Has anyone ever taken part in a sleep study? Will they look the other way if you have a wet dream?

If you don’t want to read about the seamy going-ons in the Delicious Juice Dot Bedroom, look away now:

Ed and I have been sleeping in separate beds for the past couple of months. It started out as a nice gesture, because we were both terribly sick at different times – one or the other of us would move to the futon or the couch and let the other thrash about the bed in peace and delirium. However, as time goes on, we’ve found ourselves getting really used to the whole “separate bed” thing: I kind of love not getting elbowed in the face, and Ed likes not hearing me snore.

For reasons that are probably incredibly stupid, I am mortified to acknowledge that I quite possibly snore. Fat old bald men snore, not delicate flowers in their busty prime. Guys with hairy shoulders and gravy stains on their undershirts snore. Middle-aged guys with beach ball bellies. Men who wear Speedos with no sense of irony. They snore. Ralph Kramden snores. Not me.

But, according to Ed, I snore. I snore loudly enough to keep him awake or wake him up, even with ear plugs in. He gets mad and huffy when my snoring wakes him up, so he wakes me up – and then I get pissed off because I was soundly asleep until he started sighing like the world’s biggest martyr. He feels like I’m snoring on purpose (however that works), and I feel like he’s maliciously waking me up because HE can’t sleep so why should I. Enter the separate bedrooms, and how we haven’t killed each other yet.

Ed is worried that my snoring goes deeper than chainsaws, though – he thinks I have sleep apnea. This is a further source of embarrassment for me, and makes me feel really terrible about myself because of the aforementioned stereotypes: clearly if I have sleep apnea, I am a gross fat old fatty fat fat who is fat. I don’t want to sleep hooked up to a machine (that’s how Skynet started), Ed doesn’t want to share a bed with me if I won’t man up and breathe properly, and everything makes me full of sad and shame and self-loathing. Basically, I’m a sleepy fucking party over here.

There’s also the small matter of my office: I want it back. I have a ridiculous new retina iMac I can’t fully enjoy because there’s man junk all over my stuff. He’s keeping me from my phone booth! It’s not fair.

I didn’t know that sleep monitoring mostly happens at home now, so I’ve made an appointment to see about getting a referral. I’m hoping whatever my deal is can be fixed without turning me into Robocop, because we don’t really have the space for us to maintain separate bedrooms. I may not miss Ed’s elbows and Salad Fingers, but I do miss cuddling. And penis. Penis is great.

Still feeling that shame, though.

this is what it looks like inside my head