Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday

Working a graveyard shift once a week is really fucking with me right now.

By all accounts -- and if I would follow S2's sound advice -- I should be asleep right now. It's 11:43 p.m. on Tuesday, and excepting three hours of light sleeping, I've been awake since 9:30 or so on Monday morning.

The upside to not sleeping is that you can get a lot of shit done, and the last two days have been highly productive ones. Because there are things even I keep to myself, the following report will not be a complete description of my "productivity," but perhaps it will be of some interest, especially to those who wonder just what it is I *do* on a graveyard shift in the Homes for the Criminally Insane.

So here's an abbreviated version of my waking hours:

Monday

I wake around 9:30, take my cotton-pickin' time getting up and all. The pup and I walk to the grocery store about 20 blocks away. I drop off some film for developing, buy a week's worth of groceries and lug it home in an overstuffed backpack. It rains on the return trip, and neither me nor the pup are wearing a jacket. We get home wet.

I poach the salmon -- my favorite way to prepare it -- and cook some greenbeans. I read some of my Ethics textbook and decide to leave early for school so I can get myself fingerprinted for yet another criminal background check. Turns out the fingerprinting place is closed, so I get up to school early and check at the campus safety office to see if a book I ordered had been delivered. Nope. (And, dammit! I forgot to check there tonight when I was at school again.)

At 5:30 p.m., I attend a three-hour lecture on Ethics in counseling.

9:15: I return home and begin getting ready for work. I call S2 and chat for a little bit about stuff, and then I watch a stupid new sitcom named "Rules of Engagement."

10:10 p.m.: The pup and I go for a 30 minute walk.

11 p.m.: I pull up at the Home for the Criminally Insane. For about 45 minutes, I catch up with the guy I'm relieving. He brings me up to speed on one of the resident's personal dramas. He rolls his eyes constantly while talking about it. Somewhere along the line, I realize that last week during my shift, I never checked the residents' rooms during the night. (I didn't know I was supposed to do so.) So we have a little conversation about whether to knock first or just open the door and peek on them. We also discuss whether it would be possible to kill someone with a pizza cutter (the round disc on a stick) because one is in the dishwasher, rather than locked up in the "sharps" drawer. I suggest the reason it's kept locked is not because it would make a good weapon but that it might be used in a suicide attempt.

Tuesday

Midnight: I go down to the basement to check that the exterior doors are locked. This creeps me out a little because the house is a GIGANTIC old Victorian. Conceptually, it's not really a problem for me to be alone in a house all nigh with four women who've been found guilty of crimes except for reason of insanity. But having to go into the basement of an old Victorian and check to see if the doors are locked is major-league creepy. Except for finding someone had left a wall heater on, all's safe and sound in the basement.

12:30 a.m.: I sit down in the living room and watch Craig Ferguson's monologue on the Late, Late Show. He spends a long time talking about Britney Spears and rehab and alcoholism, and he is intentionally *not* funny. He gives America a big lecture on what it's like to hit rock bottom.

1 a.m.: I do my first rounds of the night and peek in on the residents without knocking. They are all in their beds. Or so I assume, because what I see are just big lumps in beds. It occurs to me that even the craziest of people can stuff a bunch of pillows under their covers to make it look like someone's in the bed. Two of them are snoring.

1:30 a.m.: I head down to the basement again, this time to start a load of laundry. Graveyard shift involves a bunch of little chores, in part to help keep you awake. For the 8-hour shift, there is probably an hour-and-a-half's worth of work. Wipe the counters in the kitchen with a bleach solution; take out the trash; shred whatever is in the "needs to be shredded" bin.

One of the tasks is to launder the towels from the bathrooms and kitchen. Doing so involves unlocking the door to the furnace room, where the laundry detergent is kept. Everything in the house that poses the least bit of danger -- from the pizza cutter to nail clippers to detergent -- is under lock and key. I have a huge set of keys to rifle through to unlock each cabinet, drawer or closet that's secure. Down there in the basement, especially, I sometimes get an image in my head of the horror-movie heroine trying to find the key that unlocks the escape route or the car.

2:30 a.m.: I do another round of the residents' rooms. This time when I open one of the doors, a woman asks me what time it is. Another who sleeps with the lights on waves at me.

2:45 a.m.: I finish the textbook reading for my Couple's Therapy class. Realizing it is late enough that nothing else I read will be retained, I pop in a DVD. My first video is "Truly, Madly, Deeply," which is about a woman grieving the loss of her dead cello-playing boyfriend.

5 a.m.: I go back down to the basement to retrieve the towels from the dryer. On the way down the stairs, I notice through a window that the Starbucks across the street has just opened. I pause to regard this peculiar moment. I have never been awake to see a Starbucks open for the morning. Huh.

5:15 a.m.: I pop in a DVD of "Battlestar Galactica" and watch the first episodes I've seen of the modern version of one of my favorite childhood TV shows. (Imagine my amusement to find Starbuck is a girl! And so is the president. Nice.) I'm instantly caught up in the whole drama, but find myself pondering a funny comment about S2 being a Cylon.

6:20 a.m.: A resident comes downstairs and wants to watch the local Fox news broadcast, so I stop watching BSG in the middle of the second episode on this disc (which was *not* the beginning of the series as Netflix claimed).

6:45 a.m.: I write something in the logs about each resident, as is required by law. One of them says, simply, "Sleeping." While I'm doing this, one of the residents asks for her morning medications. She's supposed to self-medicate, but someone didn't pack her meds for her. The result is that I have to dig through a gigantic pile of her meds, which are kept in a different cabinet from all the other residents' meds. Of course, with that ridiculously large key chain of mine and a bunch of the keys not being clearly identified, I am squatting in front of the low cabinet for several minutes, sticking in one key after another, losing track of the keys, starting over, fumbling and fussing just like a horror-flick heroine.

7 a.m.: My relief arrives, and I finish writing in the logs.

7:30: I leave and go to Noah's to get a bagel. Normally, I would go straight home but...

8 a.m.: I go to the most boring presentation -- my attendance required by federal law -- about making false claims for Medicare reimbursement. I fall asleep during part of it, only to have a kind co-worker nudge me back to consciousness. Then, I watch a really bizarre "skit" about harrassment that ends up pissing off the Christians in the audience when they learn *they* aren't allowed to pressure co-workers into attending church. Heh!

10 a.m.: After realizing I am a danger to self and others when driving, I call S2 and ask her to drive the carpool to class tonight. She readily agrees. I walk the dog.

10:30 a.m.: I lay me down to sleep. My brain is frequently bothered by ear worms when I'm tired, and this mornings was a poem about kissing. Better than that chanting from last week.

12:30 p.m.: I wake up. I force myself back to bed.

1:15 p.m.: I wake again following a bizarre dream and realize I'm going to have to give up on sleeping more. I take my cotton-pickin' time getting up to shower and all.

3:50 p.m.: I take the pup to the coffee house. Cafe au lait to go.

4:40 p.m.: S2 swings by to pick me up for school. Interesting conversation ensues. I become aware of just how tired I am. I'm a bit giddy.

5:30 p.m.: In Couple's Therapy, we begin a role-playing process that's going to carry on for the next several weeks. S2, a guy I call Buddha Boy and I are in a triad. Each of us in turn will play therapist to the other as a couple. (Three different sets of couples.) We ended up in these groups by virtue of where we were sitting on the night the professor assigned us the task. The result is that S2 and I are now a couple of married immigrants from India who are in an arranged marriage. (This scenario was created by Buddha Boy.) I'm the husband, Ravi. S2 is playing the role of the wife, Dolly, who has been taking contraception without telling the husband.

7 p.m.: After 45 minutes of *intense* and emotional role-play -- and let me tell you, that S2 can ACT! -- the two of us are volunteered by Buddha Boy (and by the silent submission of the rest of the fucking class!) to carry on this role-play with the teacher in front of the class. The experience with the teacher was, thankfully, a little less intense than that with Buddha Boy, who had been actively engaged in heightening our emotions. Even so, it is still intense and fairly exhausting.

After it's over, I realize I had been so caught up in my character -- a real traditional, stubborn "head of household" Indian male who feels betrayed by his wife -- and so affected by S2's performance of polite, retiring, dignified sadness that I felt ... awful. I want to make up with her or something. I have never done any role-playing like this. Not even any drama except for that strange process drama class I took this summer (totally unrelated to real character play) and except for my role as one of the Apostles in a highly inappropriate version of the Last Supper in Catholic "summer camp." It is more of an emotional workout than I realized. (And I begin to get an inkling of understanding about something S2 said to me a few days ago about artistic expression.)

7:45 p.m.: Because we all haven't done enough fire walking for the evening, the professor puts on the fifth episode of "Scenes from a Marriage." Holy christ! Remember last week when I said it didn't seem like it could get any more desperate or emotionally saturated? Well, that's just what it did. Ingmar Bergman, I bow down before thee. What an intense film! I felt physically aroused -- agitation -- for a good 30 minutes or so after it was over. And even then, I was only beginning to take the edge off, despite engaging in some decompression dialogue with S2 about it. I gather next week we will see the last episode. I am *morbidly* fascinated with it. It also makes me feel like drinking hard liquor.

10 p.m.: I pour myself a few shots of dark rum (left here by a party-goer) and watch "Boston Legal."

Wednesday

Now: Wouldn't you know it? I'm tired. I thought disgorging this lengthy tale would help me close the book on the day. And so it has. I'm going to go finish watching that episode of "Battlestar Galactica" and fall asleep.

Tomorrow is another day.