Sleepless in Pittsburgh
I learned a new word, uhtceare. It’s not new – it’s new to me. The word is ancient. It’s from Old English; the language, not the furniture polish.
Side note: You will find words like glycol ether and carnauba wax in the polish, though, and they’re just as strange.
But I digress, like I do. Uhtceare is a word that means “pre-dawn anxiety.” While it was, most likely, meant for the thoughts of knights before they went into battle against invading Huns, I want to bring the word back. It is one word that perfectly encapsulates that feeling I get at 4 o’clock in the morning after visiting the bathroom. Random thoughts bombard me as I snuggle back under the covers. I like to play my greatest hits of fears, regrets, discomfort, and dissatisfaction. In the wee hours of the night, my brain is a broken record.
Sometimes, I think about the things I should have thought about when I was supposed to be thinking about them, such as “Did I take my pill after dinner?” Or “Did I proofread that PowerPoint presentation? And, on slide five, should I have used a graph instead of a pie chart?” Sometimes, it’s all recrimination. Of course, I have been known to produce a devastating comeback 12 hours after a confrontation with a coworker. No one wants to be George Costanza.
“The Jerk Store called and they’re running out of you.”
See: “Seinfeld,” season 8, episode 13, “The Comeback.”
There are times when my brain can’t think of a real problem and makes up new stuff to worry about. I wouldn’t classify them as “deep thoughts.” They are a little closer to the surface, but wacky:
Who figured out that dogs are colorblind? And how? I will be up in the middle of the night pondering this, wondering, “How do you get a dog to tell you the difference between a red ball and a blue ball?”
How do we have pictures of the Milky Way Galaxy? If we’re in it, how did we get a picture of it? It’s like taking a picture of the outside of your house from inside your linen closet.
Who picked up a lobster off a beach and said, “This looks tasty. We should eat this.” I suspect this was more trial and error, like the people who discovered which mushrooms were poisonous, may they rest in peace.
I’m bringing back uhtceare because we don’t have a word that perfectly describes that uneasy feeling you get in the middle of the night. The absolute worst thought I have when I’m trying to get back to sleep is this one: “If I fall asleep now, I can sleep for 72 minutes before the alarm goes off.”
Suddenly, I’m a math genius, calculating down to the exact second before the alarm blares. I’m not saying I’m writing this in the middle of the night, but “if I fall asleep now, I can sleep for 71 minutes before the alarm goes off.”