02.23.23
At 6am, I woke up in the long sleeve Yellowstone shirt that I purchased on a trip nearly five years ago. I am generally not someone who hangs onto things long past their best days, but I just love this shirt, despite it being the most tattered thing I own. It is, in many ways, literally hanging on by a thread, hence its relegation to Sleep Shirt.
I turned off the alarm on my phone and moved into the bathroom, flicking on the light and putting my hair in a bun on top of my head. No matter how hard I try, I am just not a morning person, for I am a terrible sleeper. I don’t often wake up once asleep, but about half the time it takes me hours — hours — to fall asleep. It’s really hard to get up for your 6am alarm when you only fell asleep three hours ago. But last night I got in bed before 9pm, spent some time reading, and was almost definitely asleep before ten. I got eight hours, so I need to resist my overwhelming urge to just get back in bed (which I do roughly eighty percent of the time).
I’ve somehow landed on cold plunge TikTok as of late, and I am always looking for some new convoluted way to Not Get Back In Bed. I do not have, nor do I plan to get, a big, deep metal tub like the ones I see online that apparently everyone on Earth has in their backyard, but I think a cold shower will suffice. I can only stand it for about thirty seconds, one part of my body jutting into the water stream at a time. Some people sit in those things for, like, fifteen minutes! What is wrong with them!? My body feels like it’s in shock as I pull on sweatpants, shivering uncontrollably.
I turn on the coffeemaker and put my drying dishes from last night away. I turn on all the lights in an attempt to trick my circadian rhythm into thinking that it is daytime, even though the sun won’t be up for another 40 minutes. I like the idea of being up early, of having some bonus hours at the beginning of the day where I don’t have to work or talk to anyone, but man, does my body fight it.
I sit on the couch (as opposed to lay on the couch, as I usually do) with my coffee and read an article in the New Yorker about the concept and semantics of the word “indigenous.” As much as I would love to call this something of an intellectual brag, the entire reason that I have a subscription to the The New Yorker is so I’ll have quick-ish things to read in the morning when I first wake up, because the chances of those words sticking in my brain are slim to none. I don’t want to read a few chapters of my book and then pick it up again later to find I have no idea what’s going on. I cannot trust any information I take in before 8am to be remembered. But reading helps to wake my mind up a little bit, and keeps me away from screens for the first ninety minutes or so after I wake up, so, New Yorker. Shoutout to Manvir Singh — I really enjoyed your article as I was reading it, but please do not quiz me.
Eventually, my 7:30am “if you’re going to go out, go now” alarm goes off in the bedroom. Abandoning Jesse Eisenberg’s contribution to Shouts & Murmurs, I go turn it off. I’ll go for a walk.
On the sidewalk along the lower edge of Fort Tryon Park, I walk up behind a coworker of mine. For a second I wonder if it’s really her, but I recognize her coat from yesterday, when we sat in our friend’s office and drank leftover beers he took from a long-over happy hour. She lives in this neighborhood. We are friends, and I like talking to her, but it’s 7:45 in the morning. She has headphones on. She probably doesn’t want to talk to me either. I cut into the park and go the other direction, opting for a walk around Inwood Hill Park instead.
I came home and changed into my shittier pair of sweatpants and an old Lake Placid sweatshirt with wear on par with my Yellowstone shirt, which I suppose makes sense, as I got them on the same trip (surely seems counterintuitive, but it’s a challenging trip to explain. Let’s just call it a cross-country moment). I got all my clothes and sheets together to do laundry.
Naturally, as I finished folding my last few things after my handful of trips to and from the basement, I noticed some stray socks under my bed and dirty clothes shoved into the bottom of a backpack that I brought upstate to visit a friend last weekend. Laundry can never get fully done, can it? Least of all when you always seem to miss a few things.
