He's My Student. He's Out of Work.

Image by gynti_46 via Flickr

He's got an idea.

Young is a damn fine thing to be. There's nothing to fear, and you're stuck like a dope with a thing called hope.

I was only 31 when I jumped ship (there was a push in there somewhere) and became a journalist, leaving academia behind.

And then, when that gig got rocky in the 90s -- I looked into the distance; I saw the rocks -- I jumped off that ship and came back.

Every time nemesis has come calling he's found a forwarding address.

I Ask My Readers for Comments about Their Sleep Patterns

I seldom troll for comments, but I am genuinely curious about this. E. has been gone for four weeks, and since I am between semesters with no duties that can't be as readily done at midnight as at noon, I have fallen into what may be my natural rhythm of sleep and activity.

At first, I thought that my altered rhythm was determined by the absence of my wife and the death of our cat. Yes, I think staying up till 4 a.m. was a product of these jolts. But now I think I've rolled with those punches, and I think my current schedule is my natural cycle.

I turn out the lights at 2 a.m. and get up at 10 a.m. That seems to be my natural physiological inclination. So now I ask: What's yours?

The question is: When you are somehow liberated from the demands of everyday life (by which I mean having to go to work) and NOT on vacation in a far place -- which has its own urgencies -- what pattern of sleeping and waking do you fall into? Maybe the subsidiary question is do you EVER have a space in your life when your fundamental pattern emerges?

And the second subsidiary question is what if you are an owl living with a lark...? This question seems to have proliferated.