November 24, 2014

Let me break it down for you

Part of what keeps me up late is that Karen is terrible at sleeping. She goes to bed in earplugs and generally wakes up at the slightest noise or light or sometimes talking to people who aren't there. She is also quite bad at getting back to sleep. And to polish it all off, she is also pretty terrible at being tired. This is an unfortunate combination in someone who lives with some guy whose bed time is all over the place and who normally comes to bed after she is asleep. So there is a rule that says I have a 2-hour window to go to bed after she goes to bed. This is a pretty good rule, as she is a lot happier, but if anything it probably only means I stay up even later. To give you an example: I was just looking at the approaching deadline for this evening and thinking, hmm, I should probably go to bed, but then I ate a piece of toast and looked at Cricinfo and whoops, I was ten minutes over, so what the hell, right – it's the couch tonight, so may as well just stay up now. I might even finish this post and play some Destiny. We're in Couch Night territory now, where virtually no bedtime is too late.

Part of what keeps me up late is that you can sleep when you're dead.

Part of what keeps me up late is that I am the world champion of procrastination. Contrary to what often seems to be popular belief, this is not the same as being bad at deadlines. I am actually pretty damned good at meeting deadlines. But there's a Golden Triangle effect here, for sure: being good at procrastination, being good at meeting deadlines, being good at getting a regular, early bedtime. Pick two of the three.

Part of what keeps me up late is that I don't like going to work. I know that there are lots of people that are passionate about their jobs. That must be pretty awesome for them. For me, jobs have always been pretty much defined by the fact that people have had to pay me to do them. In the main jobs I've held I've had one great boss, one boss who was, I think, health-damagingly bad, and now have another who is sort of a bizarre mix of the two. They all had one thing in common though: if any of them  had stopped paying me money, I would have stopped doing their job the next day. If something somehow happened that meant I no longer needed them to give me money, I would have stopped doing their job the next day then, as well. To me, this is what "work" essentially means. (I have other "work" that I would probably do for free, but not enough of it to live on, and even bits of that are a money-only affair.) I am very much a "work-to-live" person, and not the vice-versa. Subsequently, I sort of resent the size of the percentage of my conscious hours that I'm forced to spend at work, which seems entirely too large. (Not that long ago, my current boss – going through one of her regular moody periods that she goes through and grumpy that we hadn't done something fast enough – demanded to know if me and the editor enjoyed our jobs. She said that I should be fired up to get into work every day and "jumping somersaults" at the chance to what amounts to using 6 years of tertiary education to mostly send emails, make phone calls, and maintain ringbinders full of clearslips. I had to violently suppress my urge to laugh.) But since I still need money, the only practical way to reduce this percentage is to increase the total number conscious hours I have. Sometimes, if the weekend just seems like it was entirely too short, you just have to make it a bit longer by going to bed at 4am Monday morning.

Part of what keeps me up late is going to sleep always seems like it is the most boring option.

Part of what keeps me up late is that at late night, when everyone else is asleep, I get enough alone time to exhaust all the immediately appealing distractions, and end up with only 1) the entirely sensible option of going to bed; 2) the dim pulse of my pathetically feeble but nevertheless seemingly unkillable urge to write things.

One of these is the most boring option.


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