Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Meet The Day People 

We hate them because they are chipper.
And not at all pasty.


I get under five hours of sleep every night, drink 40 ounces of coffee between bed and classroom, have another 20 ounces before lunch. By Wednesday afternoons I can feel the burn, the eyelid droop, the slow leak of conscious thought. By Fridays I'm on sugar and fumes.

Give me a summer off and I sleep away the heat of the day, drift quickly into a fully nocturnal schedule.

I have powerful memories of a household awake until three in the morning, my father, my siblings and myself skulking around in nightreverie.

But it's not a personal failing to adapt to the inevitable daylight hours of the public school teacher. Instead, I'm happy to report that the tendency towards the nocturnal is genetic and dominant...and, by implication, totally excusable.

Yes, welcome to the modern world of chemicality, where no one need own their behavior. See the far-too-chipper dad and his daughter in the pic above? They have Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome, or ASPS, a genetic condition where the body clocks are moved forward -- in their case by about three hours. They fall asleep at 7:30 every night, wake up refreshed at 3:30 or so, and piss the rest of us off to no end.

Because we have the reverse of that, don't we.

Of course, the symptomatic familial result would run inverse from one case to the other. Where Bethany and Clay -- a pair of daytime names if I ever heard 'em -- cite their mornings together as a lifetime of bonding, there's nowhere to go in suburbia afterhours, no shining faces to greet in the dark hallways at the end of a long day.

Hence the slightly furtive existence of my adolescence, knowing that my family was awake in their own spaces, avoiding them into the night.

You might say the differences between our case and theirs is like night and day.

posted by boyhowdy | 9:49 PM |

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Comments:

Nocturnal history has had to adjust to rising at 5:30 every morning... I still force myself into latenight wandering, but times, they are a-changin' ... Time is winning this battle, as I find myself falling asleep earlier and earlier, pissed off in the morning because I wasted a perfectly fine 1:00 am that was so full of potential.

~Really enjoyed the post~

# posted by  Jericho : 8:28 AM, March 15, 2006

 

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