Summer vacation has and probably always will be my all time favorite holiday. It's the only holiday that covers a long enough span of time to allow time itself to become irrelevant. In that way, summer vacation is really a foretaste of the eternal kingdom of Heaven--the ultimate state of being where time forever becomes irrelevant. It's a Paradise that we create for ourselves, a temporal Shangri-la that we can truly experience while still living.

That's pretty amazing.

But you'll start to understand why time usually remains relevant while we're alive once you apply that whole "time doesn't matter" clause to your sleep cycle. If you are only bound to sleep by what your physical form demands of you, you're going to wind up with some off-balanced napping hours. You could be going to bed later and sleeping in, or going to bed earlier to get up earlier. Or you could be like me and become nocturnal.

Now you may get a chuckle from the thought of a human being going completely against what nature intended it to do, but you should stop and remember that such a thing is detrimental to your health. Mankind was not meant to work during the dark hours of the night and try to sleep through the day. For one, it makes planning anything you want to do during the day difficult. Anything happening in the morning (or in the afternoon but requires getting started in the morning) is no longer an option. And once you become truly nocturnal anything happening in the afternoon can get ruled out as well. This is especially true as a teenager when, after spending months of getting four or five hours of sleep a night between school, sports, jobs, and homework, you suddenly discover that your body will happily consume twelve hours of the day for weeks on end and still crave more.

We won't get into how much other people ("the light-dwellers," shall we say) will ridicule you for trying to enjoy late hour marathons when all you're trying to do is sleep when you're tired and do things as usual when you're not. You know who I'm talking about--the ones with the watch the dawn break, early bird gets the worm, coffee at dawn, early to bed early to rise, actually eat a meal called "breakfast" attitude. Bunch of sunshine Communists if you ask me.

In modern times it's impossible to pull off, really. There have been times like today when I tried to get to bed early (honest I did) only to be unable to fall asleep and then get to the point where I might be dozing but all of a sudden the morning noises in my house start. Cellphone alarms, waking everybody in the house up but doing a very poor job of it so each one just beeps for a good five minutes waiting for the owner to shut it off. Then the sounds of walking feet, mumbled talk. Hairdryers. Coffee-makers. Red Hot Chili Peppers being played from someone's iPod plugged into a speaker (this early in the morning? who does that?). And then, beyond all logic, at 8:25am by father decided that this is the perfect time to jam out a little on his Gibson Les Paul guitar. I don't know how well you know guitars, but this thing is loud. I think the neighbors were about to form a mosh pit in our backyard.

It's not going to stop me though. Summer vacation is still the best period of suspended reality that mankind is afforded, and no matter what conventional society deems, well, conventional, I'm still going to sleep late, sleep often, and proclaim to all that sleep cycles are for suckers.