Sunset clause
Every evening this week I've been so acutely tired I've had to fight to stop myself from falling asleep the minute I've finished eating tea. I've been through weeks like this before, but they seem to be coming round more and more often. I never know if it's to do with growing older, growing less self-conscious about how someone my age should spend the waking day, or periods of growing stress and mental exhaustion.
It's not like I do a lot with my life outside work that constitutes a bustling, hectic calendar - far from it. My mum and dad have more of a social life than me, and appear quite happy to follow up a day at work with anything from a meal out to a governors meeting. Indeed, I can't remember the last time I was out on a Friday night, and in a sense I'm glad I can't as it would undoubtely have been a profoundly unmemorable and invariably exhausting experience.
It often seems like I'm the only person in the world who feels and behaves like this. Everyone else at work, for instance, makes a point every day of detailing their activities for that evening. It's usually a veritable catalogue of hedonism. Where do they get the energy? One of them has spent every night this week out drinking somewhere or other. Admittedly he is seven years younger than me, but when I was 22 I was, even then, preferring to pass my evenings on my own terms, not somebody else's.
Still, my mind boggles when I read some of my diary entries from my last few years at school and see how I was cramming in all kinds of activities and shenanigans after hours on top of homework, revision and the like. Every week I seemed to be learning lines, composing or arranging a piece of music, attending some rehearsal, or embroiled in a performance somewhere. Perhaps I was trying to live every minute I could. But it didn't make me appreciate the preciousness of time, it just sped everything up.
Maybe I'm paying for that kind of jack-of-all-trades behaviour now. Either that or the prospect of moving is weighing more heavily on my mind than the dirt-black pre-dawn clouds outside my bedroom window every morning, which at the minute are so overwhelming they seem to be almost scraping the pavement.
Perhaps it's best to just sleep on it. After all, there's nothing I can do about anything when I'm so disposed.
Good night.
It's not like I do a lot with my life outside work that constitutes a bustling, hectic calendar - far from it. My mum and dad have more of a social life than me, and appear quite happy to follow up a day at work with anything from a meal out to a governors meeting. Indeed, I can't remember the last time I was out on a Friday night, and in a sense I'm glad I can't as it would undoubtely have been a profoundly unmemorable and invariably exhausting experience.
It often seems like I'm the only person in the world who feels and behaves like this. Everyone else at work, for instance, makes a point every day of detailing their activities for that evening. It's usually a veritable catalogue of hedonism. Where do they get the energy? One of them has spent every night this week out drinking somewhere or other. Admittedly he is seven years younger than me, but when I was 22 I was, even then, preferring to pass my evenings on my own terms, not somebody else's.
Still, my mind boggles when I read some of my diary entries from my last few years at school and see how I was cramming in all kinds of activities and shenanigans after hours on top of homework, revision and the like. Every week I seemed to be learning lines, composing or arranging a piece of music, attending some rehearsal, or embroiled in a performance somewhere. Perhaps I was trying to live every minute I could. But it didn't make me appreciate the preciousness of time, it just sped everything up.
Maybe I'm paying for that kind of jack-of-all-trades behaviour now. Either that or the prospect of moving is weighing more heavily on my mind than the dirt-black pre-dawn clouds outside my bedroom window every morning, which at the minute are so overwhelming they seem to be almost scraping the pavement.
Perhaps it's best to just sleep on it. After all, there's nothing I can do about anything when I'm so disposed.
Good night.
posted by Alistair Myles at 9:49 pm
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