in elementary school i'd wait until the house had stopped rustling, flip my lamp on and read a christopher pike or mary higgins clark in a single sitting while everyone slept.
in high school i crept into the family room to watch mtv in the dark, jumping onto the couch whenever a car drove past, wondering if a boy was going to knock on my window or do a one-ringer, the code to call him back. [this happened often enough that it was always a distinct possability, but not often enough to justify the nervous tick.]
after 3 a.m. rollerblading, general campus wandering or sitting on benches near the arches off summit avenue smoking menthols and talking smart, a handful of girls told me that no one wanted to be my roommate sophomore year because i stayed up too late.
once, when fannie and i lived together, i was hanging out with my friend teemo in our living room long after she had called it a night, and she yelled from her bedroom: shut up your big dumb laugh!
for my first few years in duluth, i'd crawl back to my apartment well past sun up. afterbars lasted until we had cashed a family-sized serving of cheeseburger hamburger helper and commuter traffic had drizzled down to nothing.
after that i went back to reading all night, tearing through two or three books a week. squinting at the final chapter around 11 a.m., scorching my stomach with a pot of coffee, sometimes making eggs, deciding to just stay awake for the day -- then crashing around noon with my legs still bouncing from the caffeine.
when i met chuck, he was also going the distance. our dates ended late-late-late, and even now we are typically up until about 4 a.m.
chuck has kept traditional business hours this week. passing out tonight just 39 minutes into a movie, even before the 10 p.m. news. exactly the kind of behavior we both think is hilarious.
i'm doing nothing. i emptied tivo of the things he doesn't watch, i've read half a book. i flipped through a magazine and found a pair of cute boots online. i attacked my google reader, catching people's updates within seconds of being posted. i read some more of that book and had another whole meal. i've consumed about 96 ounces of water in the past six hours, and flushed about 80. i've googled "how many ounces of fluid does a bladder hold?" and estimated appropriately.
left to my own devices, i seem incapable of putting myself down for the night.
8 comments:
Hmmm...it sound like you were born to be the mother of an infant. I wish I had been able to keep your hours when my kids were new.
Which leads me to the question, What do you do for Money?
I've never been a night person, it gets dark, my body seems to want to sleep.
in my defense, more often than not i was crawling to talbots with a hangover and a few hours of sleep because i adapted to your schedule. :) Fannie
I am a night owl at heart, but being married to an early-riser has me now keeping the schedule of an 86 year-old man. This totally sucks for me, because I'm most productive at night, and I don't have to normally be to work until 1 or 2 in the afternoon.
I miss reading books until the wee hours of the morning- let's trade lives for a week, o.k?
i had to go thru a sleep study at the mayo clinic, a light lamp, and no caffeine to figure out that i'm a night person too. except the medical community calls it a delayed circadian rythym, whatever that means. i called it insomnia. it just sucks to be a night person and have to work at 7 am. luckily that doesn't happen so often.
It feels so good to not be alone in the world. My friends call me a Night Walker and yes, they're nerds.
@ Amy: I had to go through the same thing. It basically means that your body clock is off by a certain number of hours - no big thing, but they keep giving me meds to try to "reset" it. I find it far more fun to be up at 4 am than to be functional at 8. Granted, in some cases this not sleeping can be darker - my sleep study found that I have chronic extremely severe sleep apnea and that my brain is literally afraid to let me sleep.
This fall I'm one of the organizers of a new homeschool co-op. The families get together for playtime and other group activities, etc.
When we were discussing what time to start, I was fighting against the 9 a.m. that the other moms wanted. I lost the fight. I was telling them, "Seriously, that's too early for me to be anywhere." They laughed and said, "That's not so early!"
Did they think I was kidding? I was not kidding. Even my 6-year-old is usually still in bed until 10.
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