Hello, world. Welcome new friends... ya know, the ones I hope to make. I've had a few blogs before, but this is the first time I've had one that wasn't connected to my name. The first time I've had one that I didn't have to worry about who was reading or what they thought of me. I hope to find this freeing. I have not written much in my life lately, and I feel the lack of that. It's cathartic, of course, and I'm not sure anyone needs this type of thing more than I do right now.

My blog title is from an idea I had years ago for a book. Perhaps this will be the first draft. Perhaps people will find this blog and read it, and be interested, and down the road I'll put it all together and trot it off to some publishing house to be made into a neat little bound collection of stories from my existence. Maybe not. I'm not stressing about where it's going to go. Names may sometimes be changed to protect the innocent (or guilty, as the case may be) and other times they may not. I won't tell you when, because it will ultimately be irrelevant I'm sure. Mostly I think it's going to be a way to further hide my own identity... as if I have one in the first place. Part of the point of this is to try and figure that out.

It's 5:14 a.m., and e-mails are popping up in my Gmail alert from all the early risers in my circle. I am about to go to bed. This is one of many problems in my current reality. I have been trying for a while now to flip my schedule back to what most people would consider "normal" without much success. Some days I feel like I shouldn't be bothering, simply surrendering to the sleep cycle I have landed on, content to get eight hours of sleep regardless of what time of day they happen. Other days I feel a huge sense of dissynchronization (okay, apparently that's not a word, but I like it because it says what I want it to say) with the rest of the world, and long to be up in the morning, living my life in daylight, and hitting the sack by midnight.

I will admit I thrive on the "normal" schedule (well, okay, I modify it a bit because my version of "getting up early" is something like 9:30 a.m.), but for a variety of reasons that will all be revealed over time, I perpetuate the night-owl schedule (what I often refer to as "New Zealand Time" even though it's not entirely relatively accurate), and it's really hard to change the routine once I'm in it.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that I live with my mother. And my brothers and sisters. There are six of us altogether under one roof. I am the oldest of the five children, and I'm gonna be forty. No, not "someday," Harry... a mere year from now, and this fact is the first of the long list of reasons alluded to above. I live in hiding. I am constantly trying to create space for myself that doesn't have other people encroaching, or insisting they be taken into consideration every damn second.

I may sound like an ass, but I'm okay with that for now. I'm complicated and flawed, and the realizations will happen when they happen. At this moment in time, I have to go to bed. But thank you for reading, and I hope you'll come back later when I write some more.

Until then...