A few notes on sleep, sickness, and slow rising.

1. Two successive weekends, I've come up with a little cold to make me miserable.

2. Both of these little colds I can trace to bouts of insomnia, long stretches of not quite enough sleep, plus a magical dose of stress sprinkles.

3. A pause to note that there are so many more, and much worse, problems in the world that I am truly sorry that this is what I have to write about tonight. But there you are. I am on the upswing from Little Cold #2, but my eyes still feel hot and I took a nap of necessity this evening, which on the one hand felt like a commandment from on high, and on the other hand is now making me nervous that I might not be able to fall asleep in an hour when I will want to be able to fall asleep.

4. Reiteration: other people have much worse problems. I know.

5. The other day, I wanted to say, when I was talking to my friend Kati, that I no longer stay up late or get up super early for things like grading or other projects. I wanted to say this, but let facts be submitted to a candid world:

• I stay up late, like, all the time. ALL the time.
• I never get up early to grade, NEVER, but I happen to have arisen super early to finish that talk I gave this past week. Stayed up late AND got up early.

So, in other words, I could not say this to my friend Kati. I had to admit that I am a serial stay-up-late-r, and that means I often don't get quite enough sleep.

6. Medicine. Naps. Dragging around. Feeling all hot-eyed. Etcetera. Staying home when the rest of the world is seeing movies. 

7. In a related matter: I hate getting out of bed like a shot, full of zip and ginger, ready to take on the world. In my ideal world, getting up would go like this:

• alarm goes off.
• I contemplate it.
• my eyes open, one at a time, then close again. For, like, a half an hour.
• I think about things while dozing. I think/doze.
• a half hour after the original alarm, I open my eyes again, one at a time. Depending on how that goes, I might keep them open, or I might close them again. For, like, fifteen more minutes.
• In the interim, I will have considered not working out, like, a dozen times. 
• But when I actually do get up, I put on my workout clothes and get it done.

8. In conclusion, waking up slow is the best and waking up like a shot is the worst. I would say this is a winter thing, but it's really applicable all year round. A slow wake up allows you to put your hands on your will to live. You really don't want to be walking around before you are fully situated vis a vis your will to live. You could hurt yourself, and that's a fact.