Location Taken: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012
Sometimes normal human patterns just look so weird, ya know?
Here I am at my Grandparent’s place, and well, as soon as Grandma heads to bed a bit before midnight, so does everyone else. Except me.
Well, there are a few people who will occasionally stay up a little later, but not tonight. Tonight it went from everyone up and doing things to everyone in bed with the lights off in something like 10 minutes. Except me. I’m still up at 1:30 am, randomly browsing the internet and half-watching the TV. Oh, and writing this post. But I’m still nowhere near tired enough to sleep, and I sleep so exceedingly poorly if I try to go to bed when I’m not tired that it’s better for me to wait until my body will let me sleep.
It really does feel like there is some hidden signal that tells everyone to do the same thing at the same time, and I didn’t hear it. Which is actually exactly what it is. It is so awkward to be missing a basic instinct like the circadian rhythm…
At home, I spend most of my time alone in my room, isolated from the odd behaviors of these strange human beasts, but here life is lived in a normal diurnal pattern and there’s nowhere I can hide away. It does mean that the people who aren’t used to my patterns look at me with disapproval at my odd sleeping times. Ah, the joys of social stigma for being different. At least I’m quite used to dealing with that.
I’m also quite used to tempering my own activities to be considerate of the sleeping people around me. Which, alas, is rarely returned in kind when they wake up and I’m still solidly asleep…
