:: Circadian subversion ::

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

I never used to be an insomniac. Not that I'm really one now, because that term seems to carry with it images of helpless tortured night-owls turning and tossing restlessly in their beds, desperate for forty winks but stymied by some congenital, hormonal, or environmental preclusion. No, the truth is anytime past ten o'clock (how strange is it that "o'clock" is still colloquial? It's like the token medieval minority we let into the country club of modern English to prove we're not biased. That and "wil o' the wisp") if I have a soft place to lie down I'm, to appropriate the title of the infamous Hollywood epic oeuvre, gone in sixty seconds. But, biological determinism be damned, I've always preferred to stay up late. I guess that means I'm not a genuine insomniac, just voluntarily sleep-deferred (and all the Langston Hughes girls go: "What happens to a slumber deferred? It puts your ass in a sleeper-hold, word."). In college, especially towards the beginning, I was awful about it; never ready to go to bed, never ready to wake up, living 28-hour days. But I've been pretty good about it since I started working. Except for the past couple months.

I know exactly what happened: the internet and the coldness. They conspired. The coldness made sure I'd be forced to stay inside while the internet suddenly decided to become way more interesting and time consuming than it had in the past. You'd think monopolizing the time of a frostbitten hermit would be the domain of television but honestly I only turn on the TV these days for 1.5 hours a week, coincidentally the sum total of the running times of The O.C. and Curb Your Enthusiasm. The internet had to go and get all RSS (or Atom) on me, so now I can't pretend to ignore the fire-hose of interesting information. When I see all those feeds sitting there with unread items I start to panic. My god, these posts are almost TWO HOURS OLD! I can't link to this, it's stale by now. What happened? I was in a meeting and the whole world updated.

Maybe that's why I've been staying up so late of late. It's the only time I feel like I'm on top of things.

The spring should fix this. My new drinking technique is unstoppable.

Enough. I hope I can rest easily tonight while the couple beneath me either plays a heated round on their XBOX or has competitive coitus (I can't tell which it is they're doing - oddly coherent speech suggests the former, guttural expletive bursts hint at the latter). I wonder if anyone's posted anything about it...

Posted by morland @ 01:14 AM

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