Open 24 hours

It’s almost impossible to think that barely twenty years ago there was practically nothing to watch on TV at midnight. By one am, you’ll be lucky if static hasn’t dominated your TV screen yet. Nowadays, turn on the TV at 01:00 and you’ll probably catch the start of some nice B-rated horror flick on Cinemax.

It was the middle of summer when I began shedding hair by the handful. This was not a situation a 24 year old, relatively healthy young woman generally faces. When it became apparent that the floor had more of my hair than my own head, I finally decided to see a derma. My doctor, a Vicky Belo look-alike took one look at me and without batting an eyelash began writing a prescription.

“Stressed ka ba?” she asked. I stared at her and couldn’t suppress a soft laugh.

“It’s summer…” I began. Who in world becomes stressed during those 2 long months of blissful freedom?

“Puyat?”

"Er…”

Another laugh escaped my lips, the kind that sings with guilt.

It was true; I had been sleeping for at most 5 hours a day since school let out last March. Sometimes, I would not get any at all. It was summer, land of the free and throw-caution-to-the-wind kind of existence. I had all the time to do what I want. Unfortunately, 24 hours, it seems, is really too short for a day.

The advent of cable TV, internet and 24-hour delivery services has made a bum’s life too convenient that it practically eliminates the need of sleep. Say I watch four movies (Cable and DVDs) in a day, that’s 8 hours of not even leaving the couch. If I’m hungry, I’ll pick up the phone and call delivery. If I’m bored, I’ll surf the web. By the end of the day, I still have too much calories from my fast food foray to burn, and since I haven’t really moved anything larger than my fingers all day, I’m not tired. So what’s the point of sleep, my body asks. Time is too short to waste. Why not just stay awake and spend the hours watching TV, writing or doing things I could not afford to do on school days? Practical as I am, I decide to stay up -- to a point where my hair falls off. Ironically, modern technology, in an attempt to make life more bearable, has a strange way of making us all stressed.

A decade or so ago, this would not be possible. The wee hours of the morning was a strange and uninhabitable place where, if caught in it, one was left to fend for oneself. Hunger pangs at these hours meant dragging oneself out of bed to brave the empty darkness of the kitchen to cook, and counting sheep was the treatment of choice for insomnia, not late night TV. These simple weaknesses in technology forced us to sleep earlier as there was no sense in staying up late, as there was in waking up early and taking advantage of the day. But electric bulbs, electronics, and computers, who can do without a good night's sleep, have blurred line between dusk and dawn, and oddly enough I feel the need to follow suit.

And so it seems the more modern we become, the less time we truly have for rest. I spent the end of the summer on a 4 day stint in Hong Kong, where my hair fell in great numbers thanks to their enviable business hours. Shops tend to close from 11 to 1 am, which translated to shopping until wee hours of the morning. In a span of a few days, I returned to Manila visibly thinner and with less hair on my head.

Well, so much for a holiday