Tossing and Turning

This paper was written in my comp class in fall of 08'. The assignment was to write about one place but from two different perspectives...one positive and one negative. I chose sleeping in my bedroom.




I am lying in my bedroom wandering towards sleep. This room is my favorite place in my house. It is very dark, cool, and quiet. The walls are painted a lovely craftsman red and the ceiling is the lightest shade of pink. The window is covered with bone colored sheers and beautiful red floral embroidered curtains. My dog pack is sleeping all around me in beds on the floor quietly snoring and sometimes dreaming. One of my cats is lying near my feet making a wonderful warm spot and another is close to my hand so that I can lazily stroke him while I drift off to sleep. The ceiling fan is turning above me providing a nice breeze and cooling the room further. The sheets are cool, soft, and clean and the chocolate colored blanket on top keeps me just the right temperature. My head and body are cradled in feathers from my pillows and featherbed. It seems like pure bliss.
I am lying in my bedroom and I think I might never go to sleep! My frustration rises more with each passing moment that I am awake. There is a sliver of sun peeking through the widow curtain and shining right on my face. The dogs are flatulent and fill the entire room with their fetid stench. Their dreaming and twitching is keeping me awake. The cats are all over the bed taking up much of the room and one of them keeps butting his head into my hand begging to be petted when all I want to do is sleep. The ceiling fan is making an unusually irksome ticking noise and its repetitious nature is driving me to the brink of insanity. My sheets keep getting balled up beneath me and cause me to toss and turn even more. There are feathers sticking up out of the feather bed and poking me in places that I can’t reach. I don’t think I will ever get to sleep.

This was a complicated exercise for me because more often than not I am an optimistic soul. I try to see the good in everything and everyone. I attempt to make the best of things and I also try not to worry about things I cannot change. Therefore the paragraph that describes my room in a positive light was much easier than the negative one. I had to remember times when sleeping didn’t seem possible and write about how I saw my room then. I also manipulated my writing by using antonyms of words found in my positive paragraph. I learned a lot about writing in this exercise. It was more difficult than any other assignment so far only because I couldn’t get past describing a place that I find so pleasant in a negative way.