wide eyed

So I'm in this quite nice hotel in Chicago, the Amalfi, I get to sleep at a reasonable hour, 11ish, then at about 2 am I am wide awake, don't know why, perhaps I overdid the coffee at around 7pm, deceived by the sunniness outside into forgetting it's much later than I would normally be drinking coffee, but gee, American coffee by and large is as weak as weak coffee drinker's weak piss, so I am not expecting that to have any kind of kick to it. So I'm awake, and I start flipping channels, going around 5 or 6 times, there is a tv movie (?) with Scarlett Johanssen in it and some other actors I recognise, an ensemble piece about some lame-o teens who break into some kind of facility to resit their SATs. I think the film has been stretched a little for widescreen as SJ looks like a bit of a fat dwarf. And also there was Becker, CSI Miami, something called RedEye, constant Family Guy (god that show grates on me) but not totally constant because it then switches to other cartoons, for 'adults', including some stopframe animation thing Seth Green is involved in and which is totally out there and in parts entirely incomprehensible to me. I was interested to see how much some shows (ones to do with money or science fiction disasters, or murder) made me uneasy and angsty at that time of the morning. And then I think I will go to sleep, but I don't, I just lie there staring at the ceiling and imagining how shithouse I will feel the remainder of the day, and that's guaranteed. Then I read about half of a book by Carl Smith called The Plan of Chicago which I had purchased earlier in the day, well, I suppose, the day before (it's confusing; I had a Monday which lasted about three days, you see). Very interesting stuff. And now I am in the 'business center', a two-computer-n-a-printer setup on the floor above my floor.

So far Chicago has been great, I enjoyed the Historical Society Research Center and going through the fire insurance maps from last century, and the I M Pei design for Hyde Park in the 60s, etc, this hiccup is a bit of a bummer (because you spend a lot of time being wide awake at night then get exhausted during the day and do dumb things). I suppose it is some kind of jet lag but it doesn't entirely make sense, as it would be - I can't do the maths - bed time, or thereabouts, at home.