Hello! Long time, no see!
I’ve been away for a bit, and not for anything urgent or tragic or earth-shattering or delightful or infuriating or, really, anything other than ordinary life.
I was unemployed in June, which causes my rib cage to tighten and thoughts to shrink, but both taught and worked my second job in July and into this month; next week, fall classes begin.
So, yeah, ordinary life.
Which hasn’t been working for me.
I mean, unemployment obviously didn’t work (no puns, please), and not just because not having money is no good: I don’t do well with nothingness. But even with something, even with teaching (and regular paychecks), my life was—is—just. . . floating by.
I don’t mind a good float, but this wasn’t that. No, this was a haze, out of phase, a time-loop of the year before (and the year before that).
There might be a bit of depression.
So I’m trying something new, a something old which I’d tried half-heartedly before. Can’t say my whole heart is in it now, but, goddammit, there’s really no reason not to do this, it’s so simple.
I’m a night person, have been for as long as I’ve been aware that one could be a night person. I wrote college papers at night, then grad papers, then my dissertation, then my first novel, then my second. I want to write; I write at night.
But I haven’t been keeping a night schedule, and I haven’t been writing, and for all my scribbling in various notebooks, I haven’t been thinking through anything.
That’s not just about the lack of night, of course. I am undisciplined without a deadline, without a commitment to someone or something else; lacking that outside pressure, it’s too easy to shrug away the day.
But at night, late night, everything seems clearer, and what I couldn’t be arsed with during the day emerges, unbidden, from the dark.
Sounds weird, I guess: why should the time of day matter? I don’t know, but it does.
And that’s been the problem. Most people aren’t on a night schedule, so even when my work schedule has allowed me the night, I’ve been mimicking the ordinary schedule One Ought To Keep.
Which is ridiculous, because no one, not one damned person, has been tossing any Oughts at me about when and how I work. No one cares if I’m up until 2 or in bed until 10. It doesn’t matter if I’m regular or not to anyone but me.
And, goddammit, I’m more than halfway through my life so you’d think I’d have learned by now that when I get to make choices then I get to make the choices that actually suit me.
So, I’m staying up late and getting up late, and seeing if that will help me sync back up with my own life again.
AbsurdBeats 