Nine in the Afternoon

The past few days I’ve been going to bed tired at ten or eleven at night, and then arising wide awake and well-rested at six or seven in the morning. I know, that’s called “normal life” a good number of people. But let’s just say that my internal clock has never, in thirty-one years, tolerated such things. I can go to bed at 10pm, but falling asleep won’t happen for several hours. And I can wake up at the crack of dawn, but don’t expect me to be anything other than tired, confused, headache-laden, and inexplicably shivering whether it’s cold or not. Except that this week, none of that’s happening. And I don’t know why.

It’s not that I haven’t tried in the past. For five years I had a day job which required me to be up that early every weekday, and let’s just say that my body fought it every step of the way, never did come close to adjusting, and I don’t think I got one good night’s sleep in five years of trying (thanks, but this isn’t the part where you write in with suggestions; if you can suggest it, I’ve already tried it). Anyway, the beauty of self-employment is that while you do sometimes have to work ridiculous hours, and the idea of being “done with work for the day” just because the clock has struck a certain hour is a mere myth, you do in fact usually get to sleep the specific hours that your body wants you to. And for me that’s been a huge blessing. I don’t care how lazy people think me for staying up working til four in the morning and then sleeping til noon, it’s what keeps me productive.

Except now. Maybe it’s just a quirk, as my sleep patterns tend to drift out of sync from the twenty-four hour clock, and sometimes I do randomly end up awake that early. if feeling like (and wishing) I were dead, just because things were bound to cycle through that time of day eventually. But these past three days have been different. Each evening I’m asleep before the late shows even come on, and each morning I’m awake enough that I could watch the morning shows if I wanted to. It’s only been three days, but I wonder how long it might last.

Am I more productive? No, of course not. Fifteen waking hours is fifteen waking hours, no matter which ones they are. If anything, trying to work in the morning is less productive, due to all the various distractions that come as a result of everyone else also being awake and wanting to contact me. I know I can close out all the various forms of communication, but then I start to worry what I might be missing out on and so I invariably open then all back up. Contrast that to sitting down and writing a feature story at eleven o’clock at night, when businesses are closed, people are going to sleep, and I don’t even have to close out my email program or phone or chat clients in order to attain the ideal level of isolation required for me to do my best writing. Except that the past few days I’ve been asleep before 11pm even rolls around. So I’m doing what I can. For instance there’s that oddly quiet period from 2-5pm pacific time, when the east coasters have already gone home for the day and the west coasters seem to go fairly quiet as well, which makes for a decent window for intensive work.

One of the habits I’ve developed in my years of sleeping til noon (funny how there’s such a societal bias against doing so that “sleeping til noon” is an actual phrase of hyperbole intended to insult people for being lazy, but I digress) is that shortly after awaking, it’s time for lunch. Sometimes I eat in, sometimes I head out, depending on how awake I am, but lunch is generally one of the first things I address when I wake up. And in the past three days that hasn’t changed – except that I’m awake by seven in the morning and starving by nine. And if I’m going to eat breakfast food, it’s not going to be for my first meal of the day. So lunch it is, at nine in the morning, except few restaurants are open this early and even fewer are serving lunch food yet.

So I’ll just sit here and eat this tuna fish for lunch, and even though it’s nine in the morning, it feels like mid-day or later. And suddenly Panic at the Disco’s “Nine in the Afternoon” has a whole new meaning for me.