My Mind Is On The Blink

One of the things that kept this past New York trip interesting was the fact that, try as I might, as exhausted as I may have been, I only managed to sleep past 5am once that entire week. (Surely, I reasoned, I should be sleeping in, in that 5am EST is just 2am PST, and yet.) In theory, I know that I should have spent that time reading something fun, watching shitty television, or some similarly mindless endeavor to keep myself from waking up too fully or testing my brain, and yet what I actually did every single time it happened was immediately get up to start working for the next hour before I went out and got myself some breakfast from the Starbucks around the corner from the hotel as soon as it opened.

Across the course of the week, I discovered the following things about this accidental routine:

  1. 6am is an ideal time to go for a walk around New York, especially in October. The sun’s not up, the people are just starting to walk around for the day, and you get to see a lot of businesses set their shit up each morning. There’s a lot of hosing down the sidewalk and people singing loudly as they do so.
  2. There are good “walking around New York at 6am” songs and there are bad “walking around New York at 6am” songs. I listened to a bunch of French hip-hop during those walks. (My hotel was just off 42nd Street, which is perpetually lit up by neon signs and an oddly wonderful thing to experience at that time of the morning when accompanied by French hip-hop; I recommend it to you all.)
  3. Inexplicably, there were always people from my company up and around at that time of the morning. Every single morning. Even the morning when the show wasn’t happening and there was no last-minute prep to be done, I ran into someone outside who was waiting for a car to head off into the morning. Perhaps the most surreal example of this was running into the same person just before I got to my hotel room the night before, and then immediately as soon as I left the hotel the next morning; in both cases, she was on a journey between the hotel and the convention center.

As I’m writing this, I’m on the plane back from New York, unsurprisingly utterly exhausted, and also hoping against hope to get a full night’s sleep for the first time in eight days. Surely it has to happen eventually.

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