June 18 Westland, Michigan: a normal morning

I woke up at 1pm. I lay inside my duvet cover for a moment, pleased that my plan to sleep during optimal sleeping hours was looking so good. (This had been perhaps my hundredth plan to sleep more reasonably, but working out for an entire round of sleeping seemed like a great sign.)

My body hurt. But I heard the rustling of the elusive S moving about the house, and sprung from my bed to see if I might catch a glimpse. As predicted, his door was open to show an empty room, but I also couldn’t see him in the living room or bathroom. Had I just heard him leaving? No—sounds came from the kitchen. I walked in—but just as he must have walked out of the other side. The only life was a lonely cloth door swinging closed. I tried to follow, but he was snapped up again by his room in a moment. And so an exciting morning hunt for my boyfriend in a two bedroom house turned up nothing, and I moved on to the business of getting up. 

Getting up is an area of life that gives me hope for my efforts at going to bed. In my thirtieth year, I finally succeeded at having a morning routine. It is not always the same morning routine. Its basic form has changed over the months, and its details change on a daily basis, to keep it fresh and interesting. But every day it exists in some form, and every day it causes me to do a reasonable set of getting up type things. For instance, I fairly reliably get out of bed, take whatever drugs I have been told to take, put some food near myself which I will then forget to eat for hours, and drink a sip of coffee (before also forgetting about that for hours). 

The answer to my getting up difficulties was the ‘getting up scav hunt’. The basic idea is this: as soon as you wake up enough to roughly remember who you are and what you are doing (at least to your normal level of knowing these things), you start a one hour timer, and open the morning’s scav hunt list. In recent days my list has had twelve items to collect. Today they ranged over hygiene, eating, drinking, taking drugs, perusing social media, and writing a short poem. The scav hunt prize is currently a relaxing bout of computer gaming, for 25 minutes minus twice the number of items missed. 

So, in an epic race against time, I found breakfast, reviewed my todo list, rinsed the places where I used to have wisdom teeth, washed my face, looked at Twitter, and tried and failed to write a poem about something something risks of succumbing to acceptance and normalcy as a substitute for doing anything good (but more poetic). Somewhere in the process, I also put on clothes even though it wasn’t required, and thought about how efforts to be utilitarian in the face of psychological realities might change the psychological realities, and force the equilibrium compromise position to compromise further. Then almost prepared for the day, I relaxed for nineteen minutes by trying to get Minecraft villagers in the mood for procreation by building more apartments near them. I have no idea why this is relaxing. 

It is so late that I am failing at my evening routine, so that is all I have to say on that. The rest of the day was similarly uneventful.