Sorry! We're CLOSED.

I'm an anxious person. This isn't news to anyone. During daylight hours, I do a fine job of avoiding a constant state of panic by using nifty cognitive strategies. Hey! Psychology is useful, as it turns out.

But things are different in the middle of the night.

After a few hours of sleep, my frontal lobes shut down for the evening. They apparently cash out for the night, turn out the lights, and pull down one of those metal gates, which will be locked until morning. My limbic system, in contrast, is OPEN 24 HRS. That joint is always jumpin'.

Say, for example, that some noise wakes me up at 1:30 a.m.. What was the noise? Probably the axe murderer who's wandering around the house. My feet are itchy. Why are my feet itchy? I have lymphoma! What now?!

My ability to consider parsimony is greatly impaired at 1:30 a.m.. Mr. Banality is not home yet. Where is he? Two possibilities: (1) he and his friends have decided to play a third game of Ticket to Ride or (2) he is dead. I decide that the latter is highly probable. I call Mr. Banality. He is alive.

Something stirs in the frontal lobes--maybe it's the cleaning crew that steam cleans the upholstery up there in the middle of the night--and tells me that I'm being ridiculous.

I know this is correct. I am being ridiculous. I am ridiculous. Which, of course, means that I will be an absolute failure as a parent. You see, last week I watched a video describing a study of nature vs. nurture in the development of personality among baby rhesus monkeys. Like human babies, they're born with temperaments. Some are anxious; others are daring. They're very cute little creatures:

In the study described in the video, the researchers paired anxious babies with easy-going foster mothers, and the babies became less anxious. There was no discussion of the opposite pairing: easy-going babies and anxious foster mothers. Perhaps it was too unethical to even consider pairing a baby rhesus monkey with an anxious mother. You can see where my night-time brain was going with this line of thought. Clearly, I should not be allowed to adopt a child.

Mr. Banality arrives home and talks about how great our friends are. Do our friends hate me now? I'm fairly certain that they do. He plops into bed and quickly falls asleep, while I toss and turn and wait for the groggy, first-shift frontal lobe employee, armed with a cup of coffee from the Cinnabon in the nearby food court, to raise the gate and open for business.