I am in the midst of another siege of sleeplessness, and after ten days or so of patchy insomnia my brain is feeling somewhat fragile, as if it's a china cup that someone has left too close to the edge of the tea table. In other words, nothing's broken yet.

I lay awake last night listening to the wind and the rain and Tom breathing and the dog sighing and the cellphone battery beeping its plug-me-in-or-turn-me-off song, and I thought about the novel I'm reading, Virginia Woolf's Night and Day, which has the world's most annoying footnotes. VW would be incensed by this edition. Also, I thought about all the editing and lawn mowing I have to do this week, and tried to remind myself to call the dog groomer. All these thoughts were unnecessary, which is the worst thing about insomnia: only the most tedious, irritable part of my consciousness seems to be awake. Where are the flashes of insight? The stunning first lines of poems? No, I'm awake thinking about buying more vinegar before I can make bread-and-butter pickles. Blah.