EXCUSES, EXCUSES

20 June 2002

The fan was blowing but it was still hot. We'd just come in from dinner at the Farmers' Market and I was looking at a night of trying to catch up on transcription I'd let slide for the last two days.

The familiar feelings began to emerge. I recognized them immediately. Instead of getting right into the typing, I was struggling to stay awake. It was only 8:30 and already I could tell I was in for a non-productive night.

It's been like this for a long time. After a day at work, it's really hard to come home to a night of work as well. It used to be that I would stay at it, fighting sleep, procrastinating, sometimes actually falling asleep right here at my desk. Sometimes I'd nod off while typing--and that produced some really interesting transcription, lemme tell you.

In the last couple of years, though, instead of struggling to stay awake until 12 or 1 a.m., I've taken to going to sleep earlier and earlier and getting up earlier and earlier. It seems that I get more work done from 4-6 a.m. than I do from 7 p.m.to midnight. It does turn my day around, somewhat, since by the time I leave for the club, I've already been up a couple of hours and at the end of the day, when most people are settling in to watch summer reruns, I'm struggling to stay awake.

There's also the "I just don't want to do this" factor, which has entered into the equation in the last week, as it does periodically. The psychiatrist is so incredibly non-demanding. He's had enough emergencies in the past 20 years, when he's needed something at the last minute and knows that I will come through for him, that when I flake off, as I have this past week, he almost never comments, asks where his work is or anything else.

This week, for some reason, has been more difficult to stay on task than usual. I am looking at four tapes to be done. I've been struggling with the first one--which is the shortest one, and really quite short. When I was doing this as my only job, and working out of an office, it was nothing for me to polish off four tapes in a morning. But here at home there are a million distractions and the sleep factor on top of them all.

But three days to do a very short tape is unreasonable even by my own standards. Still, with only one short patient note to go to finish this tape, I just could not keep my eyes opened as I sat down.

The heat was a big part of it, I'm sure. I don't know how hot it was, but enough to produce sweat, even with the fan blowing on my face. Maybe that was because we'd ridden home from the market at a fast 14 mph clip.

Anyway, when it became obvious that this was going to be another of "those" nights, I just gave up and decided to go to sleep at 8:30. I didn't even do a journal entry.

The fact that I was asleep in seconds tells me that this was probably a good decision.

So here I am, 6½ hours later, starting to get the work done that I should have done last night. Something weird about starting work at 3 a.m. Not even the newcasters are awake. It's still reruns of Conan O'Brien.