There are many things I like about my current day-job. Many, many things. I like the people I work with, I like earning money for doing things that are interesting and challenging, and I like the fact that there’s discounts at the cafe downstairs so I can stay relatively caffeinated throughout the day. This is just an illustrative handful of things I like, but you get the picture: my appreciation of this job covers a lot of terrain.
That said, I really miss staying up late. I miss spending time in the world after 2:30 in the morning when everything is quiet and I start to get that tired-but-not-quite-tired-enough feeling which results in quiet pondering and pages of scribbled notes. I miss the freedom of mainlining a whole season of a TV show I’ve discovered on DVD in one fell swoop, confident that I’ll have the time to catch up on sleep. I miss reading in bed. I miss catching my US friends online because our time-zones magically hit that point where we’d both be awake at the same time.
And I miss knowing that I can always eke out an extra hour or so of writing time if I need too, right in the heart of my favourite time to write, and sleep in a little later the following day.
It was 2:23 in the morning when I started writing this. I’ve got a day off tomorrow – an actual day off, as opposed to a non-dayjob kind of day that I’ve packed with things that require me to get up early – and I’m indulging myself in a bit of late-night awakeness. By this point 2:30 has come and gone and I’ve stopped writing this post long enough to scribble a handful of notes for later about the story I’m writing.
There’s a part of me that aches with the familiarity of it and whispers, really, don’t you miss this? Don’t you wish we could go back to doing this all the time, instead of saving it up for weekends? Don’t you wish you could abandon the structure and need to be at the same place at the same time four days a week and embrace the potential for chaos?
And I do, I really do, but I don’t want it enough.
Instead I miss it just enough for 2:23 AM to be a mid-week treat and the thing that makes the weekend a weekend. It’s not quite the same as it used to be, but I’m not quite the person I used to be either.
It’s 3:00 AM. I should sleep soon, day off or no.
But maybe I’ll go read a little, before that happens.
