You slept HOW late?

Until 3 pm. Yes, I slept until 3 pm yesterday. And I didn’t even get a full 8 hours of sleep in doing so. Why? Because I don’t live on any sort of “normal” schedule. I live on normal-to-me.

I’ve been a bit “off” for years now. I’d say since around the time I moved to Nashville, because I opted to be on my husband’s musician schedule. One that consisted of night shows on the road, or late night shifts downtown. We would joke that, “There’s another 10 o’clock?” Because 10 AM to us was like 4 AM to “day jobbers.”

Ever since I started bartending, its gotten wayyyy worse. Why? Because of that unseen-never-thought-about fact that people who work at the bar don’t go home as soon as the doors close. And depending on the night, I could be headed home as late as 5 AM. (In the summer, I’ve driven home watching the sun rise a time or two.) Keep in mind, 5 AM is like 5 PM to the rest of the world. I get home and sometimes I’m hungry. So I have something to eat. I ALWAYS take a shower before I go to bed after working. I have to get the cigarette smoke out of my hair, and the sticky drink mess off my arms. Then I usually want to decompress with a little news on the TV and a quick look at Facebook.

Once all this happens, I will be crawling into bed around 8 AM. And then, yes, I sleep until at least 3 PM. And, as I said, I don’t get a full 8 hours even in doing so… Really, when it comes right down to it, I’m keeping a schedule just like everyone else… only its tilted backwards by about 9 hours. Get up, go to work, put in 8 or 9 hours, come home, do the at-home thing, then sleep. Get up the next day and do it again.

Nights I don’t work, its possible that my husband plays somewhere. Generally you can knock that arrival-home time back by about an hour (maybe 30 minutes) on those nights. And, honestly, even on nights neither of us work, we end up staying on the same schedule as we would if we were working. Its not that easy to flip flop around. At least its not for me!

Anywhere else, this would be so extremely weird… but not here in Nashville. No, any given night of the week, I could call almost half my phonebook and find the person on the other end awake at 2 or 3 AM. It is almost its own little sub-culture to the city. The night owls. We’re the ones up, watching the neighborhood through the night. We’re the ones there if you just need to get out awhile. We’re the ones keeping the tourists entertained. We’re the ones doing it because we love it. Because it works for us.

We’re not weird. We’re not different. We’re just living our lives one night at a time.