, or just walking in the street around it. I work my way behind the cart, jumping over their piles of corn waiting to be steamed just to use the sidewalk instead of walking in the street like everyone else. I take a step off the sidewalk, and there is a parked car to my right. I take one step, then another step, and suddenly the parked car has hit me in the hip.

Funny, I don’t REMEMBER being drunk, or walking diagonally for any particular reason.  What the hell? It didn’t hurt, since I was tall enough to avoid being dragged under the car. Had I been holding a cup of coffee, I might not have even spilled a drop. It was like a kindergarten student trying with all his might to hit me on my hip and make me fall over, but not having the energy to even make me stumble. I shook it off and kept walking. It took me a second for my brain to catch up. “Oh, did something just hit me? Did this car just hit me?” I take a step back and see that the lights on the car are now red, and the car is in reverse. I step out into the street to avoid it running me down and turn around to face the driver.

I could see a woman in the driver’s seat, with her window down. She simply didn’t look at all when she backed out of her spot. No thought to safety or common sense what so ever. She hadn’t looked when she hit me with her car, and she was unaware that I was glaring at her RIGHT THEN with open contempt. She was oblivious until I opened my mouth to shout at her.

“HEY! You just HIT me with your car? What are you doing? Could you drive a little more carefully?”

She gave me an insincere little “Sorry” shoulder shrug, as if she hits people all the time and she’s just happy I wasn’t crippled from it. This is the second time I got hit by a car when it wasn’t my fault by women drivers that aren’t paying enough attention to what they are doing. Luckily I’ve escaped injury both times. The first time I got hit was much more scary, with my bike under the car. I’ve had more serious scrapes in a supermarket cart collision compared to today’s accident. Still, this is a trend I do not want to continue.

The old D&D group hasn’t been able to get together for a while now, so we’ve shifted to playing online. They’ve set up a dedicated online forum for the game, and the DM has set up an entire Homebrew world with a back story, maps, and history. I got invited to join them as they start a new adventure in this world. A coworker of the DM who is new to D&D 4E is also going to start playing with us to help round out the party. As a result, I got to make an entirely new character.

Since my last game of D&D was several months ago, I haven’t been keeping up with the most elite builds, highest damage per round outputs, or the newest feats to take. Instead of thinking of my character as a justification for the abilities and weapons I’d use to kill monsters, I went about creating him as a character, then tried to wrap suitable mechanics about it.

The thing that replaced D&D as my gaming outlet most days was Dungeon Crawl. The DM also started playing this game, and he and I both shared an interest in making the gods of D&D more like the gods of Dungeon Crawl. In Dungeon Crawl, the gods are are active in the world, calling down wrath on your enemies, punishing you when you violate their precepts, and granting you power when you follow them. I wanted to bring that element with me from Dungeon Crawl into D&D, where the gods always seemed more like window dressing and stat boosting instead of living entities.

One of my favorite builds in Dungeon Crawl is the Orc Priest of Beogh. The Orc Priest is an armed warrior that calls down smite on his enemies, gains Orc followers, and eats rotten meat as if it was candy. They wear heavy armor and carry large weapons to chop up their enemies. They fit the D&D class of “Paladin” in my eyes with a little work. At least a monstrous version of a Paladin. I usually favor monster corruption of fantasy tropes as a rule, so this seemed like the perfect fit. Instead of needing to fight for approval, this idea was green lit by the group immediately.

Orcs in D&D are typically a monster race, and they are usually used as generic warrior types to fill out a dungeon. There is a “Half-Orc” race that have player feats and can fit into several builds well. Mechanically they are just like Orcs, except they have a few better choices when you try to customize them. If the Orc race was fleshed out, with unique feats and perks that would make them more fun, they would have been my default choice, but instead I went with the more playable character first. This is the only real optimization I did for the entire build. I decided that I’d play a Half-Orc that was in denial of his human ancestry, which my DM liked, but I have yet to explore. The issue of his origin will only be delved into if the DM deems it relevant.

He is for all intents and purposes fully an Orc. He speaks Orcish (Giant) to those around him, and Common only hesitantly. He believes himself to be a prophet of an Orc God no one in the world has ever heard of before. He is a prophet of a religion from another game. I’m using the D&D 4e rules to translate how the god plays.

My character communes with this Orc god though fever dreams. He eats rotten meat that he prepares in a certain way, and when his mind drifts away at the height of his fever, he believes receives divine instruction. There is no priestly structure or any kind of lore other than what he discovers in his dreams and when he awakens. There is no one else to consult when he gets a vision. He has to parse out the meanings himself. He writes down mad gibberish in blood while he is in this fever state on old paper. He then goes around the world trying to follow these visions to fruition.

Tell me that isn’t an awesome character hook? Other than gaining piety through sacrifices of meat, there is no conventions in the game of Dungeon Crawl to explain this ritual. I just made it up and ran with it, all because Orcs in Dungeon Crawl can eat rotten meat and not get sick often.

My character claims he receives divine protection, but perhaps he isn’t channeling anything. Perhaps it’s all in his mind, which has been warped by the consuming of rotten meat and whatever odd spices he uses in its creation. Maybe he has a more primal connection to some divine source that grants him access to power out for his sacrifices. It’s ambiguous at the moment.  He’s gotten followers that also believe him to be touched by some sort of divine power and take his word that the communion ritual is real. They claim to have seen his god when they communed togehter. Who knows if it’s all just a huge delusion or not?

Just the DM I suppose.

All this background and ritual make him much more fun to get in character. There is a way a normal character would handle a problem, and then there is how a possibly insane Orc Paladin prophet that likes to trip out on rotten meat to talk to his personal, possibly fictitious, god likes to handle a problem.

I picked encounter powers and feats that compliment his reckless nature. He isn’t a stoic, righteous paladin on a mission. I’ve never had an interest in the class, and if I hadn’t gotten to play a twist on the character archetype I would have explored another kind of character. I’m glad I decided to challenge myself by playing a class I’ve never explored before. The powers seemed fresh for reinterpretation by coming at it without any background or previous min-maxing.

My Orc Paladin is a self-doubting follower of a distant and cruel god that wants answers to why he is being put through such a journey. Why has been given this awesome responsibility to lead the Orcs and Humans into battle against the Undead? Will his god abandon him if he can not gain followers or bring glory to his name? Will his next communion end up in disaster if he eats the wrong meat, or prepares it in a way that displeases his god? What if he is just plain crazy? Does it matter?

D&D can be just about rolling dice and killing monsters, but it can be a lot more than that if you get to explore how your character ticks. The play by post medium is perfect for me, because I am much more capable of playing interesting characters in print than when I try to role play in person. I’m too embarrassed to speak in character and “act” like I would in print. I’ve probably written the second most material on the entire board, second only to the DM because I’ve been inspired by this character. We haven’t even been in combat yet and I’ve already escaped death once or twice. Once the pace really picks up it’s going to be a lot of fun!

I told my foreign coworker the following when we set up our syllabus for the Intensive classes: “Do not plan on getting anything other than the review test finished on the final day of Intensive classes. Every single summer and winter class intensive has ended with a pizza party. They never announce that it’s going to happen, but you’ll be at the end of the book, desperately trying to finish the last few pages when there will be a knock on the door and pizza is brought in. You’ll try, and fail, to finish the book when this happens, so don’t let it happen to you. Finish the book the day before, do a review test, and then just plan on not getting anything done and eating pizza on the last day.”

I’ve taught numerous summer intensive classes, winter intensive classes, and every SINGLE time this is what has happened. If you count on having the last day to teach, you are out of luck. They schedule the material in such a way you need to use all the class time, but you never have it. I appreciate pizza and the kids love it, but unless you know it’s going to happen, it can be a little annoying.

I’m the only one still on the staff other than the director that knows about that tradition. I set up the intensive classes so that my foreign coworker and myself have avoided any problems. We were counting on that pizza arriving. We were going to watch a movie after our 30 minute test. That was the plan for the entire length of the intensive classes.

I went down after an hour of class to ask when the pizza was supposed to arrive. The secretaries knew nothing about it. I went in to talk to the director. “It’s the last day of the Intensive class, aren’t we ordering pizza? When does it arrive?”

“We don’t work at [Original Academy Name] anymore. This is a new school. We don’t do that anymore. You didn’t promise anyone pizza, did you?”

Ugh, lucky thing no one had said anything to the students. I snuck back up stairs and told my foreign coworker that I had been mistaken about the pizza. It wasn’t happening this year. I guess there are different, cheaper, less friendly traditions about saving money at this school to expect now. My mistake. It’s true that I hadn’t asked my director ahead of time, so there was no reason to expect anything to happen, other than the many, many precedents (6? 7 previous times?)

My director’s tone in addressing me about my question was really disappointing. It was the worst news she could have possibly heard that I mentioned this in front of the other staff or the students. She seemed genuinely annoyed that there was a possibility that she was going to have to shell out pizza for 20 students. Hell, if she bought pizza for only the classes with foreign teachers she only needed enough for 7 students! That’s two pizzas, as cheap as you can find, maximum. If I had promised the pizza to the students, I would have been willing to shell out a few won for that many kids, but it’s the school’s tradition, not mine exclusively. I was usually more annoyed than pleased by the prospect of cleaning up after a bunch of kids. The one time I actually plan for it, and it gets cuts. I’m not disappointed she let down the students, because she didn’t. They didn’t know, but I was a little let down.

The director is within the right to run the school as cheaply as possible. It’s just…I know what’s changed. She might be able to get away with a lot because of the high turn over, but I know what’s different between this school and the old one. Mostly good, some bad.

Getting Glow to sleep has been a struggle. Bathtime works wonders at making her drowsy, but when she drops giant poo-bombs it’s just easier to wash her bottom than try to let wet towels do all the work. After a few half-baths to keep her clean, we run short on clothes, towels, and arm strength to force ourselves to try another bath before bedtime.

Other things work too. Walking around with the baby wrapped in a sling helps her fall asleep. It’s cooler outside at night, and the rhythm of walking and bouncing help her get to bed too. When my wife exhausted all her options and begged for a 30 minute nap to prepare for tonight’s round of sleep battles, I gave this a try.

I got her comfortable in the sling and went for a walk around the block. Interesting sights included children jumping rope at 10:00 pm, the security guards actually awake and on patrol, and a perverted couple with their hands in each other’s pants/dresses at the bus stop across the street. (WTF! EWW!?)

After that walk, Glow was fast asleep. She only could fight sleep for one and a half trips around the block before she was sleeping soundly. I knew that Yoshi would bark when we tried to slip back inside. He gives a short little burst of “WHO IS THAT, IDENTIFY YOURSELF!”  barks every time the damn automatic security lock on the door beeps.

The door beeps to alert people in the house that someone has arrived so you can greet them and not be surprised you didn’t hear them come in. If that door was silent we’d have nothing to worry about, because we’d just slip inside at night every time. I hoped that if I was quiet enough, and was quick enough to let Yoshi figure out who was entering the door, I wouldn’t wake up Glow as I walked in. Earlier in the day I had gotten inside without having Yoshi bark at all.

I quietly opened up the number panel and entered in our code. I slipped open the door and tried to shut it behind me. I pushed the “Open/Lock” button before the door had shut in my overeagerness, forcing the deadbolt to hit the door frame and set off the security alarm. I’ve lived in this house for over a year now and have NEVER done that before! Panicking, I pushed the “Open/Lock” button again, thinking that would reset it, which locked the door with the alarm still ringing loudly. No, of course that did not work, because then you wouldn’t need to know the code to disable the alarm if you got inside! I needed to input the code again to stop the loud beeping.

Now the door was locked, and Yoshi was flipping out because he’d never heard the alarm before. I hit the “Open/Lock” button again, raced outside, careful to not have Glow hit her head on either the door frame or the door, and slammed the number panel with the correct code again. The alarm beeped a few more times and shut off. I slipped back inside and checked to see if she’s awakened, ruining my hard work. My wife, drowsy from her nap, came out to see what the hell is going on. I got her to quiet the dog and I stopped Glow from waking up entirely by moving around the apartment. I got her back down to light sleep right as she was stirring, preventing another trip outside.

It was a close call, but I avoided a crisis. She’s now asleep, the dog is not barking, and perhaps for once we’ll have a good night’s rest.

Once the intensive classes end, I have to get back in the habit of joining my wife in the bedroom to sleep on the bed. I had given up the bed to her and Glow while I was getting up tremendously early every day for work. I needed the sleep, and Glow hasn’t been sleeping through the night consistently. We’ve tried a few things to help, and we’ve gotten her to improve, but the best sleep is still in a room without a baby waking you up from time to time.

We did a trial run with Glow in her crib at the foot of the bed, and us in bed. The night was not restful for anyone involved. Glow doesn’t like the crib, I got woken up every time she tossed or turned, and my poor wife was stuck feeding her every few hours. My wife wants to forge a stronger bond between us. Mutual suffering builds appreciation for the quiet times when they do come, or something like that.

We’re hoping it’s just the switch from the bed to the crib that has caused this increased restlessness. If not, we might be in for a few more months of sleepless nights as we all adjust to one another. The other room is still set up for sleeping at the moment, and I use it to nap now. I’ve got a migraine headache starting, and it seems like the tears of a sleepy child is one of the triggers to incredible amounts of dizzying pain. I know I’ll sleep better tonight, simply because it’d be harder to sleep worse.