Change?
Thu., October 31, 10:55 AM
Something’s going on here – I don’t know just what. It could be the weather. It doesn’t seem like a sign of getting older, but it could be mild depression – or simply frustration. Whatever.
I am a morning person. I don’t mean one of those annoying people who jump out of bed cheerleading. I don’t like to get out of a comfy bed either. I just mean that, for most of my life, I operate best in the morning. By the time I was in college, I knew that well enough to sign up for 8 o’clock classes whenever possible, classes I attended after working the early breakfast shift in the kitchen. You do what works. I never pulled an all-nighter, believing that a good night’s sleep would help me more than a hasty, last-minute cramming. (It usually did.)
Early in my college life I learned to be careful about staying up late. During freshman week – that first experience with extremes – I yawned and dislocated my jaw. I needed a doctor that time, though I later learned to reduce the dislocation by myself.
So I do mornings. When I seemed to have arthritis and needed a hot shower to get moving, I began to rise at 5:30, in order to get my shower before everyone else needed the bathroom. For the past fifteen or twenty years, I’ve continued to wake up at 5:30, even though the arthritis pains are gone. My friends know that I’ll probably be asleep before eleven, but I’m always available in the morning.
But for the last few weeks, I’ve been oversleeping by at least an hour. I thought that might change when the clocks turned back, but I woke up this morning at 6:20, even though I didn’t stay up late last night. It happened yesterday too, and I had fallen asleep in front of the television the night before. Why am I so sleepy?
Perhaps related to being sleepy, I am also lazy. On my last couple of days off, when I could have done long-standing chores or run errands, I preferred to cuddle up with a book. Certainly that’s one of my favorite things to do, but I’m not the type to neglect what has to be done. And the corollary of just sitting and reading – or sitting and watching TV – is that I will feel hungry.
Overeating is dangerous, and perhaps that’s why I’m overanalyzing this phenomenon. In the long run, it really doesn’t matter. Anything that was crucial got done. Three days this week I managed to drag myself into the office, and one day I even drove down to my sister’s and did some work for her. We are not about to run out of groceries – not even milk for the geezer – nor are we out of clean clothes. The essentials are provided.
Maybe it’s time I wrote about being a Jonah©.
