Friday, February 06, 2009

A Highly Important Update

Today I woke up feeling very exhausted in a way that I knew wasn’t going to go away even if I got on my bicycle and went to work, so I called in tired and stayed in bed all day napping with Hammett and reading periodicals: an issue of Newsweek, two issues of The New Yorker, and February’s The Sun.

I’d gotten my preferred nine hours of sleep, but I’ve noticed lately that if I wake up in the middle of a dream, I feel incredibly groggy, and this morning I was awakened in the middle of a dream about my mental health professional, in which I showed her a document I’d written which I thought explained my general situation.

As she studied it (in the dream), she frowned and started scribbling out sections she didn’t agree with, perhaps sections where I’d been too hard on myself. After she crossed out three or four things, I slid the paper away from her, and, angry, said, “I think I’ll be leaving now.”

She became upset and started to cry, which made me more furious, and then she physically tried to stop me from leaving, which I found outrageous, and there was a bit of grappling at the door and I pushed her arm away, in the kind of gesture that people later describe to the police as a shove or a hit, even though it wasn’t really, and I yelled at her that she might be totally right, but I didn’t like that she was being “directive,” and that I wanted to figure things out for myself.

In the dream, she was wearing a pretty belted dress, cream-colored with little red designs on it, like something a fashionable older lady would wear and really very nice, but not the kind of thing she wears in real life, which is more elegant hippie style. That wasn’t a particularly bad dream. It was just startling to be awoken from it suddenly by the alarm.

The alarm in question did not issue from my Zen Alarm Clock. After my Digital Zen Alarm Clock died, I decided to replace it with a plain old Zen Alarm Clock, which I thought might be more reliable and which was quite handsome. It was nice to have a clock with actual hands—i.e., a clock you can learn the time from even if you’re more than two feet from it.

It made a ticking sound precisely every two seconds, or not, according to its mood, and its alarm always went off exactly 20 minutes past the time you set it for, or about that, since, due to the hands, it was hard to tell what time you HAD set it for.

Its fatal flaw, however, was this: The chime was very, very loud. I tried turning it to the wall and/or setting it on a folded cloth and/or draping a thick napkin over it, but in the end, I sent it back and am waiting for another Digital Zen Alarm Clock, which can be set to loud or soft, and you can also close its lid, which makes it even quieter.

In the meantime, I’m back to approximating the Digital Zen Alarm Clock experience thusly: I set a cheap electric alarm clock that has a loud blaring call for five minutes after I want to get up, and I set two alarms on my Invisible Clock (a diminutive gadget which, among other things, lets you set 12 different alarms in a 24-hour period), one for five minutes before I want to get up, and another for the exact desired time of arising.

After the first six beeps sound, I have five minutes to ruminate about the things I like to ruminate about in the morning, and then I must turn the actual alarm clock off and get up, or else hear that horrible noise.

My dreams are generally extremely literal. Like, the night after I felt annoyed at Mandrake (can you tell I made up that name?) at work for not doing what I asked him to do five days in a row, after which I emailed his boss, I dreamed that I saw him and said, “Say, I’m sorry I was grumpy about that thing.”

I used to consider emailing anyone’s boss beyond the pale, but this tactic is used so routinely in my group that it’s almost come to seem like something a normal person might do. The person who does this the most; indeed, the person I have learned this despicable practice from, a person who, year after year, copies the boss nearly every time she emails her very own team members (not to mention that she marks nearly every email she sends as being of “high importance”) was recently heard to complain bitterly about a person in another group who is very difficult to deal with. “Why,” said my co-worker, “a few months ago, she took to copying [our boss] every time she emails me!”

From this tale, I hope you have learned that it is (very slightly) more fun to email other people’s bosses than to have yours emailed, and also that you really should never mark an email as being of “high importance” unless the building is on fire. I’ve only sent about four in ten years, but then, maybe that’s because they don’t trust me with anything highly important.

My co-worker who always copies the boss also knows everything, by which I mean every last thing, and she also remembers everything she’s ever heard, and she is very collegial about helping out.

She has assisted me innumerable times, but this can backfire in various ways, and I would actually like to be more the kind of person who says, “If it takes me all day, I will sit here until I figure this out!”, rather than the kind of person who says, “I suppose I could look this up, but I know Carol knows this off the top of her head, so why don’t I just give her a little jingle?”

Yesterday I encountered a mystery in an area where Carol is particularly expert, and decided to exhaust every possible avenue of research before I asked her, and, lo and behold, I was able to find the answer. It took half an hour, I felt great afterwards, and I’m somewhat less likely to forget the answer since I figured it out myself.

On the other hand, undergoing all that extra mental effort is probably a second reason I couldn’t get out of bed today.

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