I meant well!
I think I dropped off at around 2:30 in the morning, but woke up at quarter to 6. I made the mistake of looking at Twitter to see if you-know-who blew up the world while I slept, and instead saw the world blowing itself up.
Finally drifted back to sleep around 8, and woke up around 10. My alarm was set for 10:30. Sooooo kind of according to plan, minus a few hours of restful slumber. I could still make this clock-resetting work.
I had breakfast around 11. Leftover stir-fry and brown rice. Yummy. Did the crossword (seventeen minutes and change for the Saturday NYT, then did another Saturday NYT from 2017, when I wasn’t good enough to finish a Saturday). Postponed the news, since I had the Twitter session earlier. Watched some of Orange is the New Black season four.
Season four opens with dismal realities but it’s funny and fun for the first two episodes, with a lot of good laugh-aloud moments. Piper, the main character, continues to be among my least favorite parts of the show. Big Boo, Pensatucky, Soso, Lolly, and Alex continue to be the highlights. I’m pleased to see a second half-Asian half-Caucasian actress, Jolene Purdy, added to the cast as a Native Hawaiian.
I’m not really sure what happened to the rest of my day. There was a nap in there for a couple of hours, around 4 I think. It was sweet. I did a few very easy chore-like things. Read the news. Had a few hot dogs with ketchup, mustard, and sauerkraut for lunch. Got moving for an evening walk at about 10:00 — kind of early for me compared to recent weeks — and thought okay, if I’m home after the usual amount of time, I’ll be in bed by 2:30 and will still sorta be on track to have normal hours.
The walk was kind of short, by design. Listened to the Kvelertak album, then felt like some Yes music — The Yes Album from 1971. Oh, I stopped at McD’s for a couple of cheeseburgers and fries, which I ate standing up on the walkway in front of the pho restaurant. I’m calling that dinner although at the time I thought it was a large snack.
I totaled about 11,700 steps when I got home before 1:30. I was a little sore.
I knew I shouldn’t have done this. But instead of cooling off in the living room with my fan on full blast, as I usually do, because I was sore, I did it in bed. Cranked up the fan there and spread out. And fell asleep.
For a couple of hours! I think I got up at 4 to write this, and I was a little hungry. I had two kitchen things to play around with this weekend, and one of them was a mug cake. I hadn’t snacked all day, now that I was calling cheeseburgers and fries dinner, and now my brain was wide awake.
So I threw together the mug cake recipe I saved and made my first mug cake. It came out pretty dang great. I mean, if you’re going to be picky about a small bite of cake, it was slightly on the rubbery side, as microwave cake-things tend to be. I kind of went into the research with the toaster oven in mind, but I found an easy recipe designed for the microwave specifically, and I liked the recipe so I went there.
I don’t have anything approaching a sweet tooth, and chocolate doesn’t do much for me, but boy am I pleased with this.
I’m listening to the next Yes album in their discography, Fragile (1971 also), which is famous for opening with “Roundabout,” their signature song. I don’t know many perfect songs, but “Roundabout” is one, and this is a pleasant album, a nice break from the black metal I’ve been writing to lately.
It’s 5:21 now, and I’ve probably ruined the whole clock-resetting thing. I don’t know what to think or feel or say. When I got up at 4, once I got moving, I was happier than I’d been all day Saturday. Part of it was getting those small tasks done, I’m sure, and part was finally getting my steps, for the first time in a week. I think most of it was just being up in the middle of the night.
Maybe I should allow myself the weekends as an indulgence for the vampire. Then have miserable Mondays, as I usually do even under normal circumstances, and adjust as the week goes along, trying my best to keep normal hours. Resetting the clock over the weekend has never really worked for me, not even when I was teaching and had to make the shift back from spring break to the fourth quarter of the academic year.
I’m disappointed in myself. But part of me feels like Kevin Kline in In & Out when he’s trying not to dance according to directions in his “How to Be a Manly Man” cassette.
There were a few moments, as I was assembling flour, cocoa, oil, sugar, baking powder, and milk in a mixing bowl, when I felt myself embracing 4:30 in the morning like Kevin Kline embracing a bad dance mix of “I Will Survive.”
Not to compare my own existential crisis with a gay man’s embracing his gayness, because that’s absurd, but I’ve spent my whole life figuring out where I need to conform to others’s expectations and where I must insist on my own drum. Is nocturnality one of those things on which I can relent for work purposes, like dress slacks and button-down collared shirts, but sink into on weekends, like cutoff jeans and Metallica t-shirts?
I pushed off a lot of Saturday’s tasks to Sunday, and now it’s past 5:30 and I can see daylight through the vertical blinds, so I don’t have a lot of confidence I’ll get to most of them.
But I mean well!
So let’s wrap this up and lay my body down.
I didn’t do much texting Saturday. Had a little conversation with my writing partner about her being on summer vacation and what her goals are. She asked me what mine are, and it’s been a while since I thought of summer that way, and of course lately I’m focused entirely on getting through spring. I think it would be good for me to think about summer, though, and where I would like to be come September.
JB also sent me a photo of his Scotch eggs, which look terrific and which he says weren’t very difficult at all. I’m impressed. It’s an impressive looking dish.
That’s about it. Here’s to a productive, restful Sunday — I think I’ll leave the TV off all day. I’m loving my OitNB but it’s eating my time in a largely unsatisfactory way. Or I’ll save it for the evening after I’ve done stuff. I have some other personal writing I need to get done, and it’ll be much easier to get through with music rather than the tube.
Reach out for connection if you need it. We all need some as spring melts into summer and virus melts into violence. It’s crazy out there, but we can get through it.