Functional Crazy
My partner and I have the luxury of a schedule we set ourselves. This has both good and bad effects on our lives. Take the last two days, for example. We had a normal workday. It began at 6pm Tuesday and ran to around 6am Wednesday.
Our work can be accomplished at any hour of the day and we have no obligations on our time, so we choose when to sleep, when to get up. Once we stopped fighting to be “normal”, we found ourselves on a Martian schedule. Each day we are up an hour or so later and our next day moves ahead a little.
We needed to make one of our now bi-weekly trips into town for supplies and the date to go fell mid-week. Going to town ruins our whole day, typically, so my partner had the brilliant idea that we go at the end of our night. We’d be able to get to the bank–during morning hours–and it would take the form of a very long day.
I was excited. I’d been facing having to go to bed somewhat early (which is nearly impossible for us), get up early and handle town on little sleep (without murdering anyone)–all of this to make it during business hours.
The job isn’t over once we get home. We still have to process everything, then normally have to work a full day while dead tired. The alternative plan seemed like it just might work. We could come home and put the important items away and go to bed, then get up pretty much as usual with no big interruption to what we do. Of course, this was an epic fail.
So, we had that twelve hour work day, loaded the car and headed into the city. It took us five and a half hours to make four stops–one bank, the recycling facility and two groceries, plus drive in and drive home. We cleaned up and put away the groceries, had lunch and then crawled to bed on our last legs, the wisp of fumes, after a twenty-one hour day.
We woke up after a normal eight hours of sleep and found ourselves too mental to work. We took some time off and enjoyed television and resting and goofing off. Then J crashed and wanted a nap. We stay together so, though I thought I wasn’t tired, I followed him to bed. Nine and a half hours later, we staggered from bed after a series of bad dreams made me declare I couldn’t take it any longer.
My partner ended up with even more eye trouble. J wondered aloud whether we sunburned our eyes being out in the brilliant daytime, only half joking. Poor dude. His eyes needed extra rest from daily strain and ongoing injury, then he slept so long that they dried out and started the cycle all over again.
I sit here now, mildly shattered and not completely sure what happened. I feel like it is bedtime, which is impossible. I can’t quite get into gear. I’m still shredded from my training routine, days ago. I think my brain doesn’t know what time or what day it is. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be slightly insane.
It is an interesting experiment we’re living out. We’re unsure why we’re as adversely affected by town as we are. It was a short trip, easy compared to what we usually face there. We seemed to save none of the chaos having to run errands brings to our life.