Night Owls

The world begins at midnight. As the stroke of midnight is called out from bells, we herald the dawning of a new dusk even as most others melt away to wrap themselves in the comfort of their beds and late night television. At 1a the people stop leaving and the rushing cars become more sparse. The streets empty of people and the ranks of the half-sloshed bar-dwellers dwindle just a little more. Underneath the frowning street lights, we emerge, fresh-faced and laughing, full of energy, piss, and vinegar. At 2a we stand laughing delighted in our odd suits at the ashen-faced last call stragglers as they come creeping out of their dens, just drunk enough to question whether we are real. By 3a the streets are mostly clear, populated only by a lone bicycle wending its tired way home or a tight knot of quietly moving people with shoes in hand. We remain alert, alive, forming circles around fires, computers, in the cracks of the world that most people that don't even notice. 4a rolls around on the dour clock faces and we launch new adventures, setting out into the clean, abandoned parks, reveling in the crisp thunderstorms roiling along the rivers and the sheer scope of the wonder in the world. When the cities are crowded, they seem mundane due to everpresent companionship, but in the night each and every one of us could well be the last person alive, the lone witness to the absolute joy of the moon gliding from clouds to shine down on vociferous arguments and manic productivity. By 5a we begin to wonder whether our wakeful watching through the march of dusk has percolated into the snoring minds of those who comfortably slumber around us. At 6a, the Eastern sky begins to wash away into the first barren hints of the coming day, and we realize that the dread Morning People will soon awaken and disturb our revelry. So we end our projects, dry our war paints and clean our tools, then wend our ways homeward, hissing over dew-drenched asphalts for one last snack before drawing the heavy curtains and rolling ourselves into the brilliance of our dreams. We are night owls, and we are watching.

We try to be polite.

New Moral Compass

I think I have decided that this song is my new moral compass:


If ever I find myself questioning whether a given action is correct, moral, or ethical, I will play this song in the back of my head. It'll be like a Magic 8 Ball, not even I will know the mechanism of how exactly it works, but the answers it gives will just magically be correct.

This strikes me as a particularly good idea.

However, that could also be due to 3h of sleep from having to change a blown-out tire at 2am*, not arriving back at home until 4am, and trying to wash all of that down with vodka. I did, however, procure a large tube of industrial-strength epoxy and a ball of string last night, so that makes me happy. Dear readers, I am curious now what you think of me in the regard of: which do you think I will wind up getting into more trouble with? The epoxy or the string?

My new roommate also bought epoxy, although instead of string he opted for a lot of fake shrubbery. You can count on some guest blogging from him in the near future.

Roommate (left) and Toaster (right, wrapped in cape). Trust us, we know what we're doing: WE'RE SCIENTISTS!

*Yes, Roommate helped. Toaster tried to repay him with an apple fritter today, but he wasn't in his lab, so Sister Doom got it instead.

Kukka*

I am not a morning person.

When I have been left alone without any other obligations (when was that, again?), I tend to sleep from 4am-10or12. But now I have a job, and although my boss has been very understanding of this (letting me work 11am-7pm instead of 9am-5pm), it has come time for me to start waking up earlier and getting in to work much earlier (so I stop missing morning deliveries and whatnot). I have tried a couple of different things to do this, but so far none of them seem to work for more than about 1 week. Normally, I like to wake up, brew tea and make oatmeal, walk the dog while they're steeping, and then read online news while I eat and drink. However, this whole process takes about 1 hour (probably because I usually eat ~1kg of oatmeal at one go). So for a week I tried getting up and skipping breakfast and just going to work. However, I don't generally eat lunch, so this didn't work for very long at all as I found myself falling asleep at my desk. So I tried using my cell phone as an alarm and putting it on the other side of the apartment so I'd have to get out of bed to turn it off. This didn't work either. I have also tried eating dinner earlier (~6pm, as opposed to ~10pm) so that the food won't keep me up. This, too, is not working.

So, reader, what works for you? How do you trick yourself in to getting up in the morning? How do you convince yourself that you're sleepy before 2am?

*That is not a new addition to the English language (see "Blurf" below). It's a Finnish word that means "rooster". This seemed appropriate because roosters=morning in Looney Tunes, which I am convinced are more accurate representations of life than any sitcom I've ever seen.