Karma, good and neutral

[chipotle]

At lunch today I met, by happenstance, coworkers from the job I tried to take last year, the one that was supposed to involve technical writing and web development and project analysis and mostly really involved being a kind of office admin, which is not my strong suit. (As I think I observed then, the obvious glee the guy I was replacing had in “retiring” — basically quitting to go back to school at 50 — should have told me more than I let it.) It sounds like they did get someone to try for that position, who was “there for a few months” and then let go when his position lost his funding. In other words, there’s a pretty good chance that even if I’d stayed there, I’d have lost the job anyway — instead of ending up at a place that actually does want me to be a web developer and technical writer.

Funny how things work that way on occasion.

As I write this, nobody’s home and I’m considering dinner. I’ve lately been feeling faintly paranoid about my “habit” of eating before the housemates are ready to, but I rarely eat breakfast, which means I usually leave to get lunch at 11:00–11:30. So I’m ready for dinner at 7:00 and really damn hungry by 8:00. I don’t want to be antisocial, but the tradition here of looking at one another around 9:30 and saying, “We should think about food before things close” isn’t something I can always manage. (And since I need to be in bed by midnight, eating at 10:00 tends to be something I pay for.)

The “in bed by midnight” thing is something else I wonder about myself now, though. I used to be able to keep college student hours, but looking back, by the time I was at Intermedia I really didn’t. I was in bed by, well, midnight. That only meant six and a half hours of sleep. Being around people who are apparently perfectly comfortable staying up ’til two or three in the morning and still getting up about the same time I do makes me feel much older than it probably should. I suspect I actually am the oldest in the house, but not by that much.

Well. Now it’s past eight, so I think I’m going to load the walker into the station wagon and drive real slow to a buffet, with my left turn signal on the whole way…

Comments

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

I'm really, really glad that things have worked out so well for you on the job front. Karma, indeed. *snug*

[vulpesrex.livejournal.com]

Do you retire for the night at midnight, because you are actually tired? Or does some calculated sense of responsibility say that that is the prudent thing to do?

I have difficulty sleeping between 11 O'clock and 2 in the morning; sometimes the internal monologue won't stop until 3. Yet I _must_ be out of the house by 6:30 in the morn, and it is a battle. I feel the lack of sleep throughout the morning, and at mid-afternoon.

I am 50.

Be grateful that you can get 6 hours' sleep, or more. An hour before midnight is worth 2 after; 5 hours of continuous, unbroken sleep is better than 6 or 7 fitful, interrupted hours; and sleep-deprivation builds up, you never fully recover from the loss.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Well, it's partly a sense of prudence. But if I'm actually getting my butt out of bed between 7 and 7:30, I'm getting tired by midnight. For most of the last few months I've had the alarm clock set for 7:30 and been hitting the snooze button until 8:15 or so, but I realized this was setting up collisions with respect to morning shower use. So I pushed the alarm back until 7 and limited the snooze-bar-pressing. I have to say, this morning it was nice to be actually ready to get out by 8:15 -- since I don't actually leave until 9, it's refreshing to be able to sit around and Not Be Rushed. If I can manage to get a full hour in the mornings, I can think about ways to put that to good use.

As for the internal dialogue, I have that, too, and I'm certainly not the type who goes to sleep when my head hits the pillow. I may investigate some natural sleep aids like valerian root.

[twentythoughts.livejournal.com]

Be sure to shake your fist and curse hoarsely out the car window at bicyclists who pass you by. "Fhyou don't own the rhoad, whipfersnapfhers!"

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Dunno, I stopped being able to do the College Hour thing in my early 20s.

But hey, take heart. There are studies that say that people who sleep at night and are up and about during the day are less likely to get cancer. o_O