I just added up my work hours put in this week and it totaled to 33 hours spent on three of my eleven active cases. Yesterday was an 11.5 hours on two cases (I only just stepped outside for 10 minutes the whole day). I don’t completely know how I feel about that. I should be happy for the work, and I am, but I should be asking myself if I like being so busy with work instead of other more “retiring” pursuits. One benefit of this is that I’m really feeling like I’m on a good old fashioned weekend this weekend. One forgets about weekends in retirement as the days tend to blend together. Some of that is a good thing and being less time-focused is pleasant at times, but when speaking to the other half (those who are NOT retired), it feels like a guilty pleasure to not realize what day of the week we are on. Still, there is something to be said for routine and the routine of weekdays and weekends, of Mondays and TGIF, not to mention Hump Day, is somewhat comforting. Next week (when exactly do we switch over weeks…is it Sunday morning like the calendar says or Monday morning when we typically rev our engines?) will be much lighter as one of those three cases finished with a long deposition yesterday and the tidying up from that will be light and then the case goes on the shelf for me like four other of those eleven. Those either get settled or go to trial, so I either have no future work or lots of future work on them down the road. Some cases run their course in four months, others drag on for three to four years.
Speaking of dragging on, I’m sitting here at 4:30am sorting out my world again, wondering why I’m wandering around at night. I have since gone back to bed and slept another two hours, so now I am more refreshed and ready to budget my day. Being a morning person, I tend to slide into late afternoon with less desire to do anything terribly aggressive (physically or mentally) and start my “evening” early on most days, around house anyway. That biorhythmic low from 3pm – 5pm is a very real thing for me. I do not nap easily, so I usually don’t try unless I’ve literally been up all night. Some of that is because I’m a CPAP user and I cannot bring myself to strap it on twice a day. I get a second wind in the evening and while it rarely translates into physical activity, I can be fairly productive with work, reading or writing while the TV drones on in the background. In fact, sometimes I have force myself to put down my work or activity to pay attention to a show or movie so as not to confound Kim with a string of who-done-what questions about whatever is on the screen.
I generally go to bed between 10:30 and 11:30. My math tells me that since I generally arise at 6:30 – 7:00, that’s the right amount of sleep for me. I use 800mgs of Advil PM (sometimes alternating with Tylenol PM for no particular reason…neither bothers my system in any discernible way). Keeping 7 – 8.5 hours available for sleep incorporates two assumptions. The first is that I generally cannot stay in bed for more than 7 hours or so. I actually get itchy and need to get up for the sake of my twitching muscles. The other assumption has become that I will almost always wake up after 3 – 4 hours and simply need to get up and move (twitchiness again). Once up I will naturally start with a bathroom break, keeping the lights off to minimize a return to full-on wakefulness. I then wander over to my sink and pop a clinical dose (800mg…and remember I’m a pretty big guy, so I need the extra mgs…and no, it does not bother my stomach in the least). I then do the unforgivable, but for me, necessary thing, I sit on the edge of the tub and read emails and texts. Sometimes I check out the coming day’s events to remind myself if any preparation is called for. Other times, I drift into writing a story since inspiration comes at all times for me (this story got its start in exactly that place). And still other times I get into a frenzy of repeated solitaire playing. I don’t know why, but no other online game interests me but solitaire is something I can play repeatedly until I start to get drowsy.
And there’s the rub. I find myself up at night for anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours. I am always watching the clock since I do not want to pass that morning point of no return (as in, return to bed). My east coast early morning crowd often comments about my being up at night, but I don’t care, it is what it is and I am rarely on a rigid morning schedule so I can sleep in if I must (tough for me, but occasionally doable). One of the things about writing these blog stories about seemingly mundane topics like sleeplessness, is that my relatability score goes way up when I do this. I got many comments on my window washing story, so I must have struck a common nerve. I was recently speaking to a local friend who is more or less my age or a few years older, and he mentioned in passing that he is awake in the middle of each night for a similar length of time. That surprised me even though I suppose it shouldn’t. I’ve never taken insomnia too seriously, so I’ve just assumed that it didn’t take the form of my wakefulness patterns. That was a silly thing to think and I am now of the opinion that many people experience the same pattern as I do, perhaps with less regularity and perhaps with even more. If I’m not careful, I might forget my time zone etiquette and start texting people in the middle of the night, assuming that the whole world is awake when I am.
I have never been a user of heavy duty sleep aides, not even something as mild as Ambien and certainly not anything stronger. Every once in a while someone will warn me off my Advil PM with its 38 mg of diphenhydramine citrate. If I switch to Tylenol PM I am getting a similar amount of diphenhydramine hydrochloride. The difference between the two ingredients has mostly to do with the way the body absorbs it and the two products have equivalent doses, so who knows how that all works on any one of us. I’ve never had any reason for being too scared of overuse of these over-the-counter drugs, so I use them pretty regularly. And yet, I won’t touch the harder stuff. Who knows why?
I kinda like being up for a bit at night. I find that my mind is pretty clear so long as I’m not troubled by something, which seems to be happening less and less these days (that is decidedly a good thing). I am also finding that I particularly enjoy those few extra hours of sleep in the morning because they somehow feel more optional and therefore pleasurable. I used to want to cry out loud, “Help, I can’t sleep!”, but the more I feel normal about this and the more I get accustomed to the flexibility my retired lifestyle affords me, the less I feel bound by any compunction to live a life on a 9-5, 10-6 schedule. Staying loose about all this is the only way to fly.