when i was growing up, i distinctly remember scoffing at this. as all idealistic youngsters are wont to do, i resolved to always be the same me around everyone; honesty was the core of my value system and i thought that the most important thing i could do in the name of honesty was to present all of myself to everyone. not just the facets that they like, but the whole thing; that way they could make an informed decision as to whether or not they actually liked me, instead of getting a favorable first impression and being disillusioned only later.
i still try to do this, but i've also come to realize that being honest doesn't mean being the same all the time. it doesn't mean forcing conversations to go in directions that other people don't enjoy or are bored with just to divulge everything about oneself. i still like the divulging -- i still really enjoy telling my life story -- but i don't go around forcing it on people anymore. in concise terms, being a generalist doesn't require talking about everything to everyone.
i'm reminded of this as i try to write emails to two of my closest friends, and it would be three except that i know the experience would just be duplicated. it's not that i don't have things to say; it's that i don't have things to say that fit into the nature of our friendship. this is hard to say without insinuating that there's something missing in our friendship, which is definitely not the case. i guess what's going on is that i don't have anything sufficiently interesting to say to them, and that's in an entirely selfish way. i feel bad when i write things that are either poorly written or inane; it's the same feeling i get when i eat greasy food and feel a grimy film enveloping me thereafter. the feeling is amplified when i'm writing to someone who i feel expects more from me, i think.
part of the heart of this change is that i've been keeping very regular and very nonsocietal hours. i've slept from roughly 6 am to 4 pm every day for the past two weeks or so. i could talk forever about this, and i just might.
the way that my being a night person evolved, as i think is the case for most night people, is that i was paranoid about missing something by going to bed early. this started in college; the crowd i quickly fell in with simply knew each other better than i knew any of them, and i was loathe to allow that subcliquishness to proliferate. this meme stayed around even when the circumstances were off: i didn't want to go to sleep for fear that a bonding experience would take place that would bring people closer together than i was to any of them.
bonding experiences don't occur in the morning, so the obvious solution was to become a night person. the time that other people would have without me was in the morning, which was not "dangerous" from this perspective. so i stayed up later and later and eventually reached an equilibrium where i was going to sleep a bit later than anyone else. in retrospect, it's a good thing that no one i knew had this same paranoia, because it would have been an unstoppable arms race. i guess it would have required two other people.
now? that's not the case, and if anything it's almost flipped. this might be a reason why people become more morning people as they go into the real world; it's not necessarily jobs so much as the fact that when things are more scheduled, there is not a daily threat of being usurped since you know other people aren't seeing each other in a situation where you could be.
instead, these last two weeks have almost been solipsistic. i've taken these morning hours and used them to think, to write, to feel. the hours they're replacing, the early afternoon hours, are hours that i would be spending in the math department, working, or, much more likely, playing cards. in an odd twist, that's when the bonding is going on: two to five pm or so in the math department. and i'm missing it due to my schedule.
i don't mean to imply that my schedule is entirely by choice. it's not. there are only three solutions to the schedule. one is to go to sleep earlier, which i simply can't do without possibly taking sleeping pills, which i'm a bit scared of. another is to wrap around, which is probably the most feasible, but which wastes a day. the third is to force myself to get up super-early one day, but the problems here go both ways: it pretty much guarantees a painful and unproductive day, and furthermore one day often doesn't fix my schedule. i recall vividly one day when i forced myself to wake up at 9 and stayed up until three in the morning anyway.
i'm continually trying solution one; we'll see what happens. i think i've had enough me time, and i'm ready for the world again.