* 'Round Midnight
by Kris Weberg on August 6, 2006
First things first: Megan Baxter wins round 1 of the "guess the subject line themes" game. Go Megan! I'll keep a running tally of wins. And remember, the little star int he subject line means that a new round has started, so this is your next shot, kids, adults, and undead myspace users!
Anyway, tonight's post comes with the realization that I genuinely can't recall the last time I went to bed before, well, midnight. Call it the perils of a college schedule or the results of not having a standard job, but it's bee a very long time since I've regularly gotten to sleep on the same calendar day I woke up.
Of course, that raises the question of what actually constitutes a day. Most people run on the calendar day -- actually, more literally an astronomical dating system. Everyone uses the solar day; a lot of people, including a few folks on this site, also use the lunar day (at least for spiritual purposes). For the purposes of time-sensitive processes like medication, there's a 24-hour day, but any span of 24 hours is a day. Personally, I go with an experiential or phenomenological day -- it's the same 'day until either I go to sleep or the sun comes up again, in which case the next day is here. It has the benefit of working on any planet, even if I've only got the one right now.
At one point in my life, it was intentional: staying up past midnight every night was a way to prove I was in fact not living at home anymore with my parents. After a while, though, it became a habit just because college in general doesn't run the way the rest of the world does, probably because everyone there wants to test their newfound freedom in much the same way.
After awhile, though, I either got to like late nights or just built my habits around it. THere's nothing more pleasant to me than taking a walk at 10pm around a still and quiet neighborhood, or, when I led a more urban existence, checking out the lit-up skyline and the unending life of the major street I was just half a block off of. And somehow I always end up awake, late, with headphones on playing something, reading or typing away. I fill my head full of words before I sleep; most nights, around 2 or 3 am, I'm falling asleep doing the Times Sunday crossword..
That's the plan for tonight, or this morning, anyway.
One Reply to * 'Round Midnight
Berserk Wig
Legend has it that Kris Weberg's head is filled with delicious candy, which is why he avoids blindfolded children carrying sticks. Fortunately for you, he's decided to empty the leftovers here at his blog for your amusement and bemusement. Read more »
Constructible Comedy
It strikes me that one of the great untapped ideas for a Web doohickey would be a Groundskeeper Willie Insult Generator. Given the sheer amount of Simpsons geekery online, you'd think at least one of those Cheeto-gorging leet-speakers would have worked out a word bank and a java program to generate an endless string of phrases in the form "[NOUN]-[VERB]ing [NOUN]-[VERB]er" by now. Insights Into Failed Comedy, Part 1: Originally, the example insult in this entry was "Cheetoh-munching," but munching really doesn't conjure up the ghastly -- and thus funny! Go »Don't Leave Me Hangin' on the Telephone
"Goodbye" is, increasingly, the midpoint of every conversation I have online or on wireless. Every phone call with a friend or relative seems to turn into one of Eliot's winding streets, though usually neither tedious nor insidious. I thought this might help, but it's painfully generic advice: There are several ways that you can end a long phone call without making up a story or sounding rude: Leave the conversation open. Go »Silk appears in Rome
Hi, all! This will be the second blog I've authored and the fourth blog with which I've been involved as an author, and I still haven't really worked out just what to say in these introductory posts. As most of you know, though, I'm wordy enough once I get rolling that content shouldn't be a problem. Go »Like, Real Gone, Daddy-O
I've been fairly busy for the last several days, going through writing-tutor training for Fall, reading for exams, and using Go »Imaginary Exploits of a Hairpiece Gone Mad
I stop blogging for a week to read up on political theology, and the world goes awry: planets vanish from the heavens, fantasy football gains a stereotypically "feminine" counterpart, and America's children become catastrophically dumber. And the worst of it is, I haven't really got much to post about in my life, unless someone here is up for a discussion of Walter Benjamin's metaphor of the automaton and the dwarf, which is nowhere near as funny as the dirty joke you probably just made up while reading that phrase. (See, there's this chess-playing automaton, and it represents historical materialism, but the machine is animated by a hidden dwarf who represents theology....oh, Go »
Jackie Mason | August 8, 2006
[hidden by author request]