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Rants >> Rant 166

:: Today's soundtrack: Evanescence "Goodnight" ::


I have decided that if you're not what they call a "morning person," then the world is against you. If you're not a morning person you may as well accept that the world is built to discriminate against you and find a way to deal with it. That's all there is to it.

After much... um... "research" on my part, I've come to the conclusion that my absolute best sleep cycle would be sleeping from 5am to noon/ one o'clock in the afternoon. However, there is no way for me to maintain this as the world at large is stacked against me. Examples of this are everywhere, ESPECIALLY since I live in a small town where nearly nothing is open 24 hours. However, the most problematic for me are the basic "rules" of other people. For instance, if we need to schedule a business meeting, I would love midnight, but most everyone on Earth would scoff at this stating that "they would be asleep by then," and then propose an alternative of 9am. Now if I were to use the "I would be asleep then" excuse, everyone would just look at me funny and tell to get up early, which would leave me with roughly four hours of sleep if I kept my 5am to noon sleep cycle. THEY can't be told to alter THEIR sleep schedule for a midnight business meeting (unless we were in the mafia or something, but we're not because we haven't formed the French Canadian Mafia yet) because this is considered to be the "normal" time for sleeping and "normal" people are just expected to be up and about by 9am for meetings.

Even if you don't have meeting schedules to contend with, the morning bias is everywhere. On Saturdays, the Post Office is closed by noon. Most businesses where I live are open 9 to 5, which would give me about four hours to do any and all errands like the going to the bank, making any purchases like CDs and clothes, etc. Also, if I need to phone someone, I'm usually available at 10pm, but quite a few people consider this being "disturbed" at such an hour. But when people ring me at 10am, it's only natural they should assume I'm awake already and don't even think that they're disturbing MY sleep time.

And why is it that if you say you woke up at noon, people automatically assume that you are a lazy lie about? They think that just because most people go to bed at say 11pm, that I had as well and therefore wasted many hours on sleep. Well, this isn't always true! If I'm just getting up at noon, then more than likely I was up until the wee morning hours... gasp!... getting stuff done! Some times I'm house cleaning at midnight or working on a diagram for a project until 2am! If I run out of things to do, THEN I go to bed, and my wake up time will reflect that, thank you very much.

I was on an overnight weekend trip once and I needed to make a late night grocery store stop. This was in a bigger city, so I was able to buy actual groceries at 3am. It was awesome. I was about the only guy in the whole store aside from those who worked there. If you know me at all (and by "know me" I mean "have read some of my past rants"), you know I despise the supermarket because it is usually crowded with evil, inconsiderate jerks who let their screaming kids run rampant, but at 3am, it was heavenly. I didn't feel rushed to get the hell out of there as per usual and there were no noisy bastard children underfoot. I took my time and found exactly what I wanted, made a quick checkout (no lines at 3am... imagine that), and was on my merry way. Why can't I have 24 hour shops like this in my hometown? I'd love to get all my errands done at 2am when all of the "normal" people are asleep and out of my way! Oh, for the 24 hour office supply store or record shop! Where are you?

So, it looks like the only way to get by properly when you're not a morning person is to live in either New York City or Las Vegas. Major cities like these are where folks like me can get their dry cleaning done at 1am and people don't assume 10am means you're awake because lord only knows what you were doing the night before at any given hour. Yeah, that's the ticket!

William (sleepless)