My Body Clock Is Being a Bad Boy

Written on 12:21 AM by Jack B.

I meant to blog on a lot of stuff this week and didn't (the Cruise/Holmes things don't count because that bizarre-ness has just been writing itself). The problem for me is that my body hasn't settled in a normal sleeping pattern yet.

The main difference between graduate school and being an undergraduate (besides from tests, papers, research, etc.) is that the grad courses are much worse to handle, time-wise. There are no "electives" here, there are things you have to take and you have to take them in a certain order and most of theses classes are at night (since most grad students are working professionals). So often I find myself working 6-9 hours at my job during the day and then rushing to class - which usually doesn't end till after 8 o'clock PM. So by the time I get home its close to 10 PM and I have work again the next morning/afternoon. I've got to go to sleep, right? Wrong.

This would be the time - from 10 to somewhere around 2 or 3 in the AM that I would do my reading, prepare my papers, and still my heavy-duty research (grad school is mostly research, I've found). This is also the time I usually work on my blog. So obviously you can count on the fingers of one hand how many hours I actually get during the school semester itself.

Yet strangely enough the body adapts. After a few weeks you get use to the schedule and don't find yourself too tired or exhausted (about a pot of black coffee a night also helps). The problem now is that the Spring semester is over. It ended at the beginning of this month - but my body clock has still not adjusted. I still find myself staying up all night until the wee hours of the morning. How I can occupy my time without school work I don't know. Usually I listen to talk radio or watch old movies on cable. The hours I formerly spent in class are now dedicated to the social life that is (for me) non-existent during the school year. Somehow because my body clock is screwed up, when I didn't have the time I could blog and now when I do have the time I can't seem to.

Why this is I have no idea, and I've almost given up hope of fixing it or wondering if I even should. After all, if one is going to be an insomoniac night owl then New York ("the city that never sleeps" as the saying goes) is just the right place for it. And school begins again in just two months anyway.

So if I don't blog, its not because I have nothing to say about X, Y or Z. More like its because my biological timer is out of whack and I don't know if I'm coming or going. Kind of like right now, as a matter of fact.