Trying To Break This Nasty Sleeping-At-A-Decent-Hour Habit

For the past -- well, I really don't know, let's see; it's been going on since my last experiment where I was at the hospital all day, which was last week, but I know it had been going on since I started taking medication in anticipation for that hospital stay (and was part of the experiment), and that was about a dozen days ago ... certainly it didn't start before the New Year, when my problem was sleeping all day as a result of my night job ... crap, I'm going to take a guess and say -- three weeks, I have passed out much earlier than I usually do -- like midnight, 11, even 10 o'clock, and not my usual 5 or 6 in the morning.

I wake up around 8:30 all refreshed and shit. It bothers me, it really does. This is not natural for me. I don't like having the same sleep cycle as everybody else. I want to be different. Now that I'm up in the morning, I realize I have nothing to do. What could I do being up so early -- watch Kelly? Find -- gulp -- work?

I don't know why this is the case. I don't remember passing out at such a decent hour since ... well, since my brother and I were so young we slept in the same bed as Grandmother. We had to because we all were sleeping in the same place.

Why is this the case? Waking up early to take this medication (I had to take it in the morning and around the same time each day, and I made the mistake of taking it in the 6 o'clock hour, meaning I had to make the choice of either staying up till then or waking up early) has to be a factor. Not having any decent TV to watch as my favorite shows take the winter off before airing new episodes also has to be a factor. This shit about The Store and Grandmother being thrown out of the house has to be contributing to this. And maybe I do have Seasonal Affective Disorder; I usually am able to fight through my fatigue at night, but this time around I haven't.

Maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe that's the main reason I've crashed at night. All I know is I'm tired once I'm done with dinner, and since there's nothing on I feel my eyelids get heavy and I think, fuck it, I'm tired, and I turn off the light and close my eyes and, if this tiredness passes, I'll get up and turn on my laptop and finally start banging out this long treatise on the Fiesta Bowl corruption scandal for the website I "work" for. Next thing I know it's daylight. Hell, sometimes there is something on TV and I'm still tired and I just pass out. Like I said, I don't remember doing this before.

I thought that exercise would do the trick. But I tried that once, last week; after I got home I even made myself some cereal, but around midnight, bam! I was down for the count.

So I tried something different. Predicated on the fact that I really, really need to write this column, after dinner I went out to a coffeehouse to work till about 11:30. And when I got home I took a shower. That way I was too wet to immediately go to sleep. I was worried that I was so out of energy that I would just fall into bed anyway. But it's 2:35 in the morning right now, and I feel wide awake. Either this strategy worked or I have had so many consecutive days of having the proper amount of sleep (and at the "right" time) that my body has no need for rest right now.

If this keeps up, I'll be back on my normal schedule of going to bed at 5 and waking up at 1 in the afternoon in no time. Wish me luck.