A few notes on sleep, sickness, and slow rising.

1. Two successive weekends, I've come up with a little cold to make me miserable.

2. Both of these little colds I can trace to bouts of insomnia, long stretches of not quite enough sleep, plus a magical dose of stress sprinkles.

3. A pause to note that there are so many more, and much worse, problems in the world that I am truly sorry that this is what I have to write about tonight. But there you are. I am on the upswing from Little Cold #2, but my eyes still feel hot and I took a nap of necessity this evening, which on the one hand felt like a commandment from on high, and on the other hand is now making me nervous that I might not be able to fall asleep in an hour when I will want to be able to fall asleep.

4. Reiteration: other people have much worse problems. I know.

5. The other day, I wanted to say, when I was talking to my friend Kati, that I no longer stay up late or get up super early for things like grading or other projects. I wanted to say this, but let facts be submitted to a candid world:

• I stay up late, like, all the time. ALL the time.
• I never get up early to grade, NEVER, but I happen to have arisen super early to finish that talk I gave this past week. Stayed up late AND got up early.

So, in other words, I could not say this to my friend Kati. I had to admit that I am a serial stay-up-late-r, and that means I often don't get quite enough sleep.

6. Medicine. Naps. Dragging around. Feeling all hot-eyed. Etcetera. Staying home when the rest of the world is seeing movies. 

7. In a related matter: I hate getting out of bed like a shot, full of zip and ginger, ready to take on the world. In my ideal world, getting up would go like this:

• alarm goes off.
• I contemplate it.
• my eyes open, one at a time, then close again. For, like, a half an hour.
• I think about things while dozing. I think/doze.
• a half hour after the original alarm, I open my eyes again, one at a time. Depending on how that goes, I might keep them open, or I might close them again. For, like, fifteen more minutes.
• In the interim, I will have considered not working out, like, a dozen times. 
• But when I actually do get up, I put on my workout clothes and get it done.

8. In conclusion, waking up slow is the best and waking up like a shot is the worst. I would say this is a winter thing, but it's really applicable all year round. A slow wake up allows you to put your hands on your will to live. You really don't want to be walking around before you are fully situated vis a vis your will to live. You could hurt yourself, and that's a fact.

Lazy, a little bit. Or a lot.

Well,

After getting back from Idaho on Saturday, and on Monday having the Fourth of July barbecue at my daughter's (fun!), and on Tuesday, having a haircut and a meeting and some hours writing a little bit strenuously and sweatily and not very attractively, I'm telling you, and then seeing a movie and meeting with my book group (fun!),

I have settled into the following routine:

• wake up not very early.
• loll around until later than that.
• make breakfast, or
• possibly whine about the fact that there is no bread for toast.
• take Bruiser for a walk when it's less cool than it would have been if I'd taken him earlier, when I was still (a) waking up not very early, or (b) lolling around until later than that, or (c) making breakfast, or (d) possibly whining about no bread, or (e) all of the above.
• take a shower.
• look at who knows what on the internet while
• contemplating what else I could/should be doing.

It's not very productive, I am forced to admit. I am "writing" and "making a film," but the measurable outcome is infinitessimal. Like, for instance, if someone were making a documentary of my summer writing/filmmaking, and they did time-lapse photography, maybe over the course of several days you might see a half of a haiku emerge.

Not really. It's more like a big messy spill of bleah, out of which might be excavated a haiku. But no one really wants to see time-lapse photography of that, do they? Or do they? I wish, maybe, I could make that movie.

Or not.

Actually, I am reasonably happy making the movie I'm making. It has lots of parts to it, and many pieces of footage, and decisions to make about what goes where, and what I should say in my voiceover, and so forth. So away I go, to look at the footage some more and take a few more notes and maybe write the other half of that metaphorical haiku. Or maybe just a half of the other half. I don't want to rush it.

In case you're interested, I am making salad for dinner. And toast. Because now there is bread, which around here, we like to call "progress."

Infinity

is how long it will apparently take me to finish my grading, but that's because there were rubrics to construct, and electronic files to organize, and the state of the universe to consider. Also, keeping track of the playoffs and going to a concert and a movie. And a little shopping. There has been some reading to do, as I am midway through one book and midway through another book. Also, the concert was very, very good, but it made me a little bit tired to stand for as long as we stood at The Depot waiting between the opening act and the Swell Season,

even though the concert got more and more sublime as it went along. By they time they played a cover of "Into the Mystic," it was okay that we had been standing for several hours, but when it was all over and we walked back to our car and sat gladly down, and then got home and realized that our whole bodies were exhausted, it was still okay that we'd stood through a several hour concert plus in-between-the-acts time, but that didn't mean our hips didn't hurt, not to mention our feet. Did I mention the fender bender that happened when a young woman who didn't look pulled right into our car? It happened before the concert when we were trying to find a parking place, and it is just one more reason why I will be grading until doomsday, or Sunday, whichever comes first.