When Good Habits Go Bad

What was once a Good Habit is now careening off course and becoming a Bad Habit.  Bad Habit flares up when The Scout is out of town. It intensified when I received a gift subscription to The New Yorker.  Now that I have an iPod Touch—forget it. Like a true Bad Habit, it is now interfering with sleep. Ergo, it is interfering with life.

I like to read.  A lot.  I like to read so much that I’m waking up in the middle of the night.  To read.

The Scout has difficulty sleeping with the light on, but he’s perfectly happy to sleep with a pillow over his head.  So a couple of nights ago, there I am with the light on devouring the 1 November 2010 edition of The New Yorker—to be precise, Seymour M. Hersh’s The Online Threat (it’s over here).  When The Scout grumbles, I turn off the light and fire up the New York Times app on my iPod Touch.  First it’s the top news, then the readers’ favorites, then—if my eyeballs haven’t burned out of my head—over to Opinion.

Last night, I woke up at 2:00 am.  I pretended I could go back to sleep for a whole 30 minutes.  That turned out to be 30 minutes of wasted reading time.  I finally checked e-mail on my iPod and read a couple of articles.  I went back to sleep at 3-something (I avoid looking at the clock).  Had a dream that I was in Buenos Aires in a beautiful marble ballroom.  See, this doesn’t help either—having a good travel dream after engaging in the counterproductive behavior.

Don’t try to solve my problem.  If I yawn while you’re speaking, don’t take it personally—I was with Seymour last night.  Besides, I bet some of you have the voracious-reader gene too.