Anything to stop clockwatching...

Holy frig. This is just getting ridiculous. I can't even begin to imagine how I would experience jet-lag, because my internal clock is completely busted as it is. I've become nocturnal. I miss the sun!

I've done the nocturne thing before, but it's always been a 6-am-to-4-pm-sleeping sort of thing (give or take a couple hours)... not sleeping at *noon* and waking at *10 pm*. WTF. At least with getting up at 4 pm, you can call it "staying up late" and "getting up late". Really late, sure, but you're still "getting up late". 10 pm? That's just night-time. There's no denying it. When you wake up at 10 pm, you are waking up *just in time for night*. Ugh. It's awful.

I'd say I'd make a good vampire, but not only am I not pale enough (and, as my brother has kindly informed me, not sparkly enough), I am also not *consistently* nocturnal enough. And it's this fact that really has me messed up lately: I've many times before declared that I've been temporally disoriented, usually when I've been off of school or whatever and days of the week lose all meaning. But at least then you still have *some* sense of the passage of time... like "two sleeps ago I went to the movies"... at least for within the last couple of days, anyway. :| At this point, I only *wish* I could meaningfully count time in sleeps!

The last week or so for me has looked something like this:

Tuesday: sleep at 4 am; wake at 8 am

Wednesday: sleep at 9 am; get rudely awoken (!!) at 10 am; sleep at 12 pm; wake at 9 pm

Thursday: sleep at 1 pm; wake at 9 pm

Friday: nap for ~ 1 hour at 12 pm; sleep at 9 pm

Saturday: wake at 5 am (there's hope!)

Sunday: sleep at 6 am; wake at 7 pm (!!)

Monday: sleep at 8 pm

Tuesday: wake at 2 am (argh...)

Like seriously, WTF? Can any of that be counted as days in *any time zone*? No wonder this stupid sore throat has been lingering all week... But even before I started staying awake for random periods of time before passing out -- while I was just being regular ol' nocturnal -- I started experiencing a phenomenon which I have dubbed, perhaps ironically, the Awake-with-the-World Effect (or AWE, for short).

See, there's a key difference between between "staying up late" and being outright nocturnal, especially if you're prancing on the late edge of nocturnal (i.e., a noon-ish bedtime) instead of diving under the covers as soon as the sun comes up and staying there until it's safely past the horizon. When you "stay up late", everyone else is asleep! You're there on your computer, doing something completely useless for some number of hours, and the World is snoring in its bed. Then eventually you go to sleep, and then the World wakes up and goes on about its business, with you finally arriving fashionably late to the Party of the Living. So you have this nice, albeit short, window of being Awake with the World: between 4 pm and whenever the World goes to sleep. This is what typically defines a Day. Whether you have one hour of post-AW wakefulness or six, it makes little difference to your perception of the passage of Days. (Note that if you're like some people I know, and wake up at 5 in the morning and sleep at 9 pm, exactly the same thing applies, only the World is arriving late to *your* party. ... or you're the lame-O** who shows up super early, before anyone else gets there.)

If you're nocturnal, on the other hand, the World wakes up, and you have a short period of AW before you go to sleep: maybe you have breakfast, chat with your housemates, email a prof, make a phone-call or two. Then eventually you go to sleep. And then you wake up that same "day", to (gasp!) a SECOND period of AW! You have a late dinner with friends (not that it's late for you, since really it's your breaktfast), hang out a while, and then the World goes to sleep. And you proceed to read the entire archive of a webcomic that started in 2002, until finally the World wakes up again. But when is this new period of AW taking place? Is it AW1 of the World's "day", or AW2 of your "day"? Do you even feel each continuous period of wakefulness as if it's a "day", despite being detached from the World for a long period smack in the middle of it? Or do you start counting AWs instead of "days"?

Or do you just sort of lose all sense of time altogether?

Probably most people don't have much data on which to base an answer to any of this. I unfortunately have collected a fair amount, and yeah... I kind of just lose all sense of time. And I think it's partially because there are twice as many AWs to keep track of as you'd have days to track, partially because there's no particularly natural way to group these AWs meaningfully (i.e., in terms of the World's "days", which is as psychologically unnatural as pairing Tuesday evening with Wednesday morning would be to most people, or in terms of your own "days", which may be a more natural pairing, but isn't really a useful grouping at all, for most purposes)... and partially because anyone experiencing AWE to begin with is probably pretty messed up in the head as it is.

[** I *wish* I could be one of these lame-Os. I get SO much more done in a day, and I feel so much more awake and like the day is so much longer, when I wake up early and go to bed early. It feels great, and I love it. Unfortunately, this early-bird routine doesn't jive well with social dancing, and I right now I couldn't imagine giving up salsa nights for a super-healthy schedule. :|]