Ah, Sleep...

I should be sleeping right now.
Well, at the very least, I should be preparing to go to sleep. That's an hour-long routine with me, and it usually begins between 8:00 and 8:30 in the evening. By 9:30--10:00 at the latest--I'm deep in dreamland. Nearly every night.
Several lifetimes ago, in high school, my days often began before seven in the morning and often ended after midnight. What with the part time jobs and piles of homework, sleep was a rare commodity. It never bothered me much, back then. I practiced and eventually perfected the art of dozing at my desk without missing a word the teacher said.
In Grade 11 a geography teacher crept up to my desk and thwapped a ruler down about an inch from my lowered head. After I gathered up the crap he had scared out of me, I proceeded to answer his question and summarize what he had been talking about since the period began in terse, rapid point form. I was tempted to add a few things he hadn't mentioned, things I'd learned through supplementary reading, but one look at him dissuaded me. Oddly, he was becoming more and more mutely furious with every point I made, so I thought I'd better shut up.
I distinctly heard him mutter the word "smartass". At that point, my lips moved of their own accord and words spilled out.
"My ass is no smarter than your ass. Sir."
We both looked at the spilled words, staining the air like ink spilled in haste. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times and I was forcibly reminded of a flapping fish. Then he did something no fish could do and no teacher had ever done to me, not since Grade Two at any rate: he sent me to the office.
I told the vice-principal--so called, I think, because he was in charge of dealing with vice in all its forms--that I had been listening intently to Mr. Flounder, whatever he had thought; that Mr. Flounder had found no fault with my summary of his lesson, and my being sent to his domain was a ridiculous over-reaction on Flounder's part. Mr. Vice tsk-tsked at me a couple of times, but that was all. After that, Flounder would occasionally call on me (several times asking questions about things he'd only hinted at) and I would pick off the queries, sometimes without even raising my head. Satisfied that I was indeed listening, he pretty much left me alone.
I worked my first night shift in my final year of high school. I would go on to work many, many more throughout my aborted university career. I never minded the deep of the night, but I hated trying to sleep during the day. It didn't matter how much I darkened my bedroom, my daily sleep was fitful and restless. Often I'd wake up even more tired that I'd been when I went to bed.
My current job allows me to indulge my inner lark: I'm up at 5:30 and at work by 7 a.m. While the zombies are stumbling through their pre-opening routines, I'm spreading chipper chatter hither and yon, annoying the hell out of everyone. And that's before I've had a coffee. One large double-double and I'm a hummingbird.
How do you do that, I'm asked, sourly. Simple. I go to bed early.
A bed salesman said something to me once I've never forgotten. You spend a third of your life in bed. Isn't a good mattress worth the price? I couldn't help but agree: for a time our bed was worth more than most of the rest of our furniture put together.
You do spend a third of your life abed. Or at least you're supposed to. Today's time-starved society would rather do...well, whatever it is all those weirdos do in the evenings. Me, I'd rather sleep.
I've always been like this, even when forced by circumstance to be up into or throughout the wee hours. Unlike most kids, I never quibbled about bedtime. As I grew up and eventually discovered the really neat-o dreams I could have once the lights went out, I relished bedtime all the more. To sleep, perchance to dream: Ay, there's the rub...rub-rub...rub-rub-rub-rub-rub...

Until people understood this strange quirk of mine, they were apt to ask if I'd watched any number of shows last night. I'd tell them that I was asleep long before Slut Island began, and they would roll their eyes and give me that "you are so alien" look I've come to know and love.

At this time I should reprise the epigram at the top of my blog:

I have lived and I have loved;
I have laughed and I have wept;
I have sung and I have danced;
I have woken, I have slept.
All these things were weariness,
And some of them were dreariness,
And all these things, but two things, were emptiness and pain:
Love, it was the best of them
And Sleep, worth all the rest of them.

Without further ado, I bid you adieu. Night-night, sleep tight, and don't let the bedbugs bite.