May bloom, May wilt

Hats off to the month of May
With it's falling leaves and its glistening days.

Well, so you may say, Mr Fanning, but there's quite a lot that's not particularly glistening about it from where I sit (the thighs of my football team, with linament, kicking goals, notwithstanding. Mmm). The leaves are falling too in Melbourne, but so, alas, is my really ultra crappy circadian clock's ability to read the signals.

Yep, it's happening already, folks. Two days of cloudy skies and the circadian rhythms are already starting their downward decline. I can feel it. For example. It's nearly 9pm and I am just gearing up in the kitchen, cooking pumpkin soup and mushroom risotto. And here it is, the beginning of the downward slide, the thought that going to bed a little later is starting to seem appealing. So tonight, I may choose to go to bed a bit later thanusual - say, 1am. Tomorrow night, 1.30. Before you know it, I'll be up till 4am.

It happens every day, the same. Wake up in the morning, back in first gear again. Thinking, ggggooootttt tttooo gggeeettt mmmooovvviinnngg. Feel slightly haggard all day, everything a bit of an effort. Come the evening - how delicious Winter evenings are, all cosy and closed in and raunchy - and then, oooh, how interesting everything suddenly appears and off I go, playing and cooking and loving the feel of the closed-in Winter night, all quiet, most normal people all cosy and snug under their doonas. Yum.

Every year without fail you can set your clock on the fact that my circadian clock can't.

But is there anything wrong with that? Why do I feel this nervous kind of anxiety about what they will think about my strange hour keepings? I have a job this year which allows me start at lunchtime - even, if I really want to, even later than that. I have no children to get me up at 6am. I can keep these hours and nobody is going to yell at me.

Surely my hours are the more civilised than the 6am wakeups or the bizarre habits people like Kent keep, getting up at 5.30. Or my friend Bettina who gets up and walks her dog first thing in the morning in the dark before work (I'm jealous really. I can't think of anything better than that). My days are just different, that's all. I'm circadianally challenged. Like, you know how morning people start off guns blazing and then end the day generally sitting down quiet and slowly gearing down until they stop and sleep? Well, I just do it in reverse. Spend the first - oh, I dunno, seven or eight hours sitting around trying to crank it up. Doing stuff, and even sounding quite chirpy and stuff, but still, you know. I'm pretending to be excited. I was still getting about in my dressing gown this afternoon at 3pm. Had a shower at 5. It's now almost 9pm and suddenly it's bright eyed and bushy tailed and, you know, wanting to write poetry and play music loud and get into it.

Nothing wrong with that, right? Right?

(It's a bit of a bummer, though, 'cause every time I get up in the morning I have this strange idea that things are gonna be different for me today, and so I try and do stuff - like, physical stuff like vacuuming. When really, everyone knows that vacuuming happens at 10pm).

Embrace your eccentricities, Suzie. Embrace. How dull if everyone was exactly the same, right?