You Need Sleep?

Modern life isn’t made for nocturnal lifestyles. I had a jury summons a while back, and at the time my routine leaned even farther toward staying up past sunrise and sleeping late into the afternoon. To report to the courthouse, and to possibly sit on a jury, would probably have meant staying awake for most of the week. Would I be excused on these grounds? I don’t know. Isn’t there a night court, or was that just a tv series?

I would seem a rare sort, in that I would like to sit on a jury. Even a boring one. Reporting to the courthouse, the few times I ever have, is a great window into society. A random gathering of humanity from, one presumes, all non-felonious walks of life.

But being tired is never an acceptable excuse. It’s like saying you’re “busy.” When Ronald Reagan was filmed falling asleep in cabinet meetings it was used by some to illustrate his purported aloofness and even air-headedness. Maybe he was just tired. What if he had issued that as a statement, through his press secretary. “I was tired.”

The President was TIRED.

I have known those who see going without sleep as a macho sort of thing.

(What’s a gender-neutral word for macho? Conveying the same idea of steroid-brained, loud-headed unassailability, but gender free? “Heroic”? “Mercenary”? “Bitch”?)
(What’s a less weak thought trailer than “sort of thing”?)

“Pulling an all nighter” was bragged about in college, but what do you bring to a final exam by going 70+ hours without sleep? I would bring little sparkling horsies trotting through the classroom, and I’d watch the letters on the exam pages skid off the desk and trickle away.

Well, I’ve had that experience while wide awake and well rested, but just for fun.

Lack of adequate sleep was, in my vivid experience, a badge of honor in corporate management. Someone pops her head into my office and says we have a meeting in some butthole city at 8am the next day. No overnight travel allowed, we can’t afford it, but your card better not be maxed out because we have to pay 6 times the usual air fare for reserving the flights so late. Questioning the value of a meeting full of people who had no sleep the night before merited no coherent response. I’d get a yelp of “WHAT!” and an arms-crossed, glassy grin.

The unasked, incredulous corporate question: “You need sleep?” My suggestion that a decent night’s sleep might bring more value to the meeting than money saved on hotel rooms seemed to yank the excitement out of the endeavor.

So we’d show up ashen-faced, imagining the end of this meeting the way the pope imagines peace on earth. The people we met with asked what hotel we stayed at. When no one answered we were offered suggestions, as if we didn’t remember which hotel. Somehow we avoided answering the question, avoided admitting that we all stayed up all night, avoided intra-corporate embarrassment, avoided admitting that someone in charge thought this meeting bigger than Yalta.