I’ve always been a nighttime kind of person.  I hate mornings.  Specifically, I consider morning to be the time after I get up from sleeping.  So "morning" could be noon, for example.  I don’t define it by the hour, but rather the sensation.  Morning is the time directly following me getting out of bed and attempting to come to a state of consciousness. 

Traditional mornings are evil.  When I had a job, my typical shift ran from 6AM until 2:30PM.  Talk about hell.  Never in my entire life, not as a kid going to school or as an adult going to work, have I ever been able to function in the "traditional" morning hours.  My brain and my body simply don’t handle it.  I know there’s all kinds of science stating conclusively how your body is alert and relaxed after sleeping, and how everything is primed and receptive in the morning hours.  Supposedly that’s when your mind functions best, and you should always do your best thinking in the morning.  I say BULLSHIT.  Maybe it’s that way for most people, but not for me.  Never has been.  I’ve always been sluggish and slow in the mornings, and I’ve never been able to overcome it.  My body simply works on a different schedule than other people.

Take now, for instance.  I’m wide awake and very alert.  My mind is in a thoughtful state; my creative juices flowing.  I’m comfortable, relaxed, and feeling quite intellectual.  At 3 in the "morning", a time when most people are snoring away.

I estimate I’m most awake, in my optimal sense of consciousness, from about 8PM until around 4AM.  Of course, circumstances can change this somewhat, but in the absence of other responsibility, I always tend to revert to this type of schedule.  My body and my mind just seem to function best at this time. 

Unfortunately, the greater world does not operate on my time frame.  Businesses aren’t open, people aren’t about, services cannot be had, and of course all my friends are fast asleep.  The world simply isn’t made for people like me. 

Still, there’s a peacefulness about this time.  Me, my music, and my thoughts.  No distractions.

These are my hours.

For a lot of people, one hundred isn’t all that big a deal.  Some people post every day, others maybe a few times per week.  Usually, these frequent posts are only a couple sentences or a paragraph.  Something small and lightweight and easily digestible by the masses.

My blog is different.  I tend to post long, rambling bits about sometimes controversial and always random things.  Most of my posts average in the 500-1,000 word range,  but I’ve also got a few behemoths of the 2,000 word ilk, and one massive 3,000+ word monster.  I don’t post as often because if I did, I wouldn’t have time for anything else.  I’m wordy.  I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

So one hundred posts for me is a big deal.  sovknight.com started on January 1, 2008.  I’ve hit one hundred in a little less than a year, so that’s not so bad.  Sure, I definitely could’ve written more, and to be honest, there are about a dozen or so drafts that were never published, but I tried to maintain a sense of quality.  Of course, they weren’t all good, but a few of them came out pretty nice, and I’d like to share my top 5 favorites with you today.

So here are my top 5 favorite posts, judged solely by me, in descending order.  I’ve linked to them and listed the thinking behind writing each.  Come in and relive the past!

5.  If You Asked 100 Guys

This one started out innocently, as a way for me to basically state my dislike of nail polish.  It sort of evolved into a list of things that guys like, hate, or how they behave.  I felt that someone had to say it, so why not me?  The post got some really good response, except for one of my readers who took offense, but it wasn’t meant that way.  It was all in good fun.

4.  Some of the Things I Don’t Understand

This post started a kind of series which I revisit from time to time.  Like everyone, I have little frustrations or annoyances that plague me in life, but it just so happens that I also have a blog on the Internet with which to vent about them.  I expect this series to continue into infinity, because the list of things that I don’t understand is quite possibly endless.

3.  Sometimes Writing a Blog is Hard

With this one, I wanted to explain why my online persona is different than my real life personality.  When I write, it’s with a different voice.  I communicate so much better in writing than in any other way.  My thoughts and ideas come across so much better, and in a much more satisfying way when I write them out.  If I meet you in person, know that the real me is the one behind the keyboard, and the shy, inarticulate person talking to you is just a shell of a being, restricted by his physical mask.

2.  We Made it This Far, You and Me

This monstrosity is 3,249 words long.  Evidently, it’s way too long for a post on a web log.  This is one of the only posts that I planned, and one that I seriously gave a lot of thought to beforehand.  That’s a rare exception here, but I thought the topic was a novel one, and I wanted to do it just right.  I was hoping to get lots of comments on it, not only because of the subject, but because of the thought I put into it.  I was so wrong.  Turns out, three thousand words is a bit much to read on a computer screen during your lunch break at work, or during your personal free time.  I should have known, and I learned a valuable lesson that day: Keep blogs short and to the point.  Or at least interesting.  This one failed on both accounts.  Still, it’s my second-favorite, because I am quite happy with the way it turned out, and I do still honestly think presenting it the way I did was novel.  I continue to learn.

1.  You Just Can’t Force it

Every once in a great while, and far too rarely, you sit down to compose an article and the words just pour out of you.  You can’t even control it at all.  It’s like you can’t type fast enough, and every single synapse in your brain is firing in a storm of creativity.  It’s writing nirvana.  It’s what happened to me here.

The idea started, ironically, as an attempt to break through some writer’s block.  I’d been having some static lately, and I thought if I just sat down and wrote about not being able to write, then I could get some ideas, or at least some sympathy.  As soon as my fingers touched the keyboard however, it’s like they had a mind of their own.  This article, although relatively short for my standards, was fired off in about five minutes of continuous typing.  In fact, I don’t even recall stopping to think about what to write next.  It all just flowed out so easily and completely.  It didn’t even require editing afterward.  If only every blog post could be like this.

The topic of the blog is about the process of writing a blog.  If you interpret it in some other way, then you just have a dirty mind. 

So there you have it.  My five favorite posts out of the one hundred I’ve published.  Writing this blog had been a fascinating experience for me, and sometimes a fulfilling one.  I can’t wait to write the next hundred.