I have been feeling sad today, for no obvious reason.

I figure this must just be another part of the long grieving cycle that I live in. Like I have said so very many times, I am processing a lot of latent emotion and that is not always an easy task.

It means feeling a lot of things that people don’t like to feel, like sadness, frustration, and rage. It means thinking thoughts I don’t wanna think. It means never know just how I will feel at any time.

But it also means recovery, and because of that, I gladly accept it.

If anything, I would make it go a lot faster if I knew how. I crave the freedom and strength of self that comes from such catharsis. I want to spread my wings and fly high above this impoverished life of mine.

I am so talented and so brilliant. And yet, here I am, mired in the malignant miasma of myself.

No wonder I am so frustrated.

Speaking of craving, an interesting thing happened earlier. I was watching YouTube videos and came across one that looked like it was going to be sad, and suddenly I felt this extremely strong surge of wanting to be sad. Of seeking something that would make me sad.

This is a new thing for me, but I welcome it. I see it as another sign that I am growing as a person and becoming, for lack of a better word, more human.

My psyche is taking baby steps into the world of actively seeking what it needs instead of just passively suffering all the time. I am slowly learning to believe that I can do things to make myself happier, that I can get what I want sometimes, and that I have a lot to offer the world.

It’s early days yet, but very encouraging ones. I feel parts of me coming alive that have been dead and numb for a long long time. And as more of me comes online, I feel more balanced at the center and hence less vulnerable and weak.

Recovery, for me, has been a very long process of waking up. I look back even just a couple of years and it feels like I was half-asleep then.

And that gives me great hope for the years to come. How much more alive, awake, and aware will I be this time next year?

It would help if I could stop abusing sleep, though. I have fallen back into the old habit of sleeping in order to silence my growing anxiety and hit fast-forward on life, and fallen hard.

Irrationally, it was Joe’s shift change that really kicked it into high gear. Somehow the days just seem longer and the hours seem to stretch on endlessly now that I am alone in the apartment during the evenings. It’s the same number of hours in a day as before, but now it feels… different.

And I still feel a clutch of panic when I think about making it through all those lonely, empty hours. Hence my need to separate the hours into manageable chunks via napping.

I don’t even truly know that it would be awful to be awake all those hours in a row. I was doing OK with the not sleeping for a while and it did me no harm. I had at least gotten it to the point where I did not sleep between the hours of noon and midnight-ish. That was real progress for me.

And it was going on Wellbutrin that really kicked that off. It has a stimulant effect so strong that you are advised to take it in the morning, otherwise it will keep you up all night.

But it seems like my problems just swamped the drug after a while. I learned to nap despite it, and so here I am, back in my sleep addiction and trying to find a way out.

My limited life has a lot to do with it. I do three things : eat meals, do stuff on the computer, or sleep. Part of what I am afraid of is that if I stay up long enough, I get bored with the computer, and it is either sedate myself with sleep or try to find something else to do with myself.

And sleep provides such a warm, inviting security blanket. I am beginning to think that my coping strategy when it gets this bad is really to just never go very far from sleep. To literally never be entirely awake. To live a bedroom life (quite literally) where the safety of sleep is never more than five feet away and I can go hide there whenever I want.

It’s like my whole bed is a security blanket.

And because my sleep is so disordered, I never know when I will suddenly get sleepy and that makes me nervous whenever I am in a position where I could not just go to sleep for more than a little while.

I have no confidence, in other words, of my ability to remain awake and alert for more than, say, three hours, even though I have done so hundreds of times without giving it a thought.

I guess that’s the addiction talking, trying to justify itself. I want to be able to just throw off sleep like I throw off my blankets and greet the day with a lusty roar, leave the bed, and never look back for eighteen hours or so.

But I’m not there yet, and it might be that I have to feed the addiction for a while, until I get over this sad phase and am on the way up again.

I guess sometimes, it’s just time to be sad.

And you are better off just wading in and getting through it even though you are perfectly capable of going around it.

You won’t get anywhere trying to stay in the thin thing margins between the swamps.

Might as well finally learn to swim.

The big news roundabout these parts is that now that the summer is nearly over, my roomie Joe’s shift as a school custodian has shifted from a day shift to an evening shift, so now he will be working from 4 PM to midnight every weeknight.

And as amongst my quartet of friends, he is the one with the least flexible schedule, this means everything else we do needs to shift around to accommodate.

And when I first heard this, I was happy, because it benefits me personally in two ways :

1) He can still drive me to and from my weekly therapy appointment, they just have to be scheduled earlier in the day now. We are aiming for something like 11:15 am in order to give him plenty of time to sleep after getting off work at midnight, and yet be far enough before his shift to allow for getting ready.

and 2) it means that he will be getting home at a simply marvelous time for us to get together to watch the Daily Show/Colbert taped between 11 pm and midnight. This is a social ritual I greatly enjoy and with the previous shift, it was hard for us to sync up and so we often had to catch up on the weekend or snatch a spare hour whenever we could. Now, it will be so easy to do.

And those are pretty good news for me. But it is not without cost (what is?), and that cost looks like it might take the shape of Denny’s.

See, with our previous schedule, Joe didn’t work at all on Fridays and so it was a great day to get together in the evening at Denny’s between 8 pm and 9 pm, have a meal and enjoy one another’s company, then return to the apartment to watch the marvelous melange of video goodness that Felicity brings to us.

Our other two social nights, Sundays and Tuesdays, we just did the video part, because I, for one, cannot afford to eat out more than once a week.

But the shift to 4 to midnight is going to throw a spanner in the works there. We could get together after midnight at Denny’s of a Friday night. One of the things I love most about Denny’s is that they are open all night, which is great for us hungry night owls.

But what I am guessing will happen is that our night out will shift to Sunday, the next social day when Joe has no work and we can do the whole shebang. And that opens up the possibility of doing something other than Denny’s.

Normally, on Sundays, if we do eat out, we go to ABC Country Kitchen. It’s a great place, with good food, a decent price, and great staff.

But we have developed a real relationship with the folks at Denny’s. We get along great with them, and they treat us extremely well. They know our preferences for things like extra napkins, sandwiches with no sauces on them, and the music turned way down low, and are happy to accommodate us.

I like to think that is because we are such good customers. We are friendly, polite, pleasant folks who are easy to get along with and never get mad over little mistakes, which from what I gather from sites like Not Always Right makes us practically saints in the annals of customerdom.

And of course we tip, but no more than average. So it must be that we are so nice.

You really do get back what you put out in this life. Not always, but most of the time. It’s not karma or vibes or positive ki, it’s just the human tendency to share mood.

Come in angry and hostile, and you will get that right back at you, and if you are woefully deficient enough in self-awareness, you will go away thinking that barista was rude to you “for no reason”.

Well nothing happens for no reason in human relationships. It may happen for a very shitty, unjustified, psycho reason, but there’s always a reason if you look for it.

Anyhow, we could easily go to Denny’s on Sunday night instead. We might not meet the same staff people and I would miss the crew from Friday nights, but we need not deprive ourselves of Denny’s.

I am more worried about the other two social days. We are all night owls, so there should be no problem staying up past midnight to hang with Joe after work, but that still leaves a lot less social time before we are all too tired to have fun than before, and that just plain sucks.

But oh well, whatever the changes, we adapt. The transition period is usually unpleasant and annoying, especially if you are someone like me who likes a certain amount of predictability in his life and doesn’t like having to change.

Eventually, though, the new situation becomes the new normal, the old normal fades away, and you have successfully adapted to the change like any smart organism.

I am a fairly adaptable person, despite my enjoying of a broad kind of routine. I am good at understanding what exactly it is I get out of a situation so that when the situation changes, I can instantly evaluate whether anything substantial has changed or is the change merely cosmetic.

And I am mentally maneuverable enough to just dodge around the little potholes of life, and flexible enough not to have really strong preferences in a lot of things.

So a lot of change just doesn’t matter to me. I can go with the flow.

But deep down there will always be the heart of a tried and true stick in the mud stubborn Taurus to deal with, and I do not do “sudden” very well.

There’s just something about me that shatters into tiny shard of glass when my expectations of what I will be doing in the next little while are challenged, and I just can’t change everything that fast.

So I can adapt to change as long as I have some warning and some time to get used to the idea.

But don’t expect me to leap into action at a moment’s notice.

I just don’t have that kind of acceleration.

I have been pondering a shift in my routine, so that I do my writing and video making at night after midnight, when it is cool and comfy and I am often at my most alert, instead of doing it late afternoon and early evening, when I am often at my lowest.

I have fought an off and on battle with my tendency to be a night-owl all my life. Sometimes it was out of necessity, because I had to work in the 9 to 5 world and could not afford to be up all night and a zombie during the day.

Other times, admittedly, it has been sheer bullheaded stubbornness. Part of me irrationally insists that I am supposed to have the same wake/sleep schedule as everyone else and that if I did, I would be so much happier and healthier and sleep like a little baby.

Only with less pooping.

But despite my efforts and despite using a fairly powerful sleeping aid every night, I still get a power surge around midnight every night and if I did not take said pills and forswore any and all attempts to force myself to sleep and just let nature take its course, I think my natural sleep schedule would be pretty much the same as Dracula’s.

I have pondered why this is or may be. Temperature would be the simplest and most immediate explanation for this trend. After all, I am a big fat sweaty dude who is prone to heatstroke. Certainly at this time of year, I am a lot more comfortable at night after the sun goes down.

But this trend does not only occur in the summer. It’s a year round thing. And in the winter, while the local climate is a lot milder than the one I grew up in, it’s still warmer during the day and hence, all things being equal, more pleasant to be a human being.

Another possibility is that some people truly are night owls by nature. Some people are born to greet the sunrise with joy in their hearts and a spring in their step, and for others, it’s that handy signal that tells them when it is time to go to bed.

It would make sense if this were true, because one can imagine that in more primitive times when fires needed to be fed all night and patrols needed to be done in order to keep the nocturnal predators at bay, it would be very handy to have people who were quite happy to be awake all night and sleep in the day.

But there is another factor contained in that explanation, and in connects with my idea that some of us are born to stay at the edge of the herd.

It might be that some of us are happiest to be awake when others are asleep because that is when there is the least “noise” in the zeitgeist. The lack of the waking presence of the masses energizes us and lets us truly spread our wings in a way that the crush of the mob during the day does not allow.

This concept of cultural/mental “noise” is quite new to me, having only conceived it last Friday night, but I think it has a lot of potentially quite useful implications.

For instance, I think this contrarian instinct to avoid the herd and do things on your own when they are busy can run much deeper than simply enjoying the night life.

I think it can extend even into seemingly unrelated pop cultural choices. I came upon this idea when Felicity and I were discussing a strange phenomenon that I had only recently discovered in myself.

It shames my ruggedly independent heart to admit this, but I realized that there were many times in my life where I had been unable to get into the new hotness of the moment precisely because everybody else was into it.

Sure, after it was a red hot cultural property, I could get into it in reruns or whatnot. But when it was the latest thing, I just… couldn’t, and it had very little to do with the quality of the cultural artifact, because honestly, I rarely even get far enough to judge, and even then, this instinct to shun the herd makes it impossible to be subjective.

Hence “noise”. It’s like wildly popular things have his barrier of noise around them that I just can’t endure. Practically everything I have ever loved, I have loved after the fact, when it was long past being the current thing and hence was safely “quiet”.

This could also explain why some of us are so deeply adverse to competition, even in cases where we stand a decent change of winning. Competition is inherently “loud”, involving joining all the other rats in the race, and if can’t stand being in the middle of the herd, you can’t stand being just another rat in the race any better.

Being a night owl, in short (too late!), could be about a lot more than just being a creature of the night. It could be an indicator that one is a very specific type of person with a remarkable amount of what seems like unrelated traits in common.

Perhaps us night creatures could band together and get ourselves culturally identified as a group, and be a tribe for one another.

We would likely face some prejudice and hate from the skylarks and the haters, but nothing truly serious, and such adversity merely binds a subculture more closely together and cements its identity.

If we got ourselves sufficiently organized, we could even work together to make a night culture for ourselves, where we gather and do social activities together between dusk and dawn, when the rest of the world is asleep but we are at our most energetic and confident.

The world needs us edge of the herd types. We are the ones who find newer, richer grazing grounds, and who see danger in time for the herd to avoid it.

We are just a little different, that’s all.

And we just can’t stand “noise”.