Of Late

I almost never stay up late -- it's just not my thing. This morning as I'm making a pot of tea -- English Breakfast -- I was trying to remember if there was ever a time I liked staying up late. Coming up with nothing. And as you'll notice from the writings below, I stayed up very late last night and curse myself for doing it. It was a weird night where I decided to take a nap before dinner around 5:00pm, slept until past 9:00pm and then was full of energy way too late.

Once you have a kid and the little darlings like to crawl into your face around about 5:00am every morning with their insane amount of energy and smiles and happy playtime and clowning around, burning the midnight oil goes out the window for about ... 20 more years or so I figure. We know when they are teenagers, they start to get up late, but still after 13 years of raising a kid and getting used to being up at 5:00am, you can find yourself stuck in that time zone, and if you're not worrying about paying for their college bills by the time they are teenagers and therefore trying to get up and earn your daily bread at a reasonably early time, you're the exception and not the rule. And they do still have to get to school around 7:30am, don't they? How does the teenage parenting thing work at all -- it sounds frightful.
Back to getting up early. I actually am an "earliest" if you can call it that -- just like a racist. I really don't like people who stay up late and can barely drag themselves out of bed in the morning. I think it's a little sick. I'm a get-up-early puritan, I'm not sure why, but I am. And I have tons of holier-than-thou judgement against those who are proud to call themselves night owls. I feel like I'm always waiting for the rest of the world to wake up. Even when I lived in California, I could call friends on the East Coast despite the three-hour later time difference and wake them up. To be up at 4:30am in LA, call a New Yorker at "their" 7:30am and wake THEM up seems perverse to me.

It seems to me bad and dissolute things happen late at night under the cover of darkness. If I'm up late and alone -- I can feel a little lonely and pathetic and dangerous. If I'm up early alone, I feel energetic, creative and spoiled by the luxuriousness of no one else up to bug me -- especially if I'm writing in the morning.

Always give me dawn and you can keep the darkness. One feels full of aliveness, the other a semi-death. To my mind, the good part of the day is over by say, 10:15am. The day is gone. The sun might as well set by then. Cocktail time.