Sleep Mask Plight

On Tuesday I posed the following question on Twitter:

 To which I received a multitude of replies.  Here are a few of them:

Apparently the general consensus was that it was fairly "diva-like."  And I must agree.  Upon meeting up with the Angry Runner in Vegas after her flight got in late, our intro went something along these lines, "Hi, I'm Jeri.  I wear this sleep mask to bed.  I realize that's pretty high-maintenance of me, but hope we can still be besties."  Also, I think the words puppies + kitties + unicorns + sparkles + yayzies + rainbows were infused in the previous statement.  But as I said, it was super duper late, so my memory might not be 100%.

I have always been a bit of a high maintenance sleeper.  You know those kids who can sleep for hours in the backseat on long family road trips?  Yeah that was my brother.  Perhaps I didn't get any shut eye because my "portion" of the back seat was the floor.  No joke.  Not sure how my parents let him get away with that, but thank God we were never in any accidents!

When I sleep it needs to be 100% dark and 100% quiet.  In grade school I had to have my bedroom walls painted yellow.  Yellow walls + a hint of sunshine = sweet jesus I'm sleeping on the surface of the sun.  Could it BE any brighter in here?!?!  (said in a Joey Tribiani voice for greater affect).  By junior high I had implemented a solution consisting of a heavy blanket tacked to the walls over the window so i can sleep til the afternoon (in the summer of course).  When my mother discovered what I had done, she demanded I remove my dungeon inducing blankets and "sleep like a normal person."  Bahahah, that's cute if you think I'm normal madre.  ;)

It was around this time that I started sleeping with a bandana over my eyes.  My name is Jeri, and I'm a resourceful genius.  When I headed off to college I quickly learned that the dorms are LOUD.  After a couple years of not sleeping (or so it felt) I learned that a loud box fan helped to drown out most obnoxious college kid noise.  Yayzies!

After college I stuck with the loud box fan solution and started developing super de duper dry eyes after a night of sleep.  I determined that I must keep my eyes sort of open when I sleep, and since I had a big box fan whirring the air around, it was doing all sorts of damage to my eye balls.  Enter the modern day sleep mask.  I heart it.  It's high maintenance and I love it.

Here are a few sleep masks that I've seen over the past couple of years that I've thought about upgrading for:

(Click images for sources to purchase)

Upon crawling in to bed Tuesday night I realized what had prompted my aforementioned twitpoll:  My sleep mask was no longer in my possession.  Waaaaaaaaaaaaah!  Old school bandana, pony up!  I've got a job for you!