the navel times and observer

If there's one thing I've noticed since, well, at least the latter part of college, I keep some really strange hours on my off-time when I don't have any people around (waking up, going to sleep, eating, etc. autonomously and thus by that atmosphere encouraging me to do the same) to help sort of structure my schedule.

I mean every weekend here in Lebanon follows the same basic plot, I'll be up late Saturday finishing that cursed paper and usually by the time I come home from that it's at midnight at the earliest and sometimes as late as 2 and some change in the morning. By that time I've spent the better part of 12 hours working, sucking down caffeine to keep me working and generally getting myself extremely worked up increasingly as the clock gets closer and closer to deadline (granted, odds are the caffeine I've been drinking all day probably makes me just that much edgier).

It gets to the point where every Saturday night it will take several hours for me to calm myself down and diffuse all the caffeine out of my system enough to go to sleep, which I'll regularly do from about 4 a.m. to noon if at all.

From that point on my weekend lacks any sort of structure. After all, it's not like I make plans beforehand with anybody here in town to meet them or anything. And if I go to St. Louis, Springfield, Columbia or Marshfield it's usually a trip made as part of one of those sleepless nights or it's something I'll decide to do more or less on the spur of the moment late on the same afternoon as my leaving. So basically I consider all my weekends to be my own, since even going to one of those towns I can usually find at least someone to spend time with.

Unlike some people, I have no shortage of "time to myself".

On the other hand it also gives me an awful lot of time for contemplation and introspection -- not always the mentally healthiest activities for someone prone to self-deprecation, a low sense of self-esteem and a deep-rooted habit of using both of those against himself.

I also find myself reminiscing a lot for other periods of time, mostly because of the people I was around at the time.

Which seems like an awful long build-up to what I'm about to say, which is that I was at the Waffle House here in town and really couldn't help but recall Toledo -- the last time I worked with people I ended up spending time with regularly (I say "ended up" as if it were coincidence when in actuality four of us lived together).

One of the things we did in groups of two at a time (and this happened just a couple times) was eat after coming out of an evening shift at the Blade at close to midnight.

Because Toledo remains distinctly inhospitable to night owls (I mean even the IHOP closed at some time before midnight), the only restaurant near the apartment that was open at that hour was the Waffle House. Thus, that's just gonna be on my mind when I'm there at 4:30 in the morning.

Ahem, like I said, big build up, small return.

In other news, Saturday I was paying for my breakfast when somebody actually recognized me from the mugshot that appears in my largely regular movie review in the Sunday paper. That was the first time.

I generally try to make the review into not only a commentary on the movie I saw, but generally try to infuse some of my vocabulary into it and generally adapt a somewhat educated perspective. At the same time I realize I don't have quite the experience or knowledge to truly provide an educated opinion, but at least I can fake it and honestly from the reviews we publish from book readers who volunteer their thoughts to the paper the Daily Record needs somebody who can actually express themselves in their opinions.

I also try to make those columns witty, or as witty as I'm capable of writing. Because that's definitely lacking in the submitted reviews. For that reason it was nice to hear somebody actually read it to the end and enjoyed it, though it seemed like my response in the restaurant fired a little over his head when I said "we like try to add a little levity to the paper sometimes," (maybe he completely understood me, but he didn't make any reaction whatsoever to my response, so who knows?).

I'm also debating going ahead and buying a good bike, because the graciously donated bike from Liz and Evan has a seat that's about 3 inches wide (just wide enough to support maybe my tailbone and cause everything else to ache). It's also attached there in a way that the wider, cushioned seat I bought isn't going to go on in any way I can figure.

On top of that, if I'm going to be riding a bike regularly I think I should at the very least be able to stand to sit on it. I also get a free classified item in the newspaper (employee perk!), so maybe I can recoup a little of the money I've already poured into the first machine, after all I can sell it for a lot less than the original retail price and I can confidently advertise that is has just been retuned.

Yeah, forgive me for the haphazard writing here, I haven't seen a wink of sleep since 11:30 p.m. when I woke up after an unexpected 3-hour nap to see that my Cards were on their way to a pennant race -- a nice surprise.