* '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 »
Like the first census in China
Quite possibly the best non-TC blog post ever. The comments are the funniest part. It does raise an interesting, if commonly-known point about the Internet (or, as Senator Ted Stevens calls it, "a bunch of tubes"): It's like your permanent record from grade school, only real....and 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 »Nominal Returns on Unfulfilled Promises
Well, I obviously never got around to any poetry over the last week, due to too much reading and not enough sleeping. And to make up for that, here's some fun for everyone. Go »Imaginary Exploits of a Hairpiece Gone Mad
I stop blogging for a week to read up on political theology, and the world goes awry: planets vanish from the heavens, fantasy football gains a stereotypically "feminine" counterpart, and America's children become catastrophically dumber. And the worst of it is, I haven't really got much to post about in my life, unless someone here is up for a discussion of Walter Benjamin's metaphor of the automaton and the dwarf, which is nowhere near as funny as the dirty joke you probably just made up while reading that phrase. (See, there's this chess-playing automaton, and it represents historical materialism, but the machine is animated by a hidden dwarf who represents theology....oh, Go »Negative Attention
Adri's post reminds me of an incident at a Wal*Mart involving myself and some of my friends a few years ago in Peoria. Since she doesn't compromise her rants with dialogue, I guess I'll post it here. Bored and a bit crazed by finals at 3am one early December Saturday, myself, my dorm neighbors Brant Baker* and Ted HItchens* piled into Brant's massive boater of a car -- he was the only one of us froshes with a car at B.U. Go »
Jackie Mason | August 8, 2006
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