Being American

Today is Monday.  It is 12:36 AM.   I am not in bed, but rather, typing this.   In my slightly delirious state of mind, I began to ponder, approximately a minute ago, what my late bedtime has to do with my being American.   Every night my roomate and I go to bed at approximately midnight or 1AM.   We are not the only ones.  Several minutes from now, I will walk into the bathroom, groggily brush my teeth, and find at least one other person moving slowly towards bed.   Is this just college, or is there more to the late-night living of my corridor?  

I wonder if the sense of being American has in some way conditioned us for this.   We learned from a young age that in order to be successful, we had to work hard and do well in school.  We also learned that Americans were lazy.  We heard that Americans like to have fun.  And so, we did them all.  We paid attention in class and spent all of lunch talking with our friends.   We joined clubs and went out on the weekends and spend Sunday night doing all of our homeork. I can't say for certain that my inability to get a decent night's sleep has anything to do with my being American, but I have a feeling that there is more to it than simple procrastination, which I have by and large put a stop to anyways thanks to the overload of college work.  The call of something beyond what is immediately in front of me is ever-present.   Like the settlers looking to the New World, smelling the strawberries while steering to shore, I think a step ahead of where I am, and sometimes lose my own place.  I never know what comes next, but I hope it is good.  I struggle to keep up with the present while keeping an eye on the future.  This pull between I want and what and where I am now may simply be a cycle of life, yet at the same moment it feels like the essensce of a dream for the future.  At 12:51, exhausted and hoping for more rest than I am going to get, I feel American.