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aruanAnd so I wax poetic about a mid-night newsprint run.
My friends often joke about my uncanny ability to fall asleep anywhere and during anything, irregardless of noise or situational propriety. From bus seats to wooden floors, in movie theaters and classrooms, through hurricanes and being deliberately jostled, I don't seem to have a problem with readily abiding the will of my biorhythms. So it's rare that I find myself awake when my body doesn't want to be: the day before a trip, driving my car, and the odd night when the urge never quite seems to materialize. As easily as my mind gives in to my body, it can prove to be quite undeterred when it elects to shun the sanctuary of deep unconsciousness.
Infrequent as they are, these occasions usually prove quite fruitful in whatever endeavor I take on in lieu. My five-page essay (then a monumentally fearsome prospect) for A.P. English Language was written entirely in longhand while sitting on my bed one such starkly sober night. The whole time, it felt as if my body had simply forgotten that it needed sleep, perhaps as if it had been set to a time zone somewhere in the South Pacific and jetlag hadn't kicked in yet. Whether wishful thinking or erroneously-channeled anxiety, there was nothing to do but leave CNN droning in the background and latently learn the looping thirty-minute newscast as the hours ticked away. In the end, I had the absolute longest one hundred minutes of French of my entire life and a paper that won the respect of my teacher for the rest of the academic year. I'd call it even.
Tonight was more of a voluntary affair - The New York Times published its (rave) review of Order of the Phoenix front page, a practically unheard-of occasion. Being a fan of both publication and topic, I decided not to let a little thing like the fact that it was three o'clock in the morning deter me from going out to hopefully track down a copy of this, yesterday's issue. Which I did, after three other gas stations and a whole lot of circling around strip malls and surveying out-of-the-way shopping centers for free-standing machines. Feeling more than vaguely guilty, and seeing as it was approaching four o'clock by then, I decided to stop at the twenty-four hour Dunkin' Donuts on Flamingo Road and read through my find before sauntering back into my house at five, when the first alarm to wake my parents will sound.
The hunched figures of some four stocky men were already clustered awkwardly around two tiny double-occupancy tables when I entered, the little chiming bell a welcome change to the ubiquitous electronic beep of most stores. One of them caught my eye and said hello, but his traveling gaze seemed rather to be wondering what kind of girl gets coffee at quarter to four in the morning and how much would it cost him to find out. He'd be disappointed to know just how unqualified I'd be in so many ways - you should see how much sugar and creamer I still take with my already watered-down concoction. I talk well, and the walk is a stylized sashay from when I perfected it back in middle school, when we all thought we knew something about everything, but it's mostly for show, like the flashy colors of reef fish or those deceptively similar to poisonous predator insects that the harmless Amazonian leafeaters evolved as protection without conflict. If anything this was a good exercise in not assuming things beyond what you can seem to know good as fact in your field of observation expertise. Reading between the lines is for poetry, and poetry can be more complicated than pointing out constellations over Los Angeles.
The stars tonight were lovely in the high, clear, cloudless sky. Lightning flashed so far away the thunder never reached my ears, dancing and chasing its own shadow across the horizon. It's still dark in pockets west enough that one is reminded of the unwired marshland that occupied it not ten, fifteen years ago. Grateful for the open road and, after the day's constant rains, cool wind in my face, I drove until the heat blasting from the open A/C vents wasn't abating the spindly tendrils of early morning chill and took the road most (and gratefully) traveled - home.
And by yesterday, they really meant Sunday's paper. Eh, so it goes.
My friends often joke about my uncanny ability to fall asleep anywhere and during anything, irregardless of noise or situational propriety. From bus seats to wooden floors, in movie theaters and classrooms, through hurricanes and being deliberately jostled, I don't seem to have a problem with readily abiding the will of my biorhythms. So it's rare that I find myself awake when my body doesn't want to be: the day before a trip, driving my car, and the odd night when the urge never quite seems to materialize. As easily as my mind gives in to my body, it can prove to be quite undeterred when it elects to shun the sanctuary of deep unconsciousness.
Infrequent as they are, these occasions usually prove quite fruitful in whatever endeavor I take on in lieu. My five-page essay (then a monumentally fearsome prospect) for A.P. English Language was written entirely in longhand while sitting on my bed one such starkly sober night. The whole time, it felt as if my body had simply forgotten that it needed sleep, perhaps as if it had been set to a time zone somewhere in the South Pacific and jetlag hadn't kicked in yet. Whether wishful thinking or erroneously-channeled anxiety, there was nothing to do but leave CNN droning in the background and latently learn the looping thirty-minute newscast as the hours ticked away. In the end, I had the absolute longest one hundred minutes of French of my entire life and a paper that won the respect of my teacher for the rest of the academic year. I'd call it even.
Tonight was more of a voluntary affair - The New York Times published its (rave) review of Order of the Phoenix front page, a practically unheard-of occasion. Being a fan of both publication and topic, I decided not to let a little thing like the fact that it was three o'clock in the morning deter me from going out to hopefully track down a copy of this, yesterday's issue. Which I did, after three other gas stations and a whole lot of circling around strip malls and surveying out-of-the-way shopping centers for free-standing machines. Feeling more than vaguely guilty, and seeing as it was approaching four o'clock by then, I decided to stop at the twenty-four hour Dunkin' Donuts on Flamingo Road and read through my find before sauntering back into my house at five, when the first alarm to wake my parents will sound.
The hunched figures of some four stocky men were already clustered awkwardly around two tiny double-occupancy tables when I entered, the little chiming bell a welcome change to the ubiquitous electronic beep of most stores. One of them caught my eye and said hello, but his traveling gaze seemed rather to be wondering what kind of girl gets coffee at quarter to four in the morning and how much would it cost him to find out. He'd be disappointed to know just how unqualified I'd be in so many ways - you should see how much sugar and creamer I still take with my already watered-down concoction. I talk well, and the walk is a stylized sashay from when I perfected it back in middle school, when we all thought we knew something about everything, but it's mostly for show, like the flashy colors of reef fish or those deceptively similar to poisonous predator insects that the harmless Amazonian leafeaters evolved as protection without conflict. If anything this was a good exercise in not assuming things beyond what you can seem to know good as fact in your field of observation expertise. Reading between the lines is for poetry, and poetry can be more complicated than pointing out constellations over Los Angeles.
The stars tonight were lovely in the high, clear, cloudless sky. Lightning flashed so far away the thunder never reached my ears, dancing and chasing its own shadow across the horizon. It's still dark in pockets west enough that one is reminded of the unwired marshland that occupied it not ten, fifteen years ago. Grateful for the open road and, after the day's constant rains, cool wind in my face, I drove until the heat blasting from the open A/C vents wasn't abating the spindly tendrils of early morning chill and took the road most (and gratefully) traveled - home.
And by yesterday, they really meant Sunday's paper. Eh, so it goes.
