missing Saturday mornings

Video Hits (Australian TV series) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I was younger, during the earlier years of high school, Saturday mornings had a sort of comforting ritual to them. I could sleep in to around 9-9:30am, then get up, make some breakfast of my choice (usually toast) and watch Video Hits. I would lose myself in the land of music until noon, making lists of new songs to add to my collection and reminiscing with old favourites.

Then I got to the age where employment becomes a necessity, and suddenly I was working weekends, a slave to endless line of consumers craving salty hangover fixes. And my Saturday morning routine kind of disappeared.

Even cutting down my work shifts didn’t help, since that was when I hit the serious end of school and all of a sudden everything became about when I would study.

Then, finally, school ended, Saturdays returned – but now Video Hits was taken off the air, and even Rage wasn’t playing for long in the mornings.

I just miss the comfort of those days, where I could forget all about my life for a while and lose myself in music, blankets and feelings of contentment. Even during the tougher times of my teenage life, it was a small safe haven once a week.

I long for that. I crave that safety and contentment; the feeling that for a few hours, everything might be alright.

Saturday mornings meant hope and the freedom of a whole weekend to do as I pleased.

I want to reclaim that. But you can’t go back, so I guess I’ll have to find a new way to experience it.

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exhausted from my 28 hour wide-eyed marathon

I’m not the kind of person who ever pulls all-nighters. In fact, before last night I had only ever managed a proper one once, and that was to see the 3am session of the final Harry Potter movie the day it came out.

I actually used to sleep more than the average person on a regular basis. I’m pretty sure I’ve managed an 18 hour sleep before (and it wasn’t just me recovering from any late nights).

But last night, for some reason, I just didn’t fancy going to sleep. At all. Even though I had been awake since 5am for an early work shift. Of course,  struggled around 1 or 2am, but once it got to 3am, I saw the challenge and decided I was going to rise up to it. And so, at 5am came a brief victory dance at reaching the 24 hour mark.

Everything after that was just icing on the cake.

I got home at about 27 hours awake, possibly in not the safest state to drive (apparently 17 hours without sleep is equivalent to 0.05 BAC). I was planning to not get any sleep and just watch movies in bed all day, but alas, my bed was too comfortable and I found myself nodding off while trying to watch John Cusack win a girl’s love in Say Anything.

So around 9am I briefly shut my eyes for about an hour, and then woke to continue the movie. Which was pretty good, in that 80s-classic-moments sort of way.

I had an interesting moment where it felt too late for me to be drinking coffee, because to me it was the end of the night, when really it was 8am and perfectly acceptable. The whole thing has thrown off all my eating patterns for the day. And time is passing really slowly now, I suppose because I had an earlier start than I normally would, and so gained extra hours in which to pursue leisurely activities.

I followed Say Anything with some lethargic music listening, and then How To Train Your Dragon, which proved to be more emotional than my sleep-deprived brain could reasonably handle. I don’t know what it is about children’s movies, but they are so much more wrought with anxiety and distress than most adult dramas. I was sobbing over the ill-treatment of Toothless when Hiccup first tries to show his father how friendly and tame he was.

I suppose this reinforces my general feeling that sleep is definitely essential for me, even in small amounts. Though staying up all night was kind of fun. And I certainly watched more YouTube videos during the wee hours of the morning than I usually would.