Burning My Candle at Both Ends

“Have you not gone to sleep yet?  young lady?”

I sit at my computer gently tapping away at some project or another, my third cup of black tea by my side, the increasing light gradually revealing my nightly crime: that yet again I have forgotten to go to bed.

Those who’ve known me a long time would no doubt recognize the scene as belonging to the early dot-com era when I lived with my grandmom, worked a programming job by day, did freelance websites (and a lot of Starcraft) by night.

Yet the author of the above statement was my housemate, just this moment, coming up to take his shower.  His tone was facetious, of course.

My grandmother would have said something very similar, though much more concernedly.  One morning, awake and floating down the stairs at 6am as she always did, utterly perplexed at finding me still at the computer where she left me, she recited me these two lines of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

“I burn my candle at both ends,
it may not last the night…”

I felt chastised.  But I never felt I could explain what it was that kept me up all night.

I also never knew the other two lines of the poem, strangely enough, until a few years later:

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends–

It gives a lovely light!

Ah hah, I have my answer for my grandmother, sadly too late (she is dead).

The light of the world isn’t enough for me; I need to create my own.  Whether it burns me away just doesn’t matter, not right now.  I’m striving for something brighter — sleep be damned.

Insomniac phase 1: 1998 : web 1.0

Insomniac phase 2: 2009 : web 2.0

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