Hunger

I rarely have problems sleeping. Usually if I'm really stressed out, my thoughts will keep me awake. This has happened a couple times in my life though I can only distinctly remember the why for one period of time I had difficulty sleeping. It was before I was about to take the SATs and I thought I would fail at life if I didn't do well in them. And then I realized that I needed to sleep to perform optimally. So it passed.

Today, I couldn't sleep not because of all the work I have to do, the packing I have to do, the grad school apps I need to look over again or the miscellaneous other things I need to take care of.

I was hungry. Really really hungry.

To preface this, I got food poisoning on Friday night. And for some reason I thought that this meant that I would be stuck eating 죽 (juk - Korean rice porridge) until I got better. I guess I assume that food poisoning was the same as 배탈 (bae-tal), which is pretty much an upset stomach due to some kind of indigestion or something. I don't really know what causes 배탈 that makes it different from food poisoning but I thought that the food poisoning I got was of the same variety and thought I would be stuck eating rice porridge for several days and then slowly weaning myself off it to solid foods.

So in other words, I half starved myself. Not by choice - I had places to go, things to take care of and I packed my rice porridge when I could. So today was the last day of my medication and I had eaten what I thought to be a decent dinner (eating as slowly as I could and chewing as much as I could remember to).

I have an early morning tomorrow. It's past midnight. I was planning on sleeping before midnight. Nothing occupies my mind as I lay in bed, staring at the semi-dark ceiling, partially illuminated by the city lights. As hunger occupies my stomach, I think to myself, Ah, now I understand what those kids are talking about when they talk about not being able to sleep because they're too hungry in those books...

So what did I do?

The truth behind my mom's words suddenly hit me. "You don't need to only eat 죽 (juk). If you feel better, you can eat whatever you want, just don't overdo it."

Without further ado, I climbed out of bed and grabbed whatever seemed to be easy to digest in my mind for an odd smorgasbord midnight snack: cherry tomatoes, this salted meat thing (장조림), walnuts and laver (dried seaweed). A little too much salt probably, the meat probably wasn't the best idea, and I'm not sure if tomatoes are easy to digest (ironically the first time I got food poisoning was from some bad cherry tomatoes...).

Oh well. I'm happy. My stomach's happy.

And now I can finally go to bed.