electric mist

on being a night owl

I'm a night owl. Born, hardcore, don't give me any of that glorious sunrise, birds singing, coffee on the porch crap. And especially don't do it before ten a.m., unless you're prepared to dodge hard objects flying at your head. When I have to get up for work (we're in construction... people are bitchy if you start after noon... the bastards), I spend the morning siphoning down diet Coke to try to be coherent. (I've tried to find a way just to do a caffeine I.V., but so far, no go.)

My college roommate was a freakish idiot who daily loved to put an incredibly loud clock which TICKED like thunder in a barrel right next to my bed and then the damned sucker worked and the alarm rang at an ungodly hour (i.e., before noon). I would warn her not to put it near me, since I wasn't terribly trustworthy when loud noises shrieked in my ears and every time she'd promise me that she wouldn't and then she'd wake up in the middle of the night (to go to the bathroom) and then move her clock over to my side of the room, set to the time she had to wake up. At which point, the clock would scream like the hounds of hell and I would spring up out of bed, my head spinning around, and in that same nanosecond, before I was truly even conscious, my good pitching arm would snag that alarm and heave it across the room onto the cinderblock dorm walls, and all its little pieces would slide down to the floor in a heap. She would snore through the whole thing and I'd threaten her life, which, she explained later, always helped jump her adrenaline in the mornings and prepare for her first class. I told her being dead was a really bad way to prepare, but she kept doing it until I found her secret alarm clock stash and started setting them to two a.m. When I was nice and awake. After a couple of weeks of sleep deprivation, she caved. It was a good thing, because I was fast about to move on to blackmail. She slept heavily and was exceptionally pose-able. Photography was my hobby.

Do not mess with a night owl.

A long time ago, I used to get a lot of people trying to reform me. There were all sorts of suggestions about how if I just got into the habit of going to sleep early and getting up early, I'd re-train my body's clock. Or they would offer ideas as to what to eat, how to sleep, what to drink or not to drink and when, as if by the very fact that I operated differently from them, I was somehow wrong. And when I was younger, I'd feel... chastised. Awkward, like I had something to apologize for to society as a whole because I wasn't little miss perky-ass alert first thing at dawn. (I've met people like that. When I'm Surpreme High Commander of the Universe, they are sooooooooo gonna be first in line for some serious smiting.)(Unless they bring chocolate.)

Some time ago, there were tons of studies on biological rhythms and how some people are just born to be night owls and others, morning people. There was a study (hell, there may have been thousands, but I only read one) which talked about a certain genetic marker in the iris of the eye. If you had it, you were a night person. If not, you weren't. Apparently the study's results were pretty much 100% correct down the line.

HAH!

My parents are dedicated morning people. (Sleeping "in" until five a.m. was slacking.) I was barely going to sleep by five a.m. When I was in high school, my Dad had to get up at 2:30 a.m. to go to work. I would read at night when it was quiet and I wasn't as likely to be interrupted by my little brother, and I'd hear Dad's alarm ring. I'd turn off my lamp, wait impatiently while he dressed, left, and then I'd listen carefully until I heard the sound of his truck turning from our street onto the main road out. I'd have to give it a couple more beats because he could see my window from that main road (as experience taught me) and if I turned on my light too soon, I'd hear about it later. Then I'd read until about four, get up at six to go to school, stay all day, do dance team after school (two to three hours of practice), drive home, do homework or talk on the phone and then, along about eleven in the evening, wake right-the-hell up. You'd think I'd have been exhausted, but even if I was feeling completely worn out at nine, by eleven, I was wide awake.

My mom said I was the same as an infant. She'd wake me up at five or so in the morning, keep me awake and busy all day, refuse to let me nap because she wanted me to sleep at night, which meant putting up with a supremely cranky infant during the late afternoon, and then at ten, bang, I was wired, happy, and playful. Raring to go. She finally gave up and just let me sleep in my own rhythms and voila, happy baby.

There aren't quite as many people trying to reform me, now. Probably that fear of me drop-kicking them across the room when they're asleep at midnight and I'm wired slows them down. Part of it may be that I've really embraced being a night owl. I love it, I love the quiet time after dark when so much of the world is asleep, I love how awake and alert I am, how the writing is always better then. I love the sense of possibility I feel, the creativity. And a thousand other things. I still have a tendancy to toss the alarm clock across the room, smashing it into pieces, but I'm getting better -- I'm down to two clocks a week now.

Posted by toni at December 8, 2004 03:46 PM