There is, however, a slight problem with this scenario. As it turns out, I am also a night owl. I usually start to catch my second wind around 11pm, and then depending on how creative or inspired I feel, it’s not uncommon for me to end up being awake until three or four in the morning. Well, as you can rightly imagine, this poses a small problem for the early bird in me.
Coincidentally, my most recent trip to London provided an inadvertent solution to this dilemma, albeit temporarily. It turns out that if I continue to live as a night owl in London, I can simultaneously be an early bird in New York.
It’s like early bird by proxy. I get to stay up as late as I like and when I get up at, let’s say 11am GMT, it will still be 6am EST, which means I am up and about my day while most of you slackers are still asleep It turns out I can have my cake and eat it, just not in the same time zone, which, truth be told, is a bit of an inconvenience for me.
Speaking of inconveniences – as I veer off on a tangent – late night visits to iTunes has turned out to be a huge one. I had to learn this one the hard way, but very few good decisions are made on iTunes after 2am. It is the music lover’s equivalent of a booty call and you’ll only end up regretting it in the morning. I can’t (I won’t) tell you how many songs I have purchased late at night only to listen back later and be like “really?! what was I thinking?” For some reason (almost) everything sounds good in the wee hours of the morning. Notable exceptions include Flo Rida, LMFAO, and The Black Eyed Peas. It would take a lot more than sleep deprivation to get them on my playlist.
In all seriousness though, I do wish that I could find a way to be more consistent with getting up early. On the occasions I do manage to drag myself out of bed, I find that the day feels so much more productive.
Although in reality, it actually really isn’t because all I’m actually doing is trading doing the work into the night to get up and do it in the morning. It would appear that the only true benefit is the false sense of superiority it gives me. I get to say I’m a “morning person.”
Earlier in the spring, a friend asked me if I would play with his team in a Saturday morning Rec League. Of course being the stand up guy that I am I said sure, why not. It was at this point, after getting me to commit that he went on to mention that the games were at seven in the morning. Basketball…at 7am….on Saturday morning. Who does that?! I suppose men with families who have to sneak out and get it in before the wife and kids get up, which is all good.
But seeing as I had neither one of those obligations, I viewed this as nothing short of torture. Even when I used to get paid to play I didn’t have to get up that early and now I have to do it for Rec League. C’mon!
Firstly, there was no chance I was going to be going to bed at ten, or even eleven, on a Friday night just so I could get enough rest to function. You can just forget about that option. I was going to hang out like I normally do and they were going to get whatever version of me showed up after three or four hours sleep. God help us all. There’s a reason basketball games are typically played at night. That kind of physical exertion is definitely not conducive at 7am in the morning.
So there I was, dragging my comatose behind out of bed at 5:30am for the next couple of months to make the drive up to Westchester from the city for 7am tip-offs. Talk about a Friday night buzzkill. The one benefit though, if you can call it a benefit, was that this situation forced me to get up and start the day. By the time we got done at 8:30, I wouldn’t go back to sleep, but instead get on with whatever work or errands I needed to get done.
Typically by the time midday hit, I would have already gotten a considerable amount accomplished. I’m not going to lie, it was a good feeling. Ordinarily on a Saturday morning the only thing I would have accomplished by noon was rolling over to hit snooze on my alarm around ten or eleven.
Well, I suppose it’s true that the early bird gets the worm, but it’s even truer that the night owl gets his sleep. It was “fun” while it lasted, but when basketball was over, I was glad to return to my modus operandi. I never imagined I could miss my bed so much. That worm is going to get got by some other bird who had the foresight to go to bed early on a Friday night, which is fine. I’ll console myself with a late brunch on Saturday. I was never really a fan of worms anyway.
Featured Image by Pixabay on Pexels
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