Earthmovers and Sandcastles

I used to be such a night owl. Now it’s not even nine o’clock, and I’ve been watching episodes of Doctor Who with Eric on the computer, drinking a couple of glasses of Rioja, and I feel absolutely done in. Last night, the family got in from shopping around 6:45, and I packed us all into bed; the boys slept clean through until morning, and I only woke for a little around 2:30, when I was hungry, so I ate a little and went back to sleep until dawn. (Eric tried to sleep then, too, but he tossed and turned for a few hours before getting up, wasting time until after 1, and then finally getting a few fitful hours of rest. Poor guy!) I’d be in bed right now, since Eric just went out to do some late Christmas shopping, but Holidailies calls.

I remember going for days without sleep back in college. Oh, the music one could write without the sanity gained from regular REM cycles! Admittedly, the course work for other classes got a bit sketchier under those circumstances, but it did tend to lend a certain ability to cut through the chaff and say exactly what one meant. Without sleep, while I was taking a self-guided research course one summer, I wrote a positively scathing paper on a particular modern composer who I found (and still find) to be a pretentious lunatic. Turned out that the professor leading the self-guided course had just returned – in time to accept and grade my paper – from a meditation seminar with said composer. Awkward…

Jokes get way funnier when you haven’t slept in a while. Stories get much more entertaining, at least once you get past the initial stage of tired grumpiness, in which you bite people’s heads off if they seem to be straying from a single point. Go beyond that, and the brain becomes far more open to following any tale in any direction. Art is more stimulating – especially when it seems to be moving around inside the frame. And it’s an oil painting. Of still life. Oh, the places you can go!

Of course, there are drawbacks. I’m afraid that Eggs Benedict are on a lifetime ban from my menus, after I ate a plate of them when I came off working an all-night shift at a restaurant and then went to stand in line for financial aid at the student union. I think sleep is required for the digestion of hollandaise sauce, perhaps. I remember that Eric and a friend of ours were having a grand time that morning, having giggle fit after giggle fit over the episodes of “Captain Planet” and “The Head” they’d stayed up watching all night long. One of them would mutter, “‘Man with big head uses secret purple monkey technique!” and they would both be on the ground. I was already on the ground, groaning over the eggs. Perhaps sleep would have been a wise choice for all of us that day.

Earlier than that, back in high school, I remember staying up nearly all night studying advanced chemistry, which I had no business taking in the first place. I understood next to none of it, but I struggled on, and that meant very late hours of rereading the same textbook sections, over and over, as if I’d have a breakthrough moment on the forty-ninth trip through. Oh, I had moments, but only when the words would begin to rearrange themselves on the page and spell out new and exciting messages to me. And I wasn’t even a coffee drinker back then; who knows what I could have managed with chemical stimulants?

Now I am in my mid-thirties, and I could perhaps say that I know better, but the truth is more simple: despite all logic, I’ve become a morning person. Can’t blame the kids; they would prefer to stay up late and sleep even later. This one is all me, and it’s working for now. And so I head off to my comforter, my pillow, and my dreams. Good night!

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