I Stayed Up Too Late

     A few weeks ago I discussed cycles and how vicious they are.  They are also really hard to break.  Since then, I've been trying to break this horrible cycle of staying up too late and then sleeping in the next morning.  I made a list of ways I wanted to be better; among them was getting up a reasonable, adult time.  So far, I have been failing.
     This morning, or yesterday morning, depending on how time is actually classified, I slept in to an unreasonable hour.  I justified it neatly because 1. I was up late recovering my hard drive from the sweet computer death and 2. I could feel illness upon me, so I was sleeping it off.  Of course, as we know from how cycles go, sleeping in means that when normal bedtime comes around, we won't be tired.
     Something odd has happened this evening.  It started off like a normal Thursday night--I watched Community and Parks&Rec, cried for about 2 minutes, then had popcorn and chocolate ice cream for dinner.  Then I watched the second disc of season 5 of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.  And then I couldn't stop doing things.  I kept watching things on TV.  I was looking things up on the internet.  I was creating playlists.  I was writing sketch ideas.  All of a sudden it was 1am.  I had things in my Amazon shopping cart that shouldn't be there.  I made a firm conclusion about the Fleet Foxes.  Clearly, it was time to go to bed.  But there was just one more thing.
     A trip down memory lane, through tweets.  I don't know why I did it, but I couldn't stop.  I had gone to my own profile and started scrolling down.  I had assumed it would stop after 25 or so.  It didn't.  So I didn't.  I read all 675 tweets and pieced together the last 2 years and some change of my life.  There were a few that I couldn't place--for example, I do not know what prompted "I apologize in advance to everyone I'm going to piss off today. Mama's on a roll and she ain't slowin' down."  I don't know that I often refer to myself as "Mama."  But there it was, and it made me chuckle.  And clearly I wasn't amused when I wrote it, but the blurry filter of nostalgia made me think it must have been a good time.  
    Then it was 2:30am, and somehow I still wasn't tired.  So I kept going with things.  Now it's almost 3.  This feels like the time of day when you debate staying up or getting just a few hours of sleep while in college.  When the alarm is going to go off in less than 2 hours so you decide to just power through.  Reading through those tweets reminded me of my early mornings when I was a trusty barista; 5am was a normal wake-up time.  I don't have to get up at 5am tomorrow, or today, and I should take a moment to be thankful for that.  
     I stayed up too late, and it's going to hurt me tomorrow, and the next day and the next, until I can break this cycle.  It's possible that one way to break it would be to stay up.  I would then be exhausted by about, oh 7am., so it wouldn't actually work.  But in theory, if I pushed through the day, I would then go to bed early and then get up early, and the cycle would magically be broken, just like that.  It'd be like sleep rapid detox.