Am I a morning person or an evening person?
Neither. I’m an afternoon person. My ideal day doesn’t include any complex interactions before 11 AM and ends with the nightly 11 o’clock news. I really get crankin’ mid-day around 1 PM. And, although it takes me a couple hours to fully crank back down at night, I’m not up doing house chores or anything else vertical in the wee hours.
One of the main bennies of working remotely for HP in California (besides the remote part) was being on West Coast time. Meaning most of my online meetings were in the afternoon—-on my time EST. I did have occasional pre-dawn episodes of needing to document my way out of a project conundrum but, as a rule, stayed off the clock till long after sunrise.
Now that I’m retired, I revel in never having to set the alarm unless I want to or have the rare need to. I have what the experts studying this sort of thing call “delayed sleep phase disorder.” I don’t fall into REM till 1 AM or so and need to make up for it when the “early birds” are doing all their rising and shining. Thanks to my laid-back lifestyle and low doses of melatonin—versus any prescrips that might have me out on the lawn eating a spaghetti sandwich in my nightgown (true story from my sister) —I’ve fallen into a sleep-wake cycle that works for me. But it doesn’t always impress the crack o’ dawn worshippers who need to comment on my habits. Not my early bird husband, thank God. He quieted down years ago. I’m talking about the ones who somehow or another need me to be bright eyed and bushy tailed on their timetables.
In all my years of being called a “night owl” —-there being no cutesy feathered label for us mid-day people—-I’ve decided the main difference between me and the early birds is how loudly they like to squawk.
“The day’s half gone! Breakfast was three hours ago! I’ve done this, that and the other thing while you were still in bed!” To which I silently say “Nyup…and that’s because your “late” news was over a TV tray at 6 PM and it was lights out by 8:30. I’m not a field laborer, a monk, a new mother, or the guy from the ‘time to make the doughnuts’ commercial, so no biggie.”
When it really mattered, when I had to make it to class, get my babies fed, my school kids off to the bus, or catch a commuter van down into the big city, I was up and at ‘em each morning. I drank more coffee, got less shut eye, and made myself fly with the flock. But now that I can flow with my circadian rhythm, I don’t get my feathers ruffled by folks on the other side of the clock. We all fill our days, watch too much television, wait for our next meals, play with our dogs and/or cats, and do whatevah else keeps us throwing a shadow. Just on different spots on the sundial.
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