What's Happening To Me? / Yeah...Right

I believe I wrote this some time around mid- to late-December. Talk about things changing! I will say more, after...

"Something started happening to me recently, and it's...strange.

I've started liking mornings.

It's only strange if you know just how much that's never been the case, to date.

For the last nine years, I've been a night owl. Just before that, for the length of 1999, I had moved back up to Michigan and was working for my cousin-in-law (that title is still something I'm not too sure about. He is my cousin's husband.). I was getting up at 5am doing that work, and I absolutely dreaded it. The hour wasn't the only thing that made that job rough (though, I was doing things like driving into Detroit during morning rush hour). It just stressed the shit out of me sometimes (after all, I was doing things like driving into Detroit during morning rush hour). The job was only one ingredient in a cocktail of stresses that ultimately hospitalized me twice, with a destroyed stomach. But alas, I digress.

After a year of that, I moved back to Tennessee. I took a job at a local theater, working the day shift, but that only meant getting there around noon, so it wasn't exactly morning. Putting in only a short time there, a funny situation gave me the chance to start working closer to home, and for more money, but it was a morning shift. By the time my 90-day evaluation came up, I was simply offered management instead, which put me on nights, and that's all she wrote. That was early 2000 and, with the exception of school getting me up before noon on some semesters, I haven't been a morning person for almost ten years. And never, aside from childhood perhaps, do I recall ever enjoying it. Indeed, I can remember many a morning in which I swore to myself, while lying in bed struggling to ignore the incessant nagging of my alarm clock, that I would rather quit my job and get more sleep than have to get out of bed. It caused me some serious problems with those early classes, at times.

And things have remained that way for all this time. I get out of work at night, go home, clean up and get comfortable, and settle in for some down time. But it's always been more than that. I have guarded my evenings as a sort of sanctuary, necessary for keeping me sane. I have recognized them for years (starting long before getting married) as the tool for maintaining a peaceful disposition. It's been my solitary time, in which I am most comfortable, most at ease. Away from the brash noises that people make, the cacophony of various voices of people who can't help but miss the fact that, sometimes, I would love silence. It's strange indeed, that I will often flinch (be it the evening, or another time in which I simply shift into that place of desiring quiet), flinch at the seeming (or may as well be) thunder peal of someone's voice breaking the silence, so uncomfortable and grating is the intrusion. And this is where I will be, more oft than not, in the evenings, but upon waking as well. My wife has learned (much to her credit and my gratitude) that I frequently prefer to "wake slowly" as it were, meaning I prefer silence for a time. Most often, the method that fulfills this desire, both in action and timespan, is for me to step out for a cigarette and just...look around in silence. The need to address this with my wife came from her being awake for hours before I rose, achieving much around the house already, and storing up a list of topics she eagerly wished to talk about with me. Fulfilling my request is a great feat of patience on her part, and admirable in her accomplishing it each time, so difficult and against her nature is it to sit silently by, with so much worthwhile discussing to be done.

I have digressed from my digression.

It has been my great joy (great when considering its scope, but as small as a smile in any given instance) to find my small plans for an evening to include some desirable snack and some fine thing to watch. It is my personal time. My time to come home from work, to get comfortable in pajamas and on couch, and to be alone while the rest of my world sleeps. So satisfying it is.

In truth, it has the cost of keeping an irregular schedule. Having become accustomed to being awake in the wee hours, it was only a small step to fulfill my entire eight hours of downtime at night, often going to bed only once the morning light through the blinds was the visible cue that I'd stayed up too long, once again. Never was it not an internal struggle for me, so fully hating the idea of being one of those people who slept the day away. It's no hate targeted at "those people," so much as the general feeling of...yuck I get from wasting the daylight hours in bed. I suppose that the ideal arrangement would be to have half of that downtime (say, four hours) spent after work, and the other four spent in the daytime, before work. But, it was always a struggle not to shoot my morning by spending all of my time in the evening.

To complicate things further, the issue of my wife and I not seeing much of each other, save for our two days off together each week (which she can never guarantee, and has had to work at least the mornings of many), it became a benefit of my odd schedule that I could just volunteer to stop with the struggle and simply commit to staying up well into the morning. This allowed me to be awake and available for her as she got ready for work, sometimes in helping ease her schedule by helping with breakfast and/or coffee, or only there for conversing.

Oddly enough, I found that passing a certain hour of the morning and still being awake allowed me to very quickly lose track of time and further destroy any hope of having any option other than simply getting up and preparing for work directly. I regret to admit that, on those days, I did more than once see eleven o'clock before seeing my pillow. Awful. I will offer the excuse (both for myself and for any reader) that, on at least one of those occasions, I was eagerly anticipating the arrival of a package. If such a package is meant to arrive, and it contains a new toy (a new tech gadget or the like), I often get very little sleep anyways, as I'm up every few hours, going to the door and craning my neck through a small opening, not wanting to show my neighbors that I'm often doing so in only my boxers.

But in recent weeks, this change happened with such immediacy, and for such reasons as I can't yet comprehend..."

Okay, a few things:

My schedule certainly didn't stay that way. For many of the reasons I listed, it was difficult and didn't make sense to force. It would have certainly meant seeing less of Violet, and my work schedule has been an obstacle, as we have had movies running past 1am for the better part of 2 months, if not longer.

But, I got a taste...and I haven't lost interest in having some of my day, before work. As things have gone, it's turned out to more closely resemble what I mentioned before, as the ideal schedule. I do tend to stay up until Violet wakes, but that is more like 5 or 6 in the morning, and rather than linger until 9 or later, I get myself to bed. I have simply been sleeping less (6-ish hours), in order to have my afternoons.

All in all, it's good to know that a real impact was made, and at least some degree of change followed.