I finally got around to downloading Faith Hill's song "Cry" last night. My first encounter with it was last week sometime, in an over-full car of people singing along with the radio. A happy sort of memory for a not-so-happy sort of song. But it's a good song. I think I identify with a lot, though not all, of it. More than I'm proud of, anyway.

But it's a good cross-step waltz, which is more to the point of what I had been meaning to write. I was trying to go to sleep last night and it just wouldn't leave me alone. It was just crying out for a choreography, and I finally had to get up and start writing down ideas just to get them out of my head. Then I spent another half hour or so, well after I should have been asleep, turning the light back on every few minutes to write something else down. I'm not sure that all the ideas are very good, though, and most of them wouldn't be very useful outside of a choreography (i.e. they'd be hard or impossible to lead and follow). But some could be interesting. Unfortunately, when I listened to the song again this morning, I found that I had been choreographing much more to my own interpretation of the music in my head than to the actual recording. Sigh.

I think I learned a bit about why my brain keeps me awake so often, though. How often does it get to just sit quietly and apply imagination to something with no distractions? Even as a relatively introverted sort of person, I don't just sit and think very much. I read, or I write, or I get distracted with other things. Journaling is often the closest I get, and even that has the distraction of trying to make coherent sentences and write them down. And even if I had sat down and deliberately tried to spend some time choreographing something last night before bed there's a good chance I would have just frozen, going "uh oh... now I'm supposed to be coming up with ideas." But in bed there's no distractions and no pressure so my brain goes out and has a field day. Even sometimes when I'm completely worn out and tired, I'll try to go to sleep and that one little bit will wake up and start ticking again. Very strange.