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Stay Up Real Late
You know you’re up too late when you look at the clock and are relieved to see it’s only 1:30 in the morning. Another good sign of being up too late is when you start counting off on your fingers how many hours sleep you’re going to get before you have to get up in the morning, if you expect to be in bed and sound asleep within the next 30 minutes. Researchers from the London School of Economics have declared that people of high intelligence are more likely to be night owls. They back their claim up by pointing out some famous people who were night owls. They included Winston Churchill, James Joyce and Elvis. They also included Joseph Stalin and Hitler. To find out if I could get smarter by just staying up late at night, I delved further into the matter and found another study by a psychologist who claimed that night owls tend to be less reliable, more emotionally unstable and more likely to have addictions and eating disorders. To back up the findings of this psychologist, I found another study that proclaims early risers to tend to be more conscientious, persistent and apt to cooperate, and that they also cope better with academic requirements. Come to think of it, there are no sayings about late birds getting the worm. In spite of all these studies I still like being up in the wee hours. I don’t know if it’s because things get real still and quiet then, or if I’m just glad everybody else had gone to bed except me. Probably both. About 2:45 in the morning it gets so quiet and still until you can hear a gnat break wind, or the flutter of a tiny moth’s wings. All the sounds and distractions of the day are long gone. They left with the fading light and diminished ever further as the darkness and stillness blotted them out. I never did like worms anyway. Sometimes I wish I was a bear. That way I could stay up all night, eat everything in sight, and when it got winter I could just put on my favorite pajamas, and curl up with my favorite quilt, and sleep till late one spring day and wake up skinny. That’s another bad thing about staying up real late--you tend to get hungry again. I mean if you have dinner at six, by three in the morning it’s time for a sandwich and some pie. After that I guarantee you’ll go to sleep. Good Lord! It’s three o’clock in the morning! But if I go to sleep right now and get up at nine in the morning I’ll still be fixing to get six hours sleep. |
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