i had almost wholly convinced myself, in late april, as i thought about the big push that was destined to be the theme of may, that i should just flat out forget about trying to make myself get up in the morning while i was finishing my capstone. i work most naturally at night, and i need to do work, so it made sense to just let myself work when work was the easiest, and worry about aligning my patterns with the rest of the world later, as the need arose.

i was gearing myself up for a plan inspired by this logic after returning from montreal, which made it very interesting to me when i heard erik say that he had been moving towards a nocturnal schedule while we were all away, and was thinking of keeping it up. the opportunity for some sort of supportive collaboration seemed too much to pass up…

graduation, visiting relatives, and pesky canadian illnesses threw things for a loop for a week or so, but as the work stretched before us and the clock started ticking louder we both still seemed to be genuinely interested in the proposition, and the past few days have made for some interesting schedule shifting.
for me, it’s been something like this:
friday/saturday – work until 4am;
saturday/sunday – wake up 3ish, work 6 – 10:30, sink the biz at nick’s, too drunk to work, sleep at info for an hour, home at 6:15am;
sunday/monday – wake up 2:30, clean kitchen, do laundry, mac & cheese sunday dinner at 9:30, half-price wine til midnight, work until 6:30am;
monday/tuesday – wake up 3:30, run errands 4 – 7, work 7 – 12:30, punk night 1 – 3, work 3 – 8, sleep 9 – 12, lunch 1 – 2:30, work 2:30 – 4:30, sleep 5 – 11pm;

which brings us to “today”
i got up at 11 last night, took a shower, ate a poptart, and came to informatics.
3 in the morning was, for me, something like the equivalent of 11 in the morning.
i had been working for 2 hours and took a little break for a snack and a cup of coffee.
in that two hours, i succeeded in getting a full skeleton of my presentation out of my head, where it has been spinning around and driving me crazy for the past two days. it’s far from perfect, and it’s ugly right now because it’s basically just bullet points, and not even the best of those, so i need to do some honing and image hunting.
but it’s something to build on and i feel like i see the path for the day, which feels really good after the circles that i feel like i’ve been running myself ragged with this week. i have been feeling unfocused, and worried about how interesting the thread that i am isolating for this presentation is going to be, and annoyed at myself for worrying about such things rather than just knuckling down.
i’m sure i’m not totally out of those woods (there’s still a week and a half and a paper and a poster to go!), but right now i feel good, and excited about the day.

so i should get back to it.
soon it will be lunchtime!
:)

but first i want to say: this work schedule is interesting for reasons other than it’s nontraditional hours.
i realize that i have had precious few times in my life where i just sit down and plug away at the same problem for days on end without other major responsibilities.
i mean, i have to go to the office for a couple of hours each day to keep on top of paperwork, and i have a meeting with yvonne this afternoon, and we had lunch yesterday, and there’s the dance tonight, so there are some wrenches in the works, but…
on the whole i think that it is really superplus good for me to just make myself do Something for hours on end, knowing that i’m not going to be finished at the end of the stretch.
most of the work i have done in my life has been one-burst kinds of efforts, and that’s a wall i really want to jump over.
watching my capstone argument crystallize, e v e r s o s l o w l y , has been really awesome, and if the crystals don’t look like total crap when i step back from them at the end of the month…
well, i would say it could be a turning point, but i’d have to find some wood to knock on first.

we’ll just have to keep going and see.

and the nontraditional hours do have their perks.
it’s true that my body’s wrestling with the eccentricity of it a bit, but my body would be wigged out by stress no matter what this month, so i’d rather put it in a schedule where at least work gets done in the midst of it all, and it’s really nice to just be able to work when i’m worky, play when i’m restless, and sleep when i’m tired.
there’s something that happens when you stop looking at the clock and thinking things like “8:00 = when i should wake up” “6:00 = when i should eat”, etc.
you just get to see the numbers for the nonsense that they are, and think “what next?”

and it’s a gift when the answer is: watch the sun come up with good music in the air, good work in front of you, and a good friend across the table from you.

speak of which, mad props to e-rock for his busybodies progress during this same stretch.
life would be much less fun if you didn’t keep the bar so high.

now back into the vortex i go.
i hope you all had a good night’s sleep.
:)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 17th, 2006 at 2:41 am and is filed under introspection, things i do. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.