You've Gotta Be Kidding Me...

Ever have one of those odd coincidences that comes outta nowhere, and is just too bizarre to let go, that you have to tell someone? Just had one:

I bought a beautiful, hard-cover graphic novel called Local, a little while ago. I started reading it, but decided to shelf it for a bit, and push through finishing Watchmen first. I accomplished that a couple of hours ago.

I was sitting here, watching the fourth season of Buffy, and was on an episode where her new college roommate was driving her nuts. She was labeling the food, insisting on logging calls made, etc.

Anyways, I paused it to go outside to smoke, and since I'd just finished Watchmen, decided to grab Local and take it out with me. I open up to where my bookmark was, and I had apparently stopped on a part where Megan (main character) was freaking out to some friend, about how her roommate was driving her nuts, logging and scheduling all activities and chores to be done, and labeling and measuring her food!

!!!!!

It's just insane when little things like that happen. I'm watching more than one episode of Buffy today, and stopping during any other episode (or even a different part of that same episode), and it would have just been kind of funny to spot the similarities. As it was, I happened to stop just at the place where, opening up and reading Local sent me spinning a bit, because it felt like continuing the story I was already on. Just....weird.

It was a little like one of the moments in NeverEnding Story, when reading the story started crossing into Bastian's world. Only....without the cool biographical (or autobiograpical) twist.

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.

New Thoughts on Old(er) Writings

I recently started using Twitter (as evidenced by the feed -->), and it has brought me back around to wanting to wake up this 'ole blog. Though I haven't posted much here, I had written several things, in something that resembles a sequence, and intend to use them. They were not written directly on Blogger, but rather in a Word program, on my phone. Knowing this will make what is posted below make a bit more sense. I'm considering a way to represent these older writings as such, and for now, I think an introduction of sorts will do. Maybe I'll slap some quotation marks around them, too. Intros may be necessary because, as I've already learned with this blog, things change. Sit on a few paragraphs long enough, and half of it won't be true any longer.

I find that, while tweeting little bits of random now and again is good and fun, I've always seen that, for my purposes, it wouldn't threaten to replace the need or desire for a more long-handed writing style. This is despite the fact that I have read a few editorials, written by people that would have us believe they see us moving to a more short-burst style of communication. Perhaps that's true to some degree, and it seems to be one more element in this ADD breeding ground, but that's not me. I'm not endlessly entertained by 2-minute YouTube videos. I don't have that impatience that causes a 2 1/2 drama to be torture. In fact, I have largely gravitated towards serial storytelling, spending my time chugging through the 15 seasons of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis (combined), and have to commit myself to watching a standard-length movie.

Well, having made my intro significantly longer than the first of my series of older writings I was going to post, I'll get right to it. Intro...intro...intro...umm, I don't know. It's only 2 paragraphs, and I suppose that it still holds somewhat true. The difference would be, that any time spent writing, when here at work, tends to be spent in Twitter or text messaging. But regarding inspiration, I spend a good deal of time wanting to make use of what I'd already written for my blog, and to move past it. Though, I very much want to get this stuff out, first.

"How strange it is that, when at work, I most often find inspiration. Despite the repetitive nature of my job (I've literally threaded and started projectors thousands of times, and in only a year's time), I find that I often have so many thoughts flow, and with such ease, I often have to retrace my steps (so to speak) in an effort to somewhat memorize them, in order to record them later. This is because, ironically enough, it is almost always when I am busy with both hands, that the light turns on.

I realize that the reasons for this are likely: (1) the quiet environment of the projection booth, and (2) I am well practiced in the performing of this task, and don't have to think about what I'm doing, thus leaving my mind free to wander about."