Me Vs Me: Sleep

I have a love/hate relationship with sleep.

Wait, that's not true, I pretty much adore sleep unreservedly but the love/hate relationship exists in relation to my complete lack of self control with regards to sleep.

I love the luxurious feeling of a long, relaxing lie in.

I love waking up and then choosing to roll over and snuggle back into my blankets.

But I hate that I can wake up, know that I am going to be furious with myself later for not getting up, and then still stick my head back under my pillow and make with the Zs.

Sleep-ins are excellent for when you've earned them, when you feel like pampering yourself, when you've been super-exhausted or on public holidays when you usually would be at work but aren't.

But when you have things that you want to get done, need to get done, were looking forward to having done... and you don't have time to do them because you hit the snooze button, that's where the love/hate part kicks in.

I don't know if it's a generational thing but I don't think I'll ever be one of those 'gets up at 6am every morning like clockwork even 20 years after retirement because that's what I did all my working life' people, and not just because I haven't had to get up at/before 6am for work since I finished working hospitality.

If I don't have to get up - and I mean have to with a capital H, the kind where you might get yelled at or fired or make somebody cry at their own birthday party - then I don't.

A few years ago I thought this was me choosing to live life the way I liked it, with extra sleep.

Now I feel like there's two me's, First Wake Up Me who doesn't give a damn about consequences and lives only to please herself and Second Wake Up Me who has to clean up after her.

It's not that I'm exhausted or lethargic or anything like that which might suggest that I have a medical condition that might explain this behaviour.
I'm just behaving like a jackass.

I know this is going to be difficult habit to ditch and will take a long time to shift behaviour that at this point I've been indulging in for about half of my life but I'm determined to try.

First Wake Up Me has to start pulling her own weight.

And if that means going to bed earlier, chugging water before I turn in and buying the loudest alarm clock money can buy and then putting it where I can't reach it or its power cord from my bed, then that's what I'm going to do.

Throwing Out My Alarm Clock

A while ago *coff three months ago* my alarm clock stopped working.

This caused a minor problem because when I don't need to get out of bed in order to turn my alarm off, I don't tend to get out of bed.

Which means getting out of bed late, skipping breakfast and flinging myself half-dressed out of the door in a panic to get to work on time.

So I pro-actively got right on that.

Last week.

But I really shouldn't have bothered.

Because the cats have come up with a new game.

A game called 'let's knock everything off the bottom shelf of Ricochet's bookcase'.

They like to play it at 5:30am in the morning and then wrestle on the resultant pile of books.

I'm not used to being awake at that hour.

And chasing a pair of furry bastards off a stack of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and assorted murder mysteries isn't my idea of a gentle awakening.

So I surrendered the bottom shelf, redistributed the books, and settled back to enjoy a restful night's sleep punctuated at a seemly hour by the trilling of my new alarm clock.

Except the early morning wrassling has relocated itself to the foot of my bed.

There are two conclusions to be drawn from this.

One. Cats are the annoying, energetic, morning people of the animal world. You know, joggers.

Two. Procrastination is nature's way of telling you not to bother spending money on things that you'll never get around to using anyway.

So I might as well throw out the alarm clock.

I'll get right on that.

Eventually.

The Truth Of It All

I think I'm getting a cold.

This is a nuisance and a bother.

So I'm treating this the same way I do most worrying developments in my life.

With sleep.

Great, long, coddling, soothing bouts of surrendering to somnolence.

I feel the same way about sleep as Odin does in Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul:

Sleeping was a very important activity for him. He liked to sleep for longish periods, great swathes of time. Merely sleeping overnight was not taking the business seriously. He enjoyed a good night's sleep and wouldn't miss one for the world, but he didn't regard it as anything even half approaching enough.

Of course, seeing as I'm not actually an immortal - unfortunately - I am occasionally rocked by the frantic knowledge that I am frittering chunks of my mortal life away in this fashion.

But usually I'm just rock-a-bye-baby'd.

This is one of the things that has convinced me that I'm not a TRUE ARTIST as a TRUE ARTIST would be gripped by self-loathing and whipped into a frenzy by the need to create and the idea that they are wasting prime creating time.

Mostly I'm gripped by blankets.

When I wake up I will create.

But for now...

...Zzzzzzz...