Late Wake

I seem to do pretty well getting up when I ought to these days. It's seldom that I genuinely sleep in, because I mostly can't even in I want to. I have fallen into a strong enough habit that I wake up when the alarm would have gone off even if I don't set it. I guess that's good. A routine is important to productivity and good health, but I do rankle at my conscious mind being subjugated by internal rhythms or whatever else does it.

Still, I have mixed feelings at best when I am at liberty to sleep in and do it. Even on those days, it feels like I have too much to do. I feel lousy if I've slept in and there were no adverse consequences. "No one at all missed me?", I'll ask myself. On the other hand, it feels none too good to wake up in early afternoon  to some email or text from the morning that needed fast attention. I'm glad in such cases to be wanted, but would love a less harried entrance into the land of wakefulness.

It's much worse, of course, to be woken by a phone call. Improvisational training comes in handy here, from Toastmasters even more so than improv comedy. We do these impromptu speeches, and I think the key is to figure out how to find all the prep time there is in the moment. You have to use it to marshal your thoughts and say something cogent and incisive. The thing is to take that principle and apply it to seeming as if you weren't just asleep. It requires quick thinking.

I hope to not get any better at that than I need to be. I'm past the time when I want to sleep in every day, though I haven't quite gotten past the lust for staying up late. I'm in that no-sleep interval, I guess. Hopefully I'll get over it soon. I'm either getting to the kind of work that can't be done on little sleep, or I'm getting just old enough that I can't do any form of work without proper sleep. I swear, I used to be able to pull all-nighters...