one oddball day leads to another?

With yesterday being such a washout for multiple reasons, I ended up calling it a day quite early. Actually, yesterday was probably doomed from the start by the fact that I’d only gotten about three hours of sleep to start with. I know it’s different for everyone, but my body’s cardinal rule is get eight hours of sleep or plan on having a really difficult day. It’s not that I didn’t try, but for some reason most of those eight hours I spent in bed didn’t include actual sleep.

So even without having the biggest interview of the week postponed at the last minute, walking past some guy who was waving a gun around, and nearly getting hit by the same car twice in a row, yesterday was still destined to be something of a lost cause. No surprise, then, that by the late afternoon I was done, too tired to either accomplish or enjoy anything, wanting the day to be over. I knew yoga would be a wasted effort if I went, and even after I remembered that Martha Wainwright was doing an in-store performance at Amoeba down the street, I couldn’t gear myself up for that one either.

By 5:30 in the afternoon I’d uncharacteristically crawled into bed, and man did I ever sleep well. Too well I suppose, as nine hours later I woke up wide awake. No I’m not waking up at 2:30 in the morning, I told myself, because that’s just as good of a way to wreck a day as only getting three hours sleep the night before. But after a few concerted attempts to roll over and go back to bed, it wasn’t happening and I was up for the day.

My inability to fully function in the early morning, no matter when I went to bed or how much sleep I got, is the stuff of legend. I can’t even wake up at 6:30 in the morning and function properly, and that was even after doing it for years on end. So forget about starting an inspired day at 2:30 in the morning. But I was up nonetheless.

Let’s see what I can accomplish. There’s a feature story that needs written. Nope. I may be wide awake, but that feeling is more along the lines of someone having hit me with an epi-pen than actually being coherent. So no, I’m not going to write up some poor band while I can barely remember what my own name is. I can crank out this blog stuff no problem, because that’s just relaying what’s on my mind, but writing about a band is actual professional writing and I’m afraid there’ll be none of that this morning.

Page layout? Nope. That takes at least a little bit of inspiration, and instead I’m just feeling confused and artificially cold, which always happens to me when I wake up too early, and kind of funny considering we’re in the middle of a heat wave. It’ll be over a hundred degrees by the afternoon, and I’ll still have the chills because of what time of day I woke up. I’d love someone to be able to explain that particular medical oddity of mine.

Anyway, I settled on tackling a project that requires no creativity at all, the mindless task of doing some internal web work that’s part of something larger that’s being worked on. There’s quite a bit of one-time work that needs to be done manually before we can roll, and now seems like a good time for it. Not like I’m going to accomplish anything more ambitious today anyway.

In a way, that’s a good thing. If I were fully awake and functional, I’d much rather be writing. But this behind-the-scenes work needed done this weekend, and the temporary mental handicap of being up too early is actually helping ensure that it gets done.

I’ll work on that feature story tomorrow.