Night and day.... dum, de de dum....

"I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day"... Vincent Van Gogh

Have you ever realised how much the world is designed for 'morning people'...

I am not a morning person... never have been. My mother laughingly tells the story of me as a school aged child, and later as a young working woman living at home, she would awake to the alarm, get up, come in and prompt me to get up, have a shower, prompt me to get up, feed animals, prompt me to get up (by this stage very loudly), have breakfast, prompt me to get out of the shower (where I was usually half asleep under the spray), put a load of washing on the line, and then discover me staring dreamily into space, sitting on the end of my bed, with a towel wrapped around me and one sock on...

When I lived at home, there was someone to keep me moving and active, if still in a zombie-like state, and hustle me out of the house and onto school or work. For many years, I drove my mother to work on my way in, and was therefore forced to keep a particular schedule, which was probably a good thing, as I also had jobs that required me to open up the office or to start a shift.

At the same time there was also someone to prompt me to go to sleep... when us kids and Dad was still at home, I disappeared to my room early... usually to listen to music on headphones in the dark... till the wee small hours... or to read... until I nodded off over a book or my Mum came in to screech that it was 2.00am and if I didn't turn my light off I wouldn't get up in the morning.

In one of my early jobs as a mailsorter, in order to get to work on Friday mornings for a 7.00am start, that required catching a 6.00am bus, I would set my alarm for 4.00am, get up, shower, make coffee, and then hop back into bed semi-clothed for an hour or so, listening to music so I could be awake enough to trust myself to leave the house.

At the Architectural practice when some bright spark the Managing Director, decided to schedule marketing meetings for 7.00am so they'd be over before the workday started, I declared the only way they'd get me there was if they supplied breakfast... so there was a danish and a coffee waiting for me... and I'd arrive with dripping wet hair and no makeup and converse in growls and grunts until my brain woke up. The same deal was negotiated with my summer school classmates a couple of years ago, if they wanted to start the day earlier, they needed to provide me with caffeine... and there was a different boy waiting patiently with coffee and a donut each day as I dragged my arse across the campus, bleary-eyed and ragged.

So... it's not a recent thing that my body clock is out of whack with what most people would consider the norm... But, living on my own, I can indulge myself a lot more.

There are days now when I have been up and prepared for work, but I have to lie down for 15-30 minutes, sometimes even an hour and then I will feel up to facing the day... those days are usually when I haven't woken up before the alarm has gone off. I don't respond well to alarm clocks or being frightened awake... it's like my system goes into shock or something, and it's almost impossible for me to bound out of bed and race into the day.

"Drink and dance and laugh and lie, Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do)"... Dorothy Parker

But the world is not kind to us night owls...

At one workplace with an agreed core hours that varied between 7.00am - 7.00pm, 2 colleagues were able to negotiate 7.30am - 4.30pm workdays, but I was told that I couldn't work a 10.00am - 6.00pm day... it was too inconvenient...

This was despite the fact that I had been able to work the same hours for 5 years prior under a previous manager... and because other departments were working till 9.00pm, we had a much better coverage of hours, often for the last hour or more of the day I was the only one in the office.

I'm lucky now, in that I have a boss who is understanding of my early morning struggles, and accommodates me, knowing that I keep track of my hours. Though there have been grumblings from some workmates, who fail to acknowledge that while they're out the door at 5.00pm on the dot, I'm often one of only a handful of people still in the office at 6.00pm... and often hitting my stride workwise about 3.00pm!

It's not even the work situation that annoys me most. It's the remarks by friends and acquaintances... the snide remarks and suggestions of laziness... that I am wasting time, that I should be doing something productive with my daylight hours...

I'm not lazy... I'm at my most productive, when most people are nodding off for the evening. Just because getting up at the crack of dawn rocks your boat, doesn't mean I have to... actually most of these bright and shiny, happy morning people are also those scary pod-people who confess to liking camping, and 5k runs in the pre-dawn.

I'm not wasting time... I am usually doing a pretty good imitation of the 'living dead' before midday... so why wouldn't I choose to actually sleep during that unproductive time.

You want to wake me up early, it better be because more than the sun is up, and you want to indulge in exercise of the carnal kind... and even then, you need to be gentle about it... otherwise... bugger off!

I've discovered over the last few days at home, that it is not so much that I suffer from insomnia, it is that my system doesn't need to sleep until well after midnight... and if I am allowed to wake naturally, I am able to be awake, and reasonably alert without much strain or effort by about 9.30am. And a 30-60 minute nap mid afternoon is more than enough to keep me feeling calm, centred and rested.

And it would be nice, when we're talking about endangered species that someone would give a shout out to us 'Night Owls' and recognise that we too need to be protected... Night Owls of the world... stand up and be proud!

"Q: What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic, and a dyslexic?
A: Someone who stays up all night wondering if there is a Dog.”... Groucho Marx

TO DO LIST:
* Get a job that starts at midday and finishes at 8.00pm
* Preferably somewhere that celebrates siesta
* The next time someone jokes about giving me an early morning wake up call... let them... then ring them at midnight and babble for an hour