the 24-hour clock
You know, I’m turning 30 in six days. I really did think that by now I’d be able to wake up at seven, be working by nine, take a civilized lunch break at noon, and then get back to it. Nothin’ doin’. It’s twenty past four in the morning (make all the jokes you want), and it is ever at about 2:30, just when I’m poised for sleep, that I decide I can change the world by updating my calendar, making enormous lists that I have no intention of consulting again, and then posting publicly about it.
I had high hopes for my thirties, I really did. Although it might be that the Special Powers trademarked by that particular decade don’t actually take effect until one is properly thirty. I hadn’t thought of that.
I blame it on the US election (although that really doesn’t account for the past month). Being five hours ahead of the action means you have to stay up late, and it’s not just about the numbers: it’s the punditry, the reviews from everywhere. I’ve had an awful lot of fun reading the curmudgeons over at National Review Online’s The Corner, I read an apocalyptic piece about Obama’s first security briefing on CNN, and listened with interest to the total silence issuing from the mouth of Sarah Palin in the past 24 hours.
(Does anyone else think she’s going to spend the next four years in finishing school? Hiring private tutors, taking courses in rhetoric? Learning to walk across a room with a book on her head? Doin’s are transpirin’ in that mind of hers, I’m telling you. Something tells me she stays very quiet in Alaska for the next couple of years and re-emerges as Sarah Palin 2.0 in time for the Republican primaries.)
Anyway, the prospect of staying up till five in the morning last night really didn’t bother me; it rarely does. I feel more adult when I get my work done during the day, but I’m putting in the same ten-odd hours regardless, and, as Stephen King would say, it’s darker than a carload of assholes out there these days, so it doesn’t really matter when I’m working. The bonus is that I detest natural light: my previous works will attest to my attempt to foster perpetual twilight.
Still, though. There’s something a bit deviant about being awake at this hour. I thought being back in a student population would put me back into an anything-goes atmosphere, but these cats genuinely seem to work by day, attend choral rehearsal by evening, eat their pulses and get their Five A Day, and tuck themselves into bed by ten-oh-oh. I can’t be the first disorganized Cambridge student, can I? But perhaps I’m the last.
I take a multivitamin, anyway. Sometimes two, when I’m feeling the need for extra virtue. Or toxicity.
Between reading The Compleat Midwifes Practice and working on novel revisions, about 85% of my life’s work has me more or less confined to this chair (there are worse chairs, certainly). At this time of night it’s always tempting to consider the All-Nighter, to just go until I drop, and then drop. But then I remember the birds. Thanks to Daylight Savings Time (a professor at a readings seminar recently told me in a very smug voice that DST is a “social construction”; I returned that time itself is a “social construction” - maybe this whole thing is just an attitude problem), the birds will be out in full force in about an hour.
Everybody knows what it’s like to hear the birds of a morning when you haven’t slept. It’s a warning that reality is setting back in: the day is beginning; the robins are opening up shop and soon everyone else will be too. One’s stolen season is stolen back when one is uniquely ill-equipped to deal with it: tired, cold in the extremities, reading the same line over and over, but of course there’s no getting to sleep now because of the fucking birds. The world has woken up and it’s only just occurred to you that you have no idea how you’re going to get through the day.
So yes, I’m trying to be civilized, I’m trying to be grown up. I’m failing parlously. The whole reason my husband and I came to love each other so was these habits, but now he’s a Morning Rower so he gets his carbs and is in bed by midnight. I need a new night owl. Katrina the teddy bear is great, but she’s not big on talk. She just sorta sits there, judging me. (She started judging me when the felt started leaving her face a little bit - she’s a case study in Velveteen-Rabbititis - now she’s got this sort of wry half-smile on her).
Katrina is telling me to go to bed, and the fact my stolid, wise bear has become animate tells me that she’s probably right all round.
Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.
Looking for more? See Sarah’s recent weblog entries here.
