I’m up late tonight.  If I have one addiction (and my wife can tick off six more without even blinking) it’s staying up into the wee hours every night…

Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as saying, "Early to bed, early to rise, makes you healthy, wealthy, and wise…"  Mine would go something more like this:  "Late to bed, early to rise, makes you…grumpy, gray-haired, and dependent on coffee."  It’s not very poetic, I know.

But I just can’t make myself go to bed early.  The rigors of the day start in the EVIL morning hours whereas the part of the day I quite enjoy starts when my sweet daughters are tucked into their beds for the night.

In the late evening I wouldn’t dream of taking on important tasks, so I usually end up settling somewhat meaningless assignments such as:

1. Researching scouting reports on Major League Baseball players.  Right now my fantasy team is pretty pathetic (regardless of all the work I put into it) and so I’m always looking for a way to improve it.  This micro-managing strategy is not really working, but it’s defintely keeping me busy.
2. Blogging.  If I can think of something to say, this is the prime time to say it.
3. Reading.  If I have a book I am into I might do some reading or I may catch up on some blog reading.  The problem with reading books is that books often lull one into a pre-mature sleep state.  As I said above, I am trying to stretch the free time not waste it with such petty things as R.E.M. cycles.
4. T.V. –Christa and I usually watch a show or movie together on most evenings.  The problem is that when it comes to "burning the midnight oil," Christa is a feather-weight.  She just can’t hang with a contender like me.  When 9 o’clock rolls around, she’s lights out and in the bed…

And that’s about it.  These activities (as mundane as they are) are the ones that I find myself taking part in late at night.  We recently re-arranged our living room so that we could hook up our Chinese cable.  It took us about 9 months to make this happen because, frankly, our incentive to do so was quite low.  There are no English channels and the programming on the Chinese channels is, well, to put it plainly, very Chinese. 

Turns out the cable was turned on last fall by someone (?) and has been on ever since.  No one is paying for it, but I guess now that we are watching it we will eventually pay the bill for the entire time… I doubt our landlord will reimburse us for the 8 1/2 months that no one was using it, but we’ll try to have them deduct it from next year’s rent.

I have the tube on right now.  I’ll give you a brief run down (description) of what is playing…at 11:16 p.m. (local time).

• CCTV Channel 1 – Chinese guys in business suits talking, shaking hands, toasting drinks (looks like a commercial.)
• CCTV Channel 5 – Chinese guys wearing black-rimmed glasses and knit (tennis-style) shirts sitting around discussing World Cup Soccer.
• CCTV Channel 3 – Chinese kung fu / soap opera type show.  These shows (and there are plenty of them) always take place in ancient dynasty times and there is always a strange looking old guy with a long white beard/hair.
• CCTV Channel 8 – Modern Chinese soap opera.  That lady’s hair is huge!
• CCTV Channel ? – Japanimation. Looks like an old one of some guys playing in a basketball game.  Shoyo (in white) vs. Skohoko (in green).  I wonder if it’s easier to play defense when everyone else is playing in slow motion like that?  I love this stuff.  The intensity of the cartoon makes it seem as if the next point will decide the fate of the entire universe.  Women in the crowd are weeping.  The coaches are ripping their T-shirts off and gnashing their teeth.  It’s just too much.
• CCTV Channel 10 – I wish I knew more Chinese.  This looks like the Chinese version of The History Channel / Discovery Channel.  Right now they are showing some black and white footage from the last century with intermittent interviews with scholars (I assume).
• CCTV Channel ?? – I didn’t really catch that commercial other than to notice one line in English. "Xining Procreation Health Hospital" followed by "Orient MaleSpecialty".  Hmmmm…
• CCTV Channel 12-25 – More of the same.  Chinese soap operas set in the 19th century and modern day, and a few American Idol rip-off type shows.  They tend to lean towards the Variety Shows as well.

To conclude, here’s a quote from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.  Because I just had some visitors here from my home town I think this quote had a greater impact on me.  On some level I can relate to all these emotions and urges that Prince Myshkin is going through in the book:

A terrible longing came upon him to leave everything here and to go back to the place from which he had come, to go away into the distance to some remote region, to go away at once without even saying good-bye to any one.  He had a foreboding that if he remained here even a few days longer he would be drawn into this world irrevocably and that his life would be bound up with it for ever.  But he did not consider it for ten minutes; he decided at once that it would be ‘impossible’ to run away, that it would be almost cowardice, that he was faced with such difficulties that it was his duty now to solve them, or at least to do his utmost to solve them.

I hope no one reads too much into me posting this quote.  I actually want to be "bound up" with this place–forever (if need be) and although I don’t think I can personally "solve" the problems I see, I do think I know the One who is the solution.  I just think having reminders of the place I grew up in definitely put a bit more longing into my heart.  It’s easy to want familiarity when so much of what is around you day-to-day is unfamiliar. 

It may be part of the reason that I stay up so late at night. 

I am just finding ways to find familiar things…or maybe I am just an idiot. (/tongue-in-cheek)