saving ink

My current job is wonderfully flexible about scheduling. Granted, my boss occasionally gripes a bit if I show up anytime after noon (which happens fairly often), but in general if I work most of my eight hours per day while other people are around, it doesn’t really matter whether I come in at 9 am or at noon.

Lately, though, I’ve been operating in timezones a good hemisphere over from where I live. Take the last two nights, when I went to bed at 6 and 7 am, respectively. Today I slept right through daylight, which ends around four in the afternoon in the winter here, and grudgingly awakened at half past four to darkness and an angry, hungry cat.

And then there’s right now. It’s three in the morning, and I’m going through Dreamweaver tutorials on YouTube (for anyone interested, these are pretty good), photoshopping a logo, and catching up on Daily Show episodes from the previous week.

The paradox is that I’m extremely productive in these wee hours, and pretty much useless in the mornings. Were I to have a job that allowed me to keep these kinds of hours, it would be eerie how much I could accomplish. At the moment, I’m using this time to work on my own projects, and spending half of every workday just trying to wake my brain up. Of course, this leaves me tired as fuck and more prone to irritability and sloppiness, but as soon as night would come for me to sleep off some of these lost hours, I suddenly awaken and repeat the process.

So far the only solution I’ve found is downing half a bottle of wine and hoping to get drowsy enough to sleep, but then the next morning is spent in battle with my alarm clock. Plus it’s not the cheapest remedy, and hardly a cure.

Now it’s 3:24 am. And there’s so much I still want to do.