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Monday, January 10, 2005

It's 4 a.m. and I am lying awake, trying to will myself back to sleep. The covers are pulled up tight to my shoulders to keep me warm, while my legs are sticking out from beneath the quilt to keep them from sweating. In a few minutes, I will have reversed the process: freezing legs inside, sweaty shoulders out. I try to convince myself that I can get back to sleep, that my dreams are the true reality, waiting patiently for me on the other side of the pillow. Only two more hours and I have to get up for real, get up and go to work. Just three days ago at 4 a.m. I was waiting for the end of my shift, anticipating my bed at the end of the day. I hate this transition time. If I lay in bed much longer I'll start reviewing my life again and that's a well-traveled dead-end road.

Every two to four weeks, I change from 12-hour day shifts to nights and then back again. Days to nights isn't as difficult. I am naturally a night person. Staying up all night seems as normal to me as getting up in the morning seems to most people. Getting up at 6 a.m. seems wrong, unnatural: an imposition on the senses. I actually like mornings when I'm up to see them; it's the getting up part that I hate.

So in defeat, I'm up, listening to Internet radio - Radio Paradise - not sure whether to wish for a slow day that I can drift through or a busy day that makes the time slip by. The thing is, I have been at the age for awhile now, where all the days slip by a little more quickly than I would like. It's seems wrong to rush things. I don't believe as much, anymore, that there is something wonderful waiting for me tomorrow or next week or next month. My suspicion is that there's simply more of the same, but with less meaning: same shit, different day. In three weeks I'll be visiting Hawaii and in four weeks, I'll be back at it, wondering what to anticipate then. There's always something to anticipate, I guess, otherwise why get up, huh? It's my job, though, to make something to wait for: to step out of myself, engage the world, do something of value for someone else. Maybe that's what really keeps us getting up. But it's 5 a.m. and I really don't know much of anything for sure.
5:13:53 AM

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