* 'Round Midnight
by Kris Weberg on August 6, 2006
First things first: Megan Baxter wins round 1 of the "guess the subject line themes" game. Go Megan! I'll keep a running tally of wins. And remember, the little star int he subject line means that a new round has started, so this is your next shot, kids, adults, and undead myspace users!
Anyway, tonight's post comes with the realization that I genuinely can't recall the last time I went to bed before, well, midnight. Call it the perils of a college schedule or the results of not having a standard job, but it's bee a very long time since I've regularly gotten to sleep on the same calendar day I woke up.
Of course, that raises the question of what actually constitutes a day. Most people run on the calendar day -- actually, more literally an astronomical dating system. Everyone uses the solar day; a lot of people, including a few folks on this site, also use the lunar day (at least for spiritual purposes). For the purposes of time-sensitive processes like medication, there's a 24-hour day, but any span of 24 hours is a day. Personally, I go with an experiential or phenomenological day -- it's the same 'day until either I go to sleep or the sun comes up again, in which case the next day is here. It has the benefit of working on any planet, even if I've only got the one right now.
At one point in my life, it was intentional: staying up past midnight every night was a way to prove I was in fact not living at home anymore with my parents. After a while, though, it became a habit just because college in general doesn't run the way the rest of the world does, probably because everyone there wants to test their newfound freedom in much the same way.
After awhile, though, I either got to like late nights or just built my habits around it. THere's nothing more pleasant to me than taking a walk at 10pm around a still and quiet neighborhood, or, when I led a more urban existence, checking out the lit-up skyline and the unending life of the major street I was just half a block off of. And somehow I always end up awake, late, with headphones on playing something, reading or typing away. I fill my head full of words before I sleep; most nights, around 2 or 3 am, I'm falling asleep doing the Times Sunday crossword..
That's the plan for tonight, or this morning, anyway.
One Reply to * 'Round Midnight
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Jackie Mason | August 8, 2006
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