Not a flirty wink, but a sleepy wink, as in "I didn't sleep a wink last night". My father, the doctor, advised his sleepless patients to ignore their seeming deprivation. He counter-acted the general advice nowadays that says you should get out of bed and do something else until you get sleepy enough to try again. He said you get more sleep than you think you're getting and that at least your body is getting bed rest. Not all of your functions are shut down but some of them are, and that's good. I thought of that this morning when I realized that three hours had passed since I awoke and couldn't get to sleep again while I fussed and tossed. Well! If that much time had passed, I must have had some sleep though it didn't feel like it during my restless meditation. Later in the day, however, I ebbed very low with a guest present and had a little trouble keeping both eyes from winking.

Such nocturnal rumination can be productive. You are in free-fall and while you are sadly vulnerable and can get led down a path of disturbing memories with one sad fact (or factoid) leading to another, on the other hand, you are wide open for revelations , reminders and remedies for some of your current stresses. After a so-called sleepless night I am surprised by my efficiency and what could be mistaken for energy as I look up something I had meant to check, or find something I had forgotten to look for, or phone someone I've been meaning to call. You win some you lose some.

I guess.

Anyway, I almost didn't write this because I am so sleepy. I'm going to bed right now. Anon, anon.

Oscar Wilde, of course. The tricky thing about temptation is that new ones keep popping up. I try to avoid it rather than resist it. When I changed computers (from HP to Apple) I decided I would not LOOK at the games. I was spending far too much time on Free Cell and had just discovered Spider (was that what it was called?) so I simply ignored access to any play things. Better not to get hooked than to try to get un-hooked.

But I just got hooked again, to something else. See, I used to get the Sunday New York Times, every Sunday, obviously, and I loved it, devoted most of my day to it and clipped and saved items for other people as well as for myself. I realized I couldn't get it while I was on my six-month (now three-month) cruise, so I stopped it last month and subscribed to the daily NYT online, so I'd get it on the ship. Well, oops.

It's daily, it's early, and it's addictive. I usually wake early enough that it presents no threat to my 6 a.m. swim. But I find that if/when I wake too late, I still read and read and kind of slip by the time of immersion. So far it's 6:05 or 6:15 but once last week it was 6:30. The thing is I like to swim alone. There are other early risers, not quite as early as me, but if I leave it too long, it's not my private pool.

Always a new challenge.

But I'm learning a lot.