Temporally Unmoored

Something weird happens when one works the graveyard shift for an extended period of time, as I have since the big shakeup on the job two weeks ago. For one thing, one gets used to the feeling that one is a day ahead of everybody else (with certain exceptions of course). It's nice to be finished with the workday while most people haven't even begun, but it really doesn't help with the commute- I usually try to run a couple of errands near my workplace to kill enough time that I avoid the brunt of rush hour traffic. My one problem is that I haven't really developed a sleeping pattern- should I sleep during the morning and early afternoon, the late afternoon and evening, or a split/combination of the two? I guess I'll vary things according to the social calendar and prevailing weather conditions... if it's crappy out, no need to stay up to stave off S.A.D.

The real test comes every other Saturday, when I leave work and head straight for Manhattan for my volunteer gig- I basically leave home around 11PM on Friday and don't get home until about 2PM on Saturday. The other Saturdays, I leave home around 8AM and don't get home until about 1AM Sunday.

Sometimes, I feel unmoored from the world timewise- most news bureaus in the States are closed, so the news is repetitive. A lot of late night radio is just plain weird- thankfully, 6-9AM promises some damn good radio here in New York. There aren't a lot of people online (with certain exceptions of course), and I typically see one person on the job at midnight, and one person at 8AM. It's easy to get lost in the cognitive labyrinth that is the internet in the wee hours of the morning. As an example, the response that I had originally planned to make to a comment at the mothership about "The Citadel":


City walls? Inner defensive walls and towers? Weapons technology from World War One …a century ago… could easily decimate this city. Are they expecting to be invaded by the Visigoths? I would think the Visigoths would take one look at these plans and be all like, “Wait, you people are from the 21st Century. You’ve landed men on the Moon, sent probes beyond planets we’ve never heard of, built bombs that obliterate everything for miles, fly machines that rain death from the skies… and these jackholes plan on building city walls to protect them? From sorcery? Really? We brought the Romans to their knees… but we didn’t have fucking SORCERY at out disposal. These guys think their cute little city walls are going to protect them… from FUCKING SORCERY?!”

Was pretty abstruse:


Not when the federal government can cast Tiltowait!


This led me on a long nostalgia trip on the web, chasing down esoterica concerning a game that my siblings and I spent long hours playing in our 'ute, which led on a chase after an anime based on the game, which can be seen here. Of course, the cartoon bears little resemblance to the way we played the game- in the cartoon, some guy kills Werdna with a really big sword, when anybody playing the game knew that the best hope for survival was to hit the mofo with Mabadi. Buncha n00bz!

Yeah, I'm becoming unmoored... reading this post over, it might be a psychological unmooring...