Late Night Blogging

So it’s about 1:15 AM local time and here I am sitting at my computer starting a blog entry. A sure sign I’m becoming addicted? Probably not. It’s just one of those nights when sleep seems determined to stay away and, since once of my New Year’s objectives is to write more, this outlet seems as good as any. Fortunately for me, I don’t tend to suffer much from insomnia. It’s often the other side I have to worry about — getting out of bed in the morning, staying awake through the day. (I don’t think I’ve taken a train ride in the past three years without nodding off. Luckily this seems to afflict me only on trains.) Still, here I am now, typing away in the wee hours.

It’s hard to say what’s different about tonight. There are a host of little things. For example, the heat in the dorm, which had been blessedly quiescent during the holiday, has come back with a vengeance. Not only does that make my apartment somewhat uncomfortable, but the pipes pop and sing and hiss. It’s not the God-awful stochastic symphony suffered by residents of Russell Hall, the 102-year-old original dorm. (Nor does the heat reach quite the same flashpoint-of-paper extreme, thankfully.) But the thermostat in this 40-year-old clunker resides at the other end of the building and, astoundingly, is in a student room. So my apartment never quite feels the way I like it.

Maybe the most obvious thing different tonight is that we open again tomorrow. I know it’s hard to dredge up sympathy for someone who’s just had 18 days of paid vacation, so I won’t even ask you to try. (Though those rotten university types get even more.) But the transitions back to work are always a little bumpy, this year perhaps more than most. I have never really sweated this before but habits shift as you age and maybe this is preying on my mind more than it used to. The fact is, Hun has a somewhat odd system in that we now have two and a half weeks of class before midterms. That’s enough time to squeeze in one more unit — barely — but it leaves very little wiggle room. Every year I poke and prod at the sequence in my classes — especially Honors Physics. To my happy surprise, I’m about a week ahead of where I traditionally end the semester, but that basically just means I have to figure out how to use that time: Do I move a unit up, expand one I already do, or what?

It’s possible that job stress is thus responsible for me being up at — let’s see now — 1:53. But I don’t think so, if only because it would be essentially unprecedented. I think part of it is my growing frustration at not being able to sit down and write. I’m not making the usual “Oh, I never have time to do what I want to do” complaint here. (I’ve done that in the past, just not this time.) After all, I just finished 18 days off and while, yes, the holidays are busy and your time is not entirely your own during them, that’s not been the issue. I’ve had more than enough opportunity to write. I just haven’t had much inspiration.

Hence, in part, my sudden resurgence of interest in blogging. Writing is a habit as much as anything else, and writing well requires writing a lot. I’ve let my linguistic muscles atrophy a little and I’m paying the price. I hope to stoke the fires of creativity again but right now I’d be satisfied with the heat generated by the writing equivalent of rubbing my hands together. There’s a chance that this will relieve just enough of the creative pressure that I never get back into writing. But I think there’s a greater chance that this will pry open the sluice gates. I guess we’ll have to see. One thing is sure: The nature of the experiment guarantees I’ll be sharing it with you, if you care to know. 🙂