Trois heures, c'est toujours trop tard ou trop tôt pour tout ce qu'on veut faire. Un drôle de moment dans l'après-midi. [Three o'clock, it's always too late or two soon for everything that we want to do. It's a funny time in the afternoon.]
It's a very interesting phenomenon, this moment in any given day when we "hit the wall," as the saying goes. At different times and under different circumstances it can be unexpected. In some cases though, it can be very predictable, and in some cases avoided. I remember that Summer when I was working my way through seminary. The employer had a big backlog that summer and told me that I was to work the "graveyard" shift (11:00 PM to 7:00 AM) from the last week of June through the 21st of August. I was elated to hear the news and thought that it would be perfect because I was playing baseball in an evening league. (6:00 PM start time; 7 innings) It was great and I took to it like a fish to water. BUT, I did discover that I had a problem. No matter what I seemed to do, I would fall into a quasi stupor at around 2:00 AM every day. The feeling would last until about 4:00 AM when I would be wide awake again and really giving it hell, as we used to say. I was embarrassed by my "weakness" and I told my colleague what was happening. All he said was, "Keep your trap shut. I know that you are producing more than anybody we've had on nights. That's all you have to know." So I kept my trap shut and that was the summer that I made $1,000.00 for about 8 weeks of work...Yep, lots of O.T.! It was 1955 or so.
That, I came to know is a phenomenon that comes from the nature of the circadian cycle. That is, the accommodation that our being makes with the rotation of the earth. But what about the other thing that I mentioned at the top? That psychological certainty that from this point on, I'm on vacation. It happens to all of us, from the CEO to the janitor. It seems that it attacked Jean-Paul Sartre at three PM., every day. Not me. For me it varies. Sometimes, I have to admit, it grabs me at 7:00 AM and never goes away, all day. Those are rough days. Worse now than ever because I work alone and at home and I have a quota and a deadline. Soooo... I have to tell you that many times I get hot and invigorated at 4:00 PM. So I get down to it and "kick ass" until 12 or 1 o'clock in the morning. What a life! Sometimes when that happens, I get four hours of sleep and bounce back up and take up where I left off and really get a whole cargo ship of work done in three "days".
So, no matter how smart ol' Jean-Paul was, and no matter that he wrote a ton of books and deep ones too, he still confessed to being human...just as human as the rest of us.
I was going to tell you about something else today, but decided that it was too deep and too dark for my mood. It was about something that I got from Sartre, and something that I believe in very deeply, but this did not seem to be the moment. Maybe some other time.
BTW, the Guy upstairs is taking his time turning up the heat in Southern California this year. It got to be all of 65 here today. There are icicles on the palm fronds, for crying out loud!
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