Now playing: "Maps" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Hello, it's the Sunday after Oscar Sunday, and the awards discourse is maybe dying down. Savor this moment.

Speaking of good changes, I'm happy to note the Alamo NYC Union saved their own hours and vanquished the blight of mid-movie phone ordering that I covered previously. In order to support the Union, I actually took this opportunity to return to the Brooklyn Drafthouse and see the situation for myself. The good news is that the Alamo experience is back to what I'd call November 2025-quality, with pre-roll video telling audiences to not use their phone during the movie, and the crowd mostly behaving throughout "Ready or Not 2: Here I Come," which was a perfect movie to pair with chicken fingers.

Oh, and remember how I talked about my evolving relationship with my phone last week? I'm ecstatic to finally share the results of my months-long testing of The Brick, which helped me shatter Instagram's chokehold on my eyes. I got 10 of my CNN Underscored colleagues to help me out with testing, and I am really proud of this article.

Sympathies, and who we extend them to, are a complicated thing. Some devils do not need advocates, and some villains are not actually intentional. Nowhere do I feel this in my soul more than when I'm pulled into a moment of sleep like I was this past Friday night. Sometimes I’ve heard people grousing about how folks who fall asleep in theaters, and I probably twitch a bit when those words reach my ears. Because I have been one of those people.

Immediately after I wrote that paragraph, I jumped over to a web browser to do literally anything else but explore the topic of sleep. This is because I have a certain shame about accidentally going to sleep in public, as well as decades ago when hanging out with friends and I just refused to go home even when my body was telling me to.

I distinctly remember going nite-nite at the 23rd & 8th movie theater during a showing of Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan," which would have been in 2010 or 2011, right before I’d get a diagnosis that made it all make a little more sense. Waking up, frantically wondering what I missed from this movie I thought to be awesome, I felt like a fake movie lover. How could I form an opinion if I couldn't keep it together to stay awake? I had bad sleep habits at that time, staying up way too late, eating too close to bedtime, falling asleep in front of the TV, and so on. I thought that earlier bedtimes were the only way out of this problem, that I was to blame. I was frustrated.

A year or two later, I got a sleep apnea diagnosis that I might have needed for years prior. Sleep apnea, if untreated, leads to a lot of terrible stress on the heart and also makes your sleep terribly unrestful. But while I was given a CPAP machine, I didn’t exactly know how to use it properly, which made me stop using it. Then, in a bit of twisted surprise, the model I had got recalled due to seriously dangerous flaws, so I’m maybe happy I didn’t stick with it? So, I digress and forgive myself. Eventually, I got out of Phillips’ CPAP hell and got a ResMed machine that I love.

While I did notice much better and consistent energy, it wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be. A spate of recent success, though, seems to have clued me into another change I needed. One of the little things I hinted at last week when I talked about what I’ve learned from my doctors is that my blood sugar is a tad bit higher than I’d like, and I’ve since learned that that can lead to tiredness. And so the dietary changes I've made seem to already be reaping unexpected rewards.¹ I’m constantly noticing how I'm less exhausted during the middle of the day or during movies, especially when watching Bi Gan’s hypnotic, gorgeous and often dialogue-free film “Resurrection” at New York City's odd little The Roxy Cinema, a one-screener in the basement of a movie theater below Canal Street.

I didn’t click with “Resurrection” the first time I went to see it, but strong applause from trustworthy folks online gave me the confidence to retry it and … well? It hit harder this time, but I still got a little lost about some of it. But I never felt like taking a nap during its 160-minute runtime. And that’s a win for me. 

Of course, sometimes I’m still risking fate with these movies and how they’re timed. On Friday, I went to a 10:30 p.m. showing of Paul Thomas Anderson's "Inherent Vice" after having been up since 6 a.m., and I'm proud to say that I made it until 11:30 p.m. before I started to get tired. That's when I'd already be asleep if I was at home, and as wonderful as PTA's film is, it's also a bit of a sleepy movie itself. Joaquin Phoenix's character practically sleepwalks through the movie, the dialogue isn't exactly written for clarity's sake and singer/song-writer Joanna Newsom's narration is incredibly calming and soothing.

But this time I didn’t feel bad, because I knew it was a late show, and that I’d been up early. I’d also noticed others who fell asleep. I was not alone, nor unique.

Listen to your body, look for answers beyond your immediate control, and don’t just assume you’ve done something wrong. Sleep apnea is believed to affect many more than have been diagnosed, and it’s not the only one of these sorts of things. And also lay off the guilt and shame, it’s not productive.

Thank you for reading this far.

Until next time!