Do you get a good night's sleep? Like, maybe six or seven or eight hours of sleep a night? Really? What's that like?
If you can indulge me, I'd like to describe an average couple of days - Sunday through Tuesday, so three days - for me. By the way, there are many ways these days could be organized differently, but that would require foresight by yours truly, & that's not happening.
I wake after a probably drunken sleep Sunday morning. Hey! It was Saturday night!
I spend most of the day (there are dogwalks & hopefully a nap & I have to make dinner as well) working on Self Help Radio. If you don't listen to the show - & maybe if you do - you're not aware of the work I put into the silly interviews, the selection of songs, the somewhat-amusing interstitial pieces. It takes a while. I haven't come up with a good system for all this. I wish I could. I have tried lots of things. None seems more streamlined than another.
Usually I get to bed around ten or maybe eleven pm on Sunday nights. This hurts a little, because it has meant, since I got my Freeform show, I miss John Oliver. I can see him on Monday but for some reason I like to see things live or mostly live. Anyway. We make sacrifices.
What happens is I sleep a fitful few hours. I wake at 4am, I shower, I gather my things, I head out to Freeform, which is north of here, & about fifteen to twenty minutes away, at 5am. I stop to get a soda at a 7-11, I like to have a little caffeine, but I am there twenty or so minutes early. It's who I am. Don't judge me.
The show happens. I hope it goes well. The show that follows mine is awesome & I chat with the deejay. I drive home, it's 8am, I avoid the highway. I get home around 8:30. If the wife is home, we walk the dogs. Mostly she walks the dogs while I am on the radio.
Around 9:30 I feed my animals. At some point I have lunch. It's a haze around that time. Did I lunch or feed the animals? Have they eaten me? I fed them, then.
For two hours - after lunch - I sleep. It's not always noon to two, but it's around then. It's not entirely restful or pleasant but it's necessary. I sometimes oversleep. I sometimes don't. What do you want from me?
When I wake, I need to work on my show from XRAY. Before that, though, I edit my Self Help Radio episode for the website, & write on this here blog, &etc. I have a rough recording that I have to edit. I don't change anything about the airbreaks - how could I? You hear the show as it happened.
The XRAY show gets my attention. Then, at some point, it's evening, the wife is home, I make dinner, there's the requisite dogwalk.
Sometimes I have the XRAY show done around the time I feed the kids, 9:30 or so. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I can nap from ten to midnight. Sometimes I don't.
Around 1am, I gather stuff & head out to XRAY (which is across the street from Freeform), & I program the show Sugar Substitute. I am done at 4am, I head home.
Mostly I get maybe two or three hours sleep before I am awakened for the morning dogwalk. Some Tuesdays I don't get to go back to sleep until the evening, some Tuesdays I nap after lunch. But mostly I operate on very little sleep.
Is this sustainable? Next week I am subbing a show on KBOO on Wednesday night/Thursday morning from midnight to 3am. When am I supposed to sleep? What is a good night's sleep, anyway? As I have grown older, my dreams have gotten more vivid, memorable, & confusing. I think I enter REM sleep right after I conk out.
Is it because for three or four days of the week, my sleep is erratic & limited? I wish I knew.
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