Lately sleep and I haven’t been on the nicest of terms. It’s like old married sex, usually one is in the mood and the other isn’t. When I’m beat down and worn out and all I want is to pass out, sleep just will not have me. Then the next day when I’m trying my damnedest to make it through yet another day, Sleep creeps in and starts pulling on my eyelids. She doesn’t care if I’m driving, she doesn’t care if I’m… well doing other things it isn’t optimal to fall asleep during.
I think it’s because I’m falling in love.
My new lover’s name is 3am. There’s something about the hours which pass after the witching hour shifts from the time before midnight used for doing good to its evil remainder. Time itself changes from a constant flowing stream of weaving chronology to a viscous sludge which moves like honey but slips through your fingers like water. Hours pass like days but before you know it 6am is creeping around the corner and your chances of sleep are greatly diminished.
Nobody is awake and alone at 3am because they want to be.
It seems I’ve become a part of a strange secret underground network of online insomniacs. There’s a certain honestly that becomes employed when you’re sleep deprived and lonely, it’s a vulnerability that’s triggered by loneliness and encouraged by fatigue. It’s amazing the connections and reconnections that you can establish chatting with a faceless person an undisclosed distance from your situation in the wee hours. It’s so easy to drop someone a line a 3am when their status reads “online now”. It really makes me wonder what people did at 3am just a few years ago when the internet was just a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye.
How did people fight loneliness before the internet?
Social interaction has become automated to the point of being inefficient. The thing that people are taking for granted is relationships can look so perfect on paper or digital bleeps of light in this case. I love to hear the “getting together” stories of people who found each other through the magic of the gods alone, like standing in line together at the grocery and one drops something perishable and they bump heads while both trying to pick it up. Almost all of my friends, if asked where they met their partner, will tell you “we met online”. A few years ago you would have been laughed out of any room for the exact same words, now they’re just common place.
So how the hell DID people date before the internet?
I have done my fair share of “online dating” and honestly I can’t imagine any other way of doing it. I know they’re out there but I’ve always been such a goof. I’m a tall, awkward sonofabitch and first impressions are not my strong suit. In fact it’s hard for me to believe that so many couples exist in the world that have been together longer the internet has been around. And the funniest part is I know people, still, in 2008 that met their partners the REAL way, the face to face way with only minor intervention from some divine force.
But 3am isn’t all about meeting other lonely people, it’s about youtube. StumbleUpon. FARK. It’s about educating yourself through 10-minute videos and pointless links that you can’t help but click. My new favorite term is “YouTube Physicist”. This applies to anyone who doesn’t know a god damn thing about physics but have watched “What the bleep do we know?” and “The Elegant Universe” enough to pick up key words and grasp a basic understanding.
I LOVE IT when I come up with new names for myself.
I think it kicks major fuckin ass. Physicists are pricks that got made fun of in high school so now they cling to the only thing that keeps them separate from the rest of the adult, non-high school universe: big stupid words. Then they expect you to use these words when speaking to them about physics but make fun because you sound like a total tard when you drop $2 words like “superposition” you picked up from a 2:34 video clip on string theory. It’s not just physicists; it’s pretty much anyone educated in crap most people don’t care about such as science. The reason most people don’t give a crap about it is because it’s made too hard for the layman to understand. Physics should be for everyone, knowledge should never be hoarded. That’s why I think YouTube should be petitioned to start YouTube University. So what if you can’t go afford to go to school if you can just watch lectures on things like Physics and Philosophy.
I would DEFINITELY go there.