I woke up in the middle of the night. Well, that’s not new. I wake up often throughout the night. Usually I just shift position and then back asleep — all in under a minute. But sometimes my brain jumps in and I have to settle it down before my bladder notices I’m awake.
My middle of the night questions are not the great existential standards: “Who am I? Why am I here? What is the point of life?” No, mine run more like “What time is it? What day is it? Do I have to go to work or is it my day off?”
Anyone else? Is it just me? Is it age? Is it pandemic fatigue?
It used to be maybe a couple of times a month that I’d have to replay the last 24 hours to figure it all out. Now it’s almost every night.
I set the alarm Friday before last even tho Fridays are always my day off and I had no early appointments scheduled. (I had an 8:00 am oil change this past Friday so had to get up an hour earlier than I do for work. Plus it was snowing. All of which is irrelevant to my point, whatever it may be, so sorry for the detour.) Oddly that was one of the few nights I didn’t wake up questioning the date.
5:00 am this morning as I was stumbling through the dark house to the bathroom, because I couldn’t shut down my brain fast enough and my bladder suddenly remembered that last tiny sip of water I had at 10:00 pm, my brain, trying make it up to me, decided to turn the whole “What day is this?” folderol into a cute singsongy children’s book a la Terry Pratchett’s Where’s My Cow.
(As always, this is not a paid ad. I’m just a super nerd fan of Pratchett so yes I have his children’s book while having no children. It’s about a father reading an insipid book about a missing cow to his young son. He alters the story, such as it is, to be more useful to a city kid who will only personally know pigs and sheep as bacon and mutton.)
Excuse me. My bladder says it can wait until the end of this paragraph, but not a second lat-
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