14 July 2010
I Never Wave Bye-Bye

Filed under t.o.v.

Strange couple of weeks, again. I am having the hardest time yanking myself out of vampire mode, and it’s driving me crazy. It’s 4:34 in the morning as I write this and for the past two hours, I’ve pretty much been up just to be up, like when I was young and stupid. As I’ve written here before, my folks were pretty strict about bedtimes when I was growing up. I asked my dad why my sister and I couldn’t stay up as late as we wanted on weekends, like some of our friends, and he said because then we’d just stay up until we dropped, staying up late just to stay up. He insisted we wouldn’t be mature enough to put ourselves to bed when we were tired.

Dang it. He was so right. Once I got out of high school, I turned into a total night owl, something my parents are well aware of. I don’t know why I’m like this. I was like this in college almost forever, except when my sister started getting her own rides to school. Then I started getting up at five to beat the traffic out to Manoa. If there’s something I love more than the dark, lonesome hours of the middle of the night, it’s the dark, lonesome hours of the early morning.

I have had two graveyard shift jobs, both of them when I was in college. If only I could do that kind of thing in my current profession.

And: if only I could find somewhere to swim in these late, late hours. I wouldn’t stress out about getting to the beach so early. I mean somewhere to swim where it’s private and the water’s not dark. I need to write my best-seller so I can get my own pool, dang it.

I’m not going to the beach this morning either. It drives me insane that I can’t discipline myself enough to make the best of these vacation days. If I were somehow doing something meaningful and productive with my vampire hours, perhaps I wouldn’t feel so bad, but what I am mostly doing is indulging the vampire in me by staying up, something I can’t do enough of during the school year.

I’ve read two books since my last review but have been unable to review them. Actually, the one I just finished this evening would be easy to review, but the one I read just before that is proving difficult, and I want to do that one first or I’ll never get it done. I might just have to do it non-creatively, just getting the basic stuff down so that I can move on. The trouble is that I think the book deserves better than that, and that’s what’s freezing me up. Gotta turn off that internal editor.

A former student of mine, now employed at UHM, wrote in her blog several weeks ago about daikon legs. I kind of want to send her my own daikon legs piece, but I don’t send people I know in real life links to this journal. Maybe I’ll just copy and paste it into an email.

I’ve been really in a foul mood for the past few days, an extended period of grouchiness that’s unusual even for me. I keep dwelling on some unpleasant thoughts and it’s adding a bitter taste to almost everything I do or say. I think I need to get back into my early-summer routine. If nothing else, it kept me too tired to focus on negativity.

That schoolmate Heidi I mentioned in my dream entry a couple of weeks ago? I friended her on FB just so I could ask her if she happened to have a younger sister I didn’t know about. No younger sister. It was worth a shot.

2010-07-14  ::  me