Wednesday 11 December 2002

Pic of the day: When light is dark and dark is light, night is day and day is night.

Dayside night

Not a perfect day. Nightmarishly tired. Otherwise OK. I'll explain. I'm writing the rest of this the next day, when I woke up after 1PM. (I vaguely recall hearing the clock radio, which is as loud as I dare in a house with one other family and which keeps talking and playing music for, I believe, 2 hours.)

I am a B-human. That's a literal translation of the Norwegian word "B- menneske", which designates people who are wide awake late in the night and sleepy in the morning. I believe my American friends call this "night owl". But here, and presumably in other Nordic countries, we are called B-humans. The early birds are A-humans, of course.

This is not quite as bad as it sounds. We don't have a culture here for sifting out people for extermination. The land is rocky and sparsely populated, we need not help it in killing its inhabitants, unlike certain people further down in Europe. Norwegian culture is very tolerant of minorities. We cheerfully accept darker skin colors, deviant sexuality, Christian fundamentalism, mental disorders ... we even accept the Sami aborigines whose land we took from them. (Well, we did not take it ... that was before our time. We just didn't give it back or offer any compensation or apology. Hey, they have the same rights to their lands now as we have, what reason should they have to complain?)

***

In perspective, belonging to a minority sleep group is hardly a big deal. And it's not like we are discriminated against. It's just that some things tend to happen in the morning, like work and such. So being the considerate person that I am, I decided to shift my day rhythm. Because we B-humans can do that. All we need to do is stay up even longer, and not go to sleep until it is day. Then we wake up later and stay up even longer into the next day, and after a short while we are falling asleep in the evening instead of the morning. Sadly the effect is not permanent.

Well, somehow this doesn't seem to work. As of this day, I'd been awake for two nights and I was of course horribly tired. I stopped by work for a while, but I don't remember much of it. Of course, once evening fell, I fell asleep, as planned. Except I woke up after a few minutes, completely refreshed, and remained wide awake all night.

After I visited my brother on the farm a couple years back, I have wondered if this is a biological condition, an extreme case of B. It seems we both tend to lock into the pattern where we are awake in the night. I have seen similar tendencies in some other relatives. I'm not sure why it grows more intense as we grow older.

But I think we can rule out computer games. Firstly because my brother don't have those, and second because I subscribe to both the American and the European servers for DAoC, my favorite game this past year. The European servers drop off drastically around 10 in the night (though some night owls stay on) which is when the American servers pick up. If I were an A-human, I could go with the flow of the Euro servers. I conclude from this that the playing games in the night is an effect rather than a cause.

***

It's usually not as extreme as this, though. Almost certainly my subconscious is trying to tell me something. Well, subby dear, if it was something I wanted to hear it wouldn't be subconscious in the first place!

My best guess is it relates to something on my workplace. I kinda promised to not write about work, and I'm still holding myself to it. Just because they are being assholes toward me, doesn't mean I'll sink to their level. That would be a sad day indeed. But my body may disagree with me on this, in which case I'm probably headed for a very interesting time and eventually an extended sick leave.