The difficulty in finding the time to write often means that I stay up long after Susan has gone to bed. I know that she doesn't particularly like falling asleep in a bed by herself, and so I frequently stick around until she shows signs of fading from the land of the wakeful. The temptation to curl up and fall asleep around the S of her body is strongest then, and many nights have seen my best intentions shipwrecked on the more immediate desires of the body to sink to its simplest state. Some nights, however, I disengage from comfort and climb the stairs to the office, where I frequently type and lurk until after 2 a.m.

Once there, I could easily stay up later, or not bother sleeping at all. There's a power in denying the body what it wants. When Susan was away at Chad's funeral, I lapsed back into a schedule in which I reluctantly surrendered to sleep after 4:30 in the morning, and pried myself out of bed when the sunlight finally became an undeniable presence in the room the following morning. I ran grittily on around 5 hours of sleep and waited eagerly for night again. I won't do that in the presence of another person. Usually, when I finally abandon ship and come to bed with Susan, it's not really because I'm tired, but because I'm certain she'll think I'm losing my squash if I stay up so late night after late night.

Last night I blew some precious life hours messing around with a redesign of the Tales of Sin and Virtue pages. Some of the motivation came from an index of some very good online journals called Brand X. I expressed an interest in being included among them recently, and they responded with a list of several formatting changes I would have to make before they could include me in their site. With a dangerously teetering pile of work accumulating on my desk, I figured it would be the perfect time to indulge in the escapist task of redesigning the entire site. You can see my draft of the front page here. To see what a daily entry might look like in the new format, check this out.

I don't know what I think of the draft redesign. The current design is so damn dorky, but I feel like my redesign semiconsciously imitated the unflinching seriousness of other online journals I've read. Is it really me? My jury is still out. If you're a regular or occasional reader of this endeavor, you're welcome to send your opinion to me.

At almost exactly 2 in the morning last night, I was sitting at the computer when the door "bell" "rang". Actually, the sound it makes is nothing like "ringing" -- it's more like a swarm of furious killer bees that has figured out how to use some extremely powerful audio equipment. It's not conducive to low blood pressure or moderate levels of adrenaline output, particularly when it blares at an unholy hour of the early morning. I was so engrossed in what I was doing that it took me a moment to gather my scattered wits back off the floor. One floor down, Susan was dragging her groggy self out of bed. She later told me that in her sleep-drunk state, she thought it was already morning and that the UPS guy was at the door with an important package.

Instead, a total stranger was still buzzing the doorbees, and knocking loudly and incessantly. When I answered the door, she told me that she lived nearby and was locked out of her house. She's pregnant, she explained, and she was bleeding a little bit, and wanted to call her housemate, who is on-duty as a nurse in a local hospital.

I told her to hang on a sec so I could frantically spur my creaking mental gears to appraise the situation. One thing that I find most repulsive about living in the city is that it compels you to reevaluate the kind of trusting response that we should all be free to show each other. It feeds you the raw materials for ornate defenses. Something about the perfection of this woman's story popped a little kernel of suspicion in me. It sounded a little like a recent spate of scams in which a good Samaritan is asked to help fund a cab or bus trip for a hapless and earnest person who promises they'll pay the fare back as soon as possible.

What made the whole thing bizarre was that the police station was right there -- probably a more logical place for a pregnant woman to go than a stranger's door at 2 a.m. The police station is so close that I could, if I were in a particularly self-destructive mood, hit it with a rock. I suspected the whole thing was a setup. The "friend" would suggest that she come in to the hospital, just to be on the safe side, and since she was locked out of her house, she would need cab fare.

But there was no way to be sure. I felt like a complete urban-desensitized prick as I came back outside to suggest that she try the police station, where they could probably offer more help than just a phone. She was perfectly nice about it. I looked out through the front windows as she walked away and noted that she walked the opposite direction from the police station.

Susan and I were still pretty jazzed from the ear-shattering wakeup call, and spent some time debating whether it was the right decision. Whether or not the woman's story was true, I was disturbed to note that my first reaction to it had been suspicion. But the more I thought about it, the more the situation sounded like a scam. Gradually, my feelings shifted from self-recrimination to anger. Preying on people's desire to do good seems like a low-impact crime -- certainly not so terrible as mugging -- yet its effects on social cohesion are phenomenal. If, for whatever reason, I wanted to curtail helping behaviors in a given population, I can think of no better strategy than to send in operatives to run scams like these. As the word gets out to members of the society, few will continue to assist anyone outside they don't already know. The possibility of altruism will be stripped down its base sociobiological roots.

More and more, I wanted to run after this charlatan and shake her until she witnessed the contagion she was spreading in an already sickened world. But then, who knows... there always exists the possibility that it was all truth, and I am the one suffering from the desensitizing disease.