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Digital Slob Curt Brandao |
Sleep easier, at least
until the bill arrivesWhether they be Martha Stewart, the Macarena or flavored coffee drinks, most level-headed Digital Slobs are savvy enough not to buy into pop culture's many false gods. However, you'll rarely bump into an authentic Slob who won't testify to the truly metaphysical Power of the Pillow.
Like many, my devotion to head cushions began in childhood, and my first guardian angel was a cool-to-the-touch, shiny green satin pillow case with a silver zipper on the side. Long after Mom dropped the truth about Santa on me like a ton of bricks (just because she wanted credit for my first Timex watch), I still clung to my core pillow tenets.
In retrospect, I might've looked a bit gender neutral (at best) squeezing a shiny, lilac-scented pillow whenever I was off the clock from kindergarten (I wouldn't dare take it outside -- even in my paste-eating days, I knew mine was a forbidden love). But I was, after all, raised by a single mother, a sister and a grandmother. Maybe things would've been different if I'd had a sturdy father figure -- maybe the pillow would've smelled more like Old Spice.
But arrested development or not, that pillow made me feel special, and not in the why-is-my-bus-smaller-than-their-bus kind of way.
Yet over time, I strayed from my faith, abandoning heavenly cranial support for a string of empty, meaningless, lumpy pads that just fell flat and made me do all the work in the bedroom. This is why now, when I turn my neck a certain way, it sounds like trees snapping during a mudslide.
The hustling, bustling Digital Age deserves some blame. Aside from Slobs, does anyone else even bother to go to bed anymore? A society that builds two-ton automobiles factory installed with cruise-control, alarm clocks on the dashboards and heated driver's seats with lumbar support that can tilt back to a 20-degree angle has obviously mixed up sleepy time with wakey-wakey time. Why don't they just dip the air-conditioning filters in nitrous oxide? Buckle up, close your eyes, suck your thumb, and you can easily feel like you're right back in the womb racing down the Interstate at 70 mph.
But someone at least made an attempt to put worthwhile slumber back in its traditional, parked position by developing viscoelastic material, or "memory foam," that conforms to your body. Imagine sleeping on a giant slice of pound cake that never goes stale.
Viscoelastic pillows cost $25 to $150. Tempur-Pedic (www.tempurpedic.com) calls theirs the Millennium Pillow, Contour Products (www.contourpillow.com) calls theirs the Cloud Pillow, but a few days after your credit card is approved you'll be calling yours the My Pillow is Better Than Your Pillow, Pillow.
They may also fight wrinkles by reducing the pressure on your face. So, the morning lines on your cheek that make you look like a low-budget Star Trek alien might disappear twice as fast.
Depending on whose PR you believe, NASA first developed this material to reduce the effects of G-forces on liftoffs, or to help astronauts sleep, or to make car bras to keep nicks and scrapes off the Mars rovers. Who cares, it works.
A return to divine dozing takes time, however. At first, you might fight slumber because it feels too good, like you're having a full body massage and you don't want to miss anything.
But if that keeps you up the first night, just call work and say you're taking a personal day to reunite with a childhood friend.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Curt Brandao is the Star-Bulletin's production editor. Reach him at: cbrandao@starbulletin.com
