MOP April 23: Basic Complaints About a Semi-Bad Day

Today had all the benchmarks of a good day. It was a Thursday, aka, the day I have my most interesting classes. I had no homework due. I even ran into an old friend from the ROV club.

Unfortunately, despite all those promising features, I had a bad(ish) day instead.

First of all, I’ve been having anxiety/heart palpitations lately, so I decided to stop drinking caffeine. The trade-off was that I was tired and headachey all day.

I got to school at 8:00 am because Ben had a class, but my first class wasn’t until 10:00. Normally I use these morning hours to do homework, but today I went back to my car and fell asleep on the back seat. I had some blankets in the car.

Unfortunately I had bad sleep paralysis. In case you have never experienced this terrible body-alseep mind-half-awake state of being, let me walk you through my thought process as I lay there.

My phone is right beside my head. Let me pick it up and see what time it is.

*Pick up phone*

Okay. Now I see the phone in my hand, but I also see the phone still lying beside my head. There can’t be two phones, so one of those phones is a hallucination.

How can I test the phone I’m holding to make sure it’s real? Maybe I can bite it.

*Bite phone*

Okay. The phone was soft and bite-able, which means it isn’t real, which means that I hallucinated picking up the phone and biting it and it’s really still by my head and I really can’t move at all. If I throw this fake hallucination phone, it won’t make a “clunk” sound, because it isn’t real.

*throw phone. Hear no “clunk” sound.*

I finally woke up for real, and picked up the phone by my head, and looked at the time. It was only 9:35 or so, but I didn’t want to go back into the sleep paralysis, so I got up instead.

It was cold and drizzly and I’d dressed in a t-shirt, skirt, and sandals, thinking it would be sunny like yesterday. WRONG! I took my laptop out of my backpack, and in the free space I’d cleared, I shoved in a fleece Tinkerbell blanket and a pair of socks.

Now, even though walking to class would be cold, once I got to class I could put on socks and snuggle up in a blanket.

I had planned to post, today, about being a ponderer. About how I ponder everything so much that I live half my life inside my own head and have trouble shutting off the thought stream when I need to, like, sleep. But then I had a headache and didn’t feel like posting about that after all.

I will, however, tell you about something I pondered today. I pondered blankets in class. I have never seen people take blankets to class, but it seems to me a perfectly logical thing to do, as long as you’re not in a stadium classroom with a huge blanket that spills over into the seats beside you. Blankets are warm and cozy in a stark and cold classroom, and they make you miss your bed just a little bit less.

So why don’t people take blankets to class?

It’s weird how we have these rituals for how a classroom is supposed to operate, and everyone kind of naturally picks up on all the implicit “rules.” Since no one brings blankets to class, people pick up on that, and don’t take blankets to class.

I like to think that when I break those unspoken norms it’s because I’m counter-cultural or don’t care what people think about me or whatever, but often it’s just because I’m too lost in my own head to pick up on some of the implicit rules.

Anyway.

After school I went home and went straight to bed, this time setting my alarm clock so that if I DID get sleep paralysis I’d have something to jolt me out of it. I slept for a good two hours until I had to get up and make supper.

The point of this whole ramble is to say that when it came down to it, I was tired all day and had a constant headache, and the last thing I wanted was to try to come up with a clever post, even though yesterday I had TWO post ideas bubbling in my brain. One was about being a ponderer, and the other was a further rant about culture and humanity.

Cleverness will have to wait. For now, here’s a complaint post to tide you over. Ta da!

Until next time, you can enjoy clever MOP posts over at Life in the Shoe and Dreaming of Dragonflies, the blogs of Mom and Jenny, respectively.