Last night I put a book on Claudia’s bed thinking she’d feel less beholden to spurn it if I wasn’t present. I thought I was so clever. I don’t know how long it took her, but she stayed up all night reading it. All of it.

Reading: not something she’s been doing enough of lately. She’d been, admittedly, watching a lot of crappy Netflix cartoons.) I did also enroll her in a drawing class today, for how to draw anime-style figures, and she took that while Béla made an impossibly pale, jiggly sponge cake… the crown jewel of Asian baking.

It’s still very hard to do academic work, and we are doing more creative and life-skills things. I am super-grateful that the green screen kit came this week. And really delighted that Claudia not only READ, but is up playing her bass… it’s almost midnight, but hey, I didn’t even ask her to do it. There is still a theory circulating that if we could all be more or less nocturnal for a week, we’d find it had real benefits, or at the very least, we would look back on it VERY fondly; like a wild week of Keroac and Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg and Corso, but just with no drugs. Or friends. Or strangers. Or leaving the house other than to buy food if necessary.

I have read up on it and nocturnalism has NO drawbacks for health other than that it doesn’t “fit in” with the way “most normal” people have arranged to do things. (Kind of like autism, or the social model of health in general.)

It’s just funny how all four of us noticed that our moods improved, bit by bit, throughout each day — until dinnertime actually felt like we USED to feel at breakfast — and evenings were just powerhouses of creativity. This is the natural cycle for many artists and academics (I read up on that too…) I think we are all taking more note of it now because, with nowhere to GO or get to (the store, the doctor, a class), we don’t feel crappy for having gotten less sleep — because no one has to be at their best mid-day, and it’s JUST as good to be at our best at 2am.

If I had been twelve, and had stayed up all night reading a vampire novel and my mother was excited for me, I’d be a different person than I am today. It is not programmed into Claudia’s development right now to have a lot of appreciation for me, at least not the kind that shows to too many people… but, she’s been sitting next to me all evening, and she’s upstairs singing right now, and I think that’s gotta count for something.