Wide awake

6 04 2016

Tuesdays wipe me out.

I teach 3 courses on Tuesday (for about 5 1/2h, total), which you’d think wouldn’t be that bad, and it’s not as if I’m up at the crack of dawn, but man, by the end of the day (~8:40), I have had it. Yeah, I manage to hustle to the train, but even if I have supremely good train mojo and make it home by 10, I am done.

I’m still tired today, and I’m not sure why: I went to bed slightly earlier than usual and got a decent night’s sleep, but man, I feel shriveled.

You’d think if I just went to bed early tonight, all would be well, right? Nope. In fact, as the evening stretches out, I’m actually perking up.

I’m not–or not, any longer—a severe night owl, but if I could get away with a 11am-2/3am wake schedule, yeah, I would.

Except, I could, and I don’t: I don’t teach until 2, so I could get up around 10:30, be on the train by 11:30, and get to campus in time to argue with Jtte for awhile before heading to class.

So why don’t I?

I mean, I’m not currently working my second job, so it’s not as if I need to be on a 9-5 schedule. And Athena knows I’m not getting much accomplished in the morning as it is.

No, I think the issue is that I think I should be on a normal (-ish) schedule and even though precisely no one would care that I’m not, it would seem like I’m slacking off if I a switched to a 2nd-and-a-half shift.

I also think I’m worried that I might have to return to a normal schedule at some point, and then, Oh no! WhatdoIdo?!

I’m not making any sense with myself. I do need to pick up some freelance work, but it’s not as if I couldn’t write—I’d rather write—at night instead of during the day.

And that’s just it: I’ve got me some writin’ to do, and writing requires night time.

Maybe that’s the excuse I need to break away from all of the non-judgement my friends and colleagues are not shoving my way and just, y’know, do what I can.

Because I’m a grown-ass woman, and this is something I actually can do.

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Wake up little Susie

3 02 2016

Jesus fuck:

subway sleeping

Subways are not for sleeping, says the man who has a driver.

[Y]ou make yourself a very easy victim and much more susceptible to a crime, says the man with bodyguards.

Why would you put yourself at that risk? says the man who thinks that telling tired people not to sleep is a way to reduce crime.

Hey, you want to protect me? How about paying attention to the jerk-off who’s trying to rob me?*

*Note: I have never been robbed on the train.

All right, all right, I get it: people who are sleeping are sometimes crime victims. And, as the story details, nudging people who are sound asleep in an empty car to wake up and tuck their iPhones back into their pockets is. . . not a bad idea, actually.

But jeez, Bratton, do you have to be such a dick about it?


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Sleep tonight

9 06 2015

Places in my apartment where cats sleep:

On the desk.

009

Annoyed that she is no longer sleeping.

004

On the bed in the sun.

014In a file box on my socks.

007

Again, annoyed I woke her up.

At the threshold to the bathroom.

021

Yep, also annoyed.

These are not the only places the cats sleep.

No, these cats are pros, and can sleep anywhere.


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Categories : Musing, Photos & art

Party all night long

1 09 2014

I don’t begrudge my neighbors the Caribbean carnival. Truly.

It happens once a year, over Labor Day weekend, and it’s a big damned deal to everyone who participates in and watches the West Indian Day Parade down Eastern Parkway. The costumes are faaabulous, the mood exuberant, and everyone is happy.

Almost everyone.

I’ve bitched about this before and noted that I am a bad, bad neighbor—because while I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade (heh) on Monday, I wish the hell out of rain for the midnight parade the night before.

And, actually, “midnight” is a bit of a misnomer: I went to bed around one, and the festivities didn’t really pick up until about 2:00 am. It lasted until about 12:30 this afternoon.

The big noises (bands, club-sound-systems-on-flatbeds) have mostly ceased, but some folks feel the need to drive around, slowly, with the steel-drums sounds breaking out of their cars and trucks, for the rest of the day.

Don’t forget the vuvuzelas, of course. If I had any energy at all—which I don’t, onnacountanot getting any sleep last night—I’d stomp down the stairs, out to the street, and shove that demonic tube down every person-who-even-thinks-of-raising-that-shit-horn-to-their-lips’s throat.

Except that would mean they would henceforth be bleating every time they breathed. Perhaps I could just break the damned things over my knees.

Oh, if you’re over the age of 12, the fuck you doing with a vuvuzela anyway? Shouldn’t you know better?

It’s supposed to rain later today, so hopefully that will dampen the need to party all day, and I might be able to get in a nap.

(Fuuuuuuuuck. I gotta get a honey before next year—-one who doesn’t live in my neighborhood, so I could stay at his or her joint for a decent night’s sleep.)

Crab crab crab.

Okay, so maybe I begrudge them a little.


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Beep beep

27 05 2014

To the asshole who’s car alarm went off ALL NIGHT LONG last night: I hope you woke up to a dead dead dead battery.

Or a brick thru the windshield. Whatever.


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Categories : Quick hits, Rant

All night long

2 09 2013

I gambled and lost.

‘Tis the night before the West Indian parade down Eastern Parkway—which means the night-before parade down Nostrand. It got going full blast within the past 20 minutes or so, i.e., about twenty past one.

And the gamble? There was a decent chance at rain, so I decided against calling C. and asking to bunk at her joint for the night.

Ah, well. Perhaps it will rain later.


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Then I’m going to break it till it falls apart

31 07 2012

Crazy dreams, man.

We all have crazy dreams sometimes, but I have this thing about not waking up before I think I should wake up; thus, if something wakes me up at, say, 8:30 on a Saturday morning, there is no way I’ll think, Oh, I’m awake now, a little early, but that’s okay.

No. What I will think is, That is too goddamned early for a weekend morning, and will roll over and go back to sleep for another hour or so.

When that happens, when my second sleep lasts an hour or so or less, I have crazy dreams. Sure, I probably have crazy dreams in my regular sleep that I don’t remember because, duh, asleep, but these second-sleep dreams tend toward surrealism in a way my other dreams do not. They seem as if they might actually be happening, but there’s something. . . off about them; it’s as if the dream doesn’t have the time to accelerate into full-on unreal, and so gets stuck in this half-world of the weirdly real.

Disclaimer: I don’t pay much attention to my dreams beyond their entertainment value. I see dreams as a kind of vent for everything I’ve accumulated over the day, nothing more.

Anyway, this morning I woke around 6:30, a half hour before my alarm would go off; as per usual, I saw no reason not to eke out a few more moments of unconsciousness.

Which is how I found myself in the street on an office chair whooping around desks and chairs and flinging papers about and singing Echo & the Bunnymen as office workers around me danced and sang.

No, I don’t understand it either.


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Tired of sleeping

30 12 2009

I do love to sleep.

When I think vacation I think: I can sleep in!

Weekends? Sleep in!

Days off? Yep, sleep in!

It’s not that I have anything against the morning (it’s afternoons I could do without) but my body and my brain have informed me—repeatedly—that they’d much prefer to remain tucked in and unconscious to any dawn awakenings.

When I was in high school, I could enjoy the early morning after a long night: after watching the moon rise red over Lake Michigan, rise into white, then fade away, we’d squint at the sprawling yellow elbowing its way over the horizon.

Or in Madison, I’d pull all-nighters before stumbling to class with that paper in hand.

Nonetheless, while I remain a night person, the last time I met the morning at the end of a long night was some years back, in Montreal, after hitting an after-hours dance club. It was March or February, I think, and a bit of shock to fall out of the dark club into a white, white (it was snowing) morning.

Can’t do that shit no more.

All of this is a very long prelude to the observation that even I, who in high school was known for my 13-14 hour sleep sessions, who will turn over if the damned radiator wakes me even minutes before the alarm goes off rather than get up, who requires a ritual to get out of bed each and every morning,  even I can have too much bed time.

I was mildly sick on Thursday, sicker on Friday, sicker sicker on Saturday, sicker sicker (with fever!) on Sunday, and, while recovering on Monday, was nonetheless still unable to rise with my alarm and go to work.

I slept. I got up, putzed around on the computer, then would take an hours-long nap. Read a bit, watch Netflix or Hulu, then to bed early. Repeat. Repeat.

All that goddamned sleep. When I finally woke after noon on Monday (after my abortive attempt to return to the working classes), I thought, God, I’m sick of lying down.

Fucking flu: Robbed me of one my one pure pleasure.

I actually didn’t mind getting up to go to work today.

I’m not too worried, tho’: I’m sure I’ll be silently cursing my fate when the radio blares tomorrow.


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