* 'Round Midnight
by Kris Weberg on August 6, 2006
First things first: Megan Baxter wins round 1 of the "guess the subject line themes" game. Go Megan! I'll keep a running tally of wins. And remember, the little star int he subject line means that a new round has started, so this is your next shot, kids, adults, and undead myspace users!
Anyway, tonight's post comes with the realization that I genuinely can't recall the last time I went to bed before, well, midnight. Call it the perils of a college schedule or the results of not having a standard job, but it's bee a very long time since I've regularly gotten to sleep on the same calendar day I woke up.
Of course, that raises the question of what actually constitutes a day. Most people run on the calendar day -- actually, more literally an astronomical dating system. Everyone uses the solar day; a lot of people, including a few folks on this site, also use the lunar day (at least for spiritual purposes). For the purposes of time-sensitive processes like medication, there's a 24-hour day, but any span of 24 hours is a day. Personally, I go with an experiential or phenomenological day -- it's the same 'day until either I go to sleep or the sun comes up again, in which case the next day is here. It has the benefit of working on any planet, even if I've only got the one right now.
At one point in my life, it was intentional: staying up past midnight every night was a way to prove I was in fact not living at home anymore with my parents. After a while, though, it became a habit just because college in general doesn't run the way the rest of the world does, probably because everyone there wants to test their newfound freedom in much the same way.
After awhile, though, I either got to like late nights or just built my habits around it. THere's nothing more pleasant to me than taking a walk at 10pm around a still and quiet neighborhood, or, when I led a more urban existence, checking out the lit-up skyline and the unending life of the major street I was just half a block off of. And somehow I always end up awake, late, with headphones on playing something, reading or typing away. I fill my head full of words before I sleep; most nights, around 2 or 3 am, I'm falling asleep doing the Times Sunday crossword..
That's the plan for tonight, or this morning, anyway.
One Reply to * 'Round Midnight
Berserk Wig
Legend has it that Kris Weberg's head is filled with delicious candy, which is why he avoids blindfolded children carrying sticks. Fortunately for you, he's decided to empty the leftovers here at his blog for your amusement and bemusement. Read more »
Natural Deselection
Every so often, something happens to you that makes you realize nature or God or whatever else you attribute your existence to apparently goes to work drunk sometimes. And sometimes that realization makes you post long, boring blog entries that people only read in hopes of getting clues for a prize-free post-title game. Clues that aren't actually there. Go »Cardinal Sins of the Blogosphere
Hey, is this thing on? I realize that blogging is meant to give everyone a picture of the blogger's ongoing life, but to be frank, I haven't really had one of those in awhile. Between exams reading, doing minor administrative work for a department working group, working up a course proposal for Fall '08, and complaining about much of the above I haven't gotten so much done. Go »Don't Leave Me Hangin' on the Telephone
"Goodbye" is, increasingly, the midpoint of every conversation I have online or on wireless. Every phone call with a friend or relative seems to turn into one of Eliot's winding streets, though usually neither tedious nor insidious. I thought this might help, but it's painfully generic advice: There are several ways that you can end a long phone call without making up a story or sounding rude: Leave the conversation open. Go »Collaborative Theatre with Irrational Actors
At a certain point, I guess everyone realizes that it's no use arguing with someone who's coming from virtually a different planet in terms of assumptions and opinions. And at a certain other point, some people realize that they cannot stop despite the uselessness of going on. While that sort of argument only very rarely happens to me here at TC, it certainly happens to me elsewhere, where I use various Zaba-proof psuedonyms to conduct my arguments about subjects ranging from the pointless to the inane. Go »Constructible Comedy
It strikes me that one of the great untapped ideas for a Web doohickey would be a Groundskeeper Willie Insult Generator. Given the sheer amount of Simpsons geekery online, you'd think at least one of those Cheeto-gorging leet-speakers would have worked out a word bank and a java program to generate an endless string of phrases in the form "[NOUN]-[VERB]ing [NOUN]-[VERB]er" by now. Insights Into Failed Comedy, Part 1: Originally, the example insult in this entry was "Cheetoh-munching," but munching really doesn't conjure up the ghastly -- and thus funny! Go »
Jackie Mason | August 8, 2006
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