After Midnight

For maybe the last two weeks or so, I haven’t wanted to go to bed. Normally, sometime around 10:30 p.m. I start whining to Jesse about wanting sleep. I have a hard time falling asleep when he’s still up, so I usually pester him until he agrees to call it a night. But recently, it’s been the reverse. I either haven’t felt sleepy or I just plain don’t want to go to bed. Jesse has been wandering in sometime after midnight or 1:00 or later, having realized the time and how few hours stand between him and the first time the alarm goes off. When it comes time to wake up, of course, I am much more enthusiastic about sleeping, but for one reason or another I just can’t get myself to want to go to bed at night.

Not surprisingly, I have also started making myself iced coffee drinks in the mornings. I’ve never been much of a fan of hot coffee unless it’s more milk and sugar than actual coffee, but iced coffee is something I can really get into. I’ve been making pots of strong coffee and freezing it in ice cube trays. Then I pop some ice-cube coffee, milk, cocoa powder, and vanilla into the blender, and voila! Quite a tasty way to start the morning. I’m careful not to have one each day, though, because I’m not interested in making coffee a habit. Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that; it’s just not my thing.

Today, though, the caffeine wasn’t quite cutting it and by dinnertime I was crabby and could tell that my thinking was a bit muddled and sluggish. (And since Jesse and I are on basically the same schedule, he was the same way, so you can imagine what a goofy couple we made today.) Tonight I actually considered going to bed around 9:30.

Instead, we embarked on a major closet-rearranging project that involved both our offices and their respective closets. I’m not sure exactly how that happened. One moment, I’m thinking that sleep sounds really good. And then suddenly everything from the closet in my office is in the middle of the floor and I’m making a Goodwill pile. Now we’ve got four full trash bags and a collection of boxes at the front door. My closet is deliriously neat, with everything accessible. I even have a few boxes labeled, though not in attractive fonts like Martha Stewart uses.

Jesse is still working on his closet, as we had that one way past full and he hasn’t had a chance to really set up his office since we made the transition to two offices. And now it’s 2:00. Seems like we’ve stayed up this late, we might as well stay up and finish the job.

I’ve decided I need to start getting up earlier, because I’m not starting my work as early as I’d like. I know staying up late and getting up early is a bad idea. But I think I’ll try it, just to see. There’s always coffee until I realize I’m bored with that routine and want to go back to an early bedtime. And don’t worry, Mom, this really is just a phase. I promise I’ll resume my typical eight-plus hours a night soon enough. There’s just something about the late night I’ve missed since college. The after-midnight hours and I have lost touch, and it’s been kind of nice to see them once again.

And the closets are quite happy…