I can't sleep. I mean, I really can't sleep. It's 4 a.m. and I've done little better than doze since I turned out my light at 10. And the hell of it is, it's all from good intentions.

I decided to try to kick my weight loss and bikini-plan into a higher gear by knocking off the sauce for a week or two. I've been counting calories, and hitting the gym in the mornings a few times a week, but still not moving things along like I want to. It's discouraging because if there are two things I hate to do, they're diet and exercise. Oh, I'm happy to spend the day working like a beast turning over the garden. But I really and truly hate grinding away on an elliptical machine, for even the deadly 20 minutes I do on my super-speedy morning workouts. And just the thought of dieting makes me feel deprived and grouchy.

So naturally I decide to take it one step further and deprive myself of one of the primary pleasures of life: wine.

Problem is, I'm a more or less chronic insomniac even with two glasses of wine on board of an evening. Without it, I'm just sitting in the dark like an owl, making up shit to worry about: Global warming, the plight of the sea turtles, dogs that died 20 years ago, why I had trouble making friends in sixth grade, why I can't remember the ending of Villette. You name it. At last, to save my sanity, I get up and eat a bowl of cereal and sit in the living room for awhile, hollow-eyed and exhausted, until I'm able to quiet my interior monologue enough to go back to bed. Likely I'll fall asleep around 5:30 and be a zombie when the alarm goes off -- rudely -- an hour later.

I'm not sure the few hundred calories worth of wine are worth it, frankly. But I remain steadfast. I have clothes I can't wear, and bathing suit season -- horror of horrors -- is fast approaching. The stark unavoidable fact of my middle-aged body in a bathing suit is sobering in and of itself, without the extra cottage cheese.

In my callow youth I imagined myself aging gracefully, accepting each line and wrinkle with equanimity. But the reality of it is much more distressing. In my 20s, when I gave lip service to aging gracefully, I always imagined that I would have achieved a certain "maturity" by my 40s ... that simply failed to materialize. Nor could I realize in my 30s that my sense of being a grown-up had gone as far as it ever would. Mentally, I never aged beyond about 34, and let me tell you, for 34, my body has gone all to hell. I didn't realize, see, what probably any woman over 40 could have told me. No matter how mature I become, no matter how experienced or wise or worldly my accumulated years might make me, I'm never going to feel any older than about 34. Okay, a tired, achey and jaded 34, but when I look in the mirror, 34 is about what I expect to see.

Imagine my shock, then, on confronting the tired 44-year-old broad that turns up in my bathroom with me every morning. Those roots! That cellulite! That... thing under the chin! Why, it's enough to drive even a mature, grown up woman to drink. For me, it's falling off a log.

So, the upshot is... I'm awake. At what is now turning up to be 4:21 a.m. Worrying about whether tis nobler in the mind to sacrifice the nightly glasses of wine to the gods of bikini or just chuck it in.

Think I'll go lie in bed and worry about it.