Schedules and sleep

For years I’ve been moaning about having to teach night classes followed within 48 hours by an early morning class or meeting. By nature I’m a morning person (though not an extreme one), and the only time I ever coped well with night classes was back in the last century, when I was able to stack all my obligations in the afternoons and evenings, thus allowing me to sleep from roughly midnight to 8:00 a.m. on a regular basis.

For the first time in the twenty-first century, thanks in part to Zoom and also to some retirements, I have that schedule again.

And yet after my first night class of the semester, I was up till 2:00 a.m. and still didn’t sleep well. Too much stimulation: a day full of new people! a different classroom! also an unhappy colleague to talk off a ledge, and staying late to scan some things that need to go on the V(i)LE site, and finally lying awake thinking (more with pleasurable excitement than with anxiety, but still, awake) about things I needed to do. I hope I get used to the new people and classroom. I never realized the extent to which sheer physical exhaustion used to help me sleep after I got all keyed up to stay awake for class and the drive home.

At any rate, I’m now regularly doing work after dinner, to replace the now-missing mornings. It’s interesting! It feels like re-connecting with my grad-student self. Like early mornings, evenings are peaceful: incoming e-mail is rare, and there’s a feeling that “normal” people are doing other things, not demanding my attention.

Actually my morning-person leanings have been in trouble since last summer, when for various reasons I kept being unable to sleep till very late, and then either sleeping late the next day or taking naps. But basically I was tired all summer. The fall term put me back on a closer-to-normal schedule, but I was still tired a lot of the time.

Then when I had Covid I sort of turned into a cat, no circadian rhythms at all. I couldn’t sleep for more than a couple of hours at a stretch, because I’d wake up congested and coughing, or otherwise uncomfortable. I drank a lot of hot liquids to soothe my throat, so my bladder also woke me up regularly. But all those liquids lacked caffeine, and I haven’t restarted my very modest caffeine habit (usually a single serving of green tea in the morning). I’m sure I would have recovered faster if I’d been able to sleep more, or at least more hours in a row, but it just wasn’t happening. Naps round the clock were the best I could do.

Once I was able to breathe better, I’ve been in bed for eight or nine hours most nights, sometimes even ten, and asleep for most though not all of it (I often wake up for awhile in the middle of the night). I miss the flavor of my fancy green tea, and the alert feeling when the caffeine kicked in, but on the other hand, I don’t seem so generally draggy in the morning. Or maybe I’m a little bit draggy all the time, but not especially so when I first get up.

Though the semester has started, I still have a lot of teaching prep to do, the kind of stuff I like to have done before classes begin. The syllabus for that night class is very rough, and the V(i)LE sites are much less populated than I’d like them to be. But that work is just going to have to get done in the awake hours that I have. Though I keep thinking I’m mostly back to normal, every time I push myself a little the body pushes back and tells me no, you aren’t really. Long nights, short walks, and gentle yoga are where I’m at right now, physically. The brain seems to be in decent shape, for which I am grateful. That means I’m able to do the work that needs to be done, that I want to do, am excited about. But I can only do so much of it.

I’m not complaining. Mostly I’m just noticing differences. It’s like when I was ill in November 2015 and time stretched out so hugely because I wasn’t doing anything. Last semester seems like at least a year ago, and in other ways as well I feel insecurely anchored in time (see above re graduate-student self). Probably the demands of the semester will take over and anchor me again, soon. For now I’m somewhere between dragging and floating, and immensely grateful that I’m able to keep to a consistent sleep schedule this term, even if it’s not what I would have said was my preferred schedule. I don’t think I could cope with one of those 33-hour turn-arounds I used to have.

Spring?

At any rate, the start of the “spring” semester. We’re also getting unseasonal warmth with rain instead of the snow and sub-freezing temperatures that are more usual in these parts at this time of year. This makes me feel strangely adrift in time and place. But at least I don’t feel like I need to stay indoors in my iguana cage. Though Sir John dislikes cloudy rainy weather, I’m okay with it. That is, I can stand cold if it’s bright, and I can stand gloomy if it’s warm(ish); what really gets me down is the combination of dark and cold.

I just hope the plants realize they’d better hang on for a few months before putting out buds, because I’m sure we’ll get real winter eventually.

At any rate, it’s a new year, and not only that, we’re well into it already. Halfway through January! I’m back from a delightful week in the company of Queen Joan and Lady Maud, spent in the land of bougainvillea and rosemary hedges. We visited the sites, we cooked together, we did some vintage shopping (just as we did in college), we worked a jigsaw puzzle (and had to give up on a second one). We survived what the locals saw as a fearsome rainstorm (in the midwest, we call that sort of rain “summer”). Unfortunately, on a previous stage of Queen Joan’s royal progress, she caught a cold, which she generously shared with her attendant ladies; fortunately, it was no worse ailment, and I had warning enough to go get zinc lozenges and start on prevention / amelioration in good time, so I’m only rather snuffly. But I’m pretty damned tired of being sick, and I hope that I can be healthier in the rest of the coming year.

I am not up to making resolutions or even picking a theme for the year. I am in the mode of putting one foot in front of the other, and my main hope is that things can just keep keeping on much as they are right now. Life is pretty good, as I have indicated in my posts about retirement, and I would like to keep enjoying this pleasant state of affairs.

Anyway, hello blogosphere! I’m sorry I haven’t been commenting much lately, though I do read. Happy belated birthday to Ganching, and I look forward to hearing about more of Carolbaby‘s creative explorations; I hope MLA went well for those, like Undine, who attended. May all the academics have good semesters, with delightful hard-working students and plenty of writing time!