I’ve always been a night owl and I’m beginning to think that, no matter my wishes, I always will be. I’d love to be a virtuous morning lark — the world must be easier if you’re awake during the day– but I can’t seem to alter my sleep schedule. I’ve been trying and failing for years.
The harder I try, the worse it gets.
It even seems that this is a disorder of some kind. (These days everything is.) This one is caused by a malfunctioning circadian clock. It has a fancy name: Delayed sleep phase syndrome. And it’s incurable.
As usual, I’m an extreme case.
Half the people who have it are clinically depressed. They say it’s not a symptom of depression but perhaps a cause. I don’t believe that.
This so-called disorder is a social construct. As for the depression, the morning people are the cause. They’re bigots for one thing. That whole “early to bed, early to rise” is their burning cross on my lawn. And they’ve somehow managed to get the whole world running on their clock.
While night owls have to be tolerant of morning people, because we’re vastly outnumbered, morning people have never been tolerant of their mutant night owls. They think that sleeping during the day makes one lazy. It doesn’t. I work at night and I’d get more done too if I didn’t need to worry about waking you people up. Morning people have never been concerned about waking me up.
I think that night owls should rule the world for 10% of the year, that everything should be opened and closed on our schedule. We should even be free to wander into your rooms at 3am and shout: “Why you still in bed lazy bones?!” Then we’d see who’s depressed. It might even cause some mutual understanding. If not, it’d at least be a measure of revenge.
1 comment
Suzi Moonlight
May 6, 2008 at 1:31 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Sing it, Brother!