Zombie
I’m doing it again
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice…well, you know how the old saying goes. Except in this case, I’m both the fool and the foolee in my current scenario. And I’m doing it again — to myself.
I’m a nightowl; always have been. However over the past year or so, I’ve officially graduated from nightowl to zombie.
On weekdays I get up (or should I say, my wife Michelle gets me up about 6:45 A.M. — and when I say she gets me up, what I mean is, she starts getting me up. Y’see, it’s a process. It begins at around 6:45 but usually drags out until about 7 A.M. I’m famous for sleeping through alarms. If I didn’t have her to make sure I was up and at ‘em in the morning, I most assuredly would have lost my corporate job years ago.
Back when I was freelancing it was no biggie. I generally slept until 8 A.M., then rolled out of bed, grabbed a cup o’ joe, and wandered upstairs to my studio to get started on the day’s projects. Sometimes I ate lunch, sometimes I stopped and grabbed a shower, but most of the time I just drank coffee all day long and worked until Michelle returned home around 6 P.M.
I was a nightowl back then. I stayed up, either working, websurfing or watching TeeVee, until at least 12:30 or 1 A.M. Any later than that and I’d either sleep away half the next morning or be only partially functional if I got up at normal time.
These days, my night’s just getting started at 12:30 or 1 A.M. — and that’s with getting up at 7 A.M. every weekday for the last ten years.
Over the last 4-5 years, particularly since I’ve been blogging, I’ve been sleeping less and less. I’ve heard that as we age, our bodies crave sleep less, which speaks to the stereotypical phenomenon of the senior citizen who gets up before the sun. However I know that I’m exacerbating that circumstance. I’ve been depriving myself of sleep for years, and it’s getting worse.
But now, finally, my body is barkin’ back at me — more than I’ve ever experienced. I know that I really need to get off of this treadmill — and soon.
The good news is that I’ve always been an extremely healthy person, so I’ve been able to get away with it. I work out three times a week and am in the best physical shape of anyone I know who is my age or older; I rarely get sick, and typically feel good just about all the time. It’s the latter part that has begun to change; it’s really gotten my attention; I realize that I haven’t felt <em>really good</em> in about two months, and I fear that it’s all beginning to catch up to me.
For as good a thing as the workout routine I’ve maintained over the past four years has been, I fear that I’m undermining the benefits of one healthy activity with another one that’s just as potent for the opposite side of the ledger.
At this point I honestly can’t imagine what it must be like getting as much sleep as I was back when I averaged 5-6 hours a night. Now my normal bedtime is somewhere between 3 and 4 A.M., while still rising at 7. And it’s not just on weeknights that I punish myself this way. I do it seven freaking days a week.
Sure there are exceptions, but on average, if I get four hoursa night nowadays I’m doing pretty well. And yes — just in case you were wondering — It’s also pretty depressing to think about how much sex I’ve screwed myself out of (pun intended) with this ill-begotten pattern of mine. Michelle places a much greater premium on shuteye than I do, and well she should. She ain’t waitn’ up for nobody.
What started out as a late night blogging obsession has now ballooned into a near desperation for ‘me time.’ I fight drowsiness to watch an AMC movie that starts at 2 A.M. because I ‘need to.’ And I’ve gotta tellya, as I type that sentence out I realize just how stoooopid that sounds, ‘cuz it is.
In early December I got sick for the first time in about three years. I was miserable and missed two days of work. That never happens. And I know that my lack of sleep was the chief culprit. Right now I feel almost exactly the way I did just before succumbing to that nasty December cold. I don’t want it to happen again.
My body has had it with my zombiefied bent — no matter how much I try to justify it; I really know this. For the last 2-3 days, there hasn’t been five minutes I haven’t felt as though I could fall asleep in under a minute if I tried to.
That’s bad, folks. I should know better.
Maybe I’ve just now figured it out.
I need some Zs. Starting tonight, I’m gonna go get me some.
Thanks for listening.
finizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
