Why I Am Still In Bed
Inside a boot sequence
I wake up, if this new state can reasonably be called “awake,” and roll over to turn off my alarm. I need to pee. The alarm is distressing, but not as distressing as not having an alarm and risking missing a day of potential utility.
Time to inventory. Am I suffering? Yes: I am inside a body, and the body is inside space and time.
Did I sleep enough? There’s no good way to tell, but probably within acceptable margins if I woke with the alarm. My eyes hurt, but that might just be allergies and not sleep deficit. Are my nose and sinuses congested? Of course, because I’ve been prone for several hours and that’s what happens. Does my back or neck hurt? The muscles gripe about some stretched position I slept in, but the joints seem to have no complaints, so today is a good day.
My bladder and bowels are ready to be evacuated. Also, I’m quite hungry and need to make a cup of tea. Time to roll out of bed? No, wait, I’ll also have to shower and get dressed and put on deodorant and have my vitamins and brush my teeth, and then… what else has to get done today? I have to make it to the grocery store, and send some emails, and check my email in case there are more emails for me to send, and either write something or plan something to write later, and catch up on that podcast, and also that game I play has a content update that I want to stay on top of coming at 7pm, and then there’s a virtual hangout I promised I’d go to.
That’s like 15 Things. How many Things do I think I have in me to do today? It feels like a good sleep day, so probably around 10? But I’m never a reliable judge, first thing, so it could be more or fewer. Guess it’s time to plot a traveling salesman path through all of my tasks for the day; well, actually, 5 or 6 different paths, to make sure I’ve covered my margin of error when estimating the number of Things I’m likely to get done. That means I first have to sort all of the known tasks into “mandatory” and “discretionary,” and then assign priority weights to the items in each category, and then based on that determine an order of operations.
I still have to pee. That reminds me that there are potential economies of scope and scale: I can eliminate all my waste at once, for example, but count that all as just one thing rather than two, so maybe I can tick more Things off the list. Is there anything else I can combine? I could listen to my podcast while eliminating waste and making breakfast, too! Time to re-sort all my sorted tasks to find more synergies. Wait, I have to make breakfast, but there’s no way I have the juice right now to make anything, even 2-minute oatmeal, because making food and eating food are two separate Things and I only budgeted for one. Time to catalogue all of the food items in the house and see which of them I could reasonably put directly in my mouth with no intervening steps.
Okay, I’ll have a chocolate croissant and a glass of milk, and experience tells me I can be more efficient about it by setting my tea to steep while I do that. I haven’t done the Thing but I’ve got a firm plan for several Things now, and that’s a start. The toilet needs are getting urgent, but also I feel weird brushing my teeth in a room in which I’ve just flushed a toilet because aerosols. And my mouth feels bad because my nose has been clogged because allergies and I’ve been prone for hours, and I need it to stop feeling bad, but also brushing my teeth feels bad until after I’ve done it and I’m not sure I can tolerate anything else that’s both unpleasant and discretionary. Okay, I know: I’ll get up and have my gummy vitamins, because they taste good and make my mouth feel less gross, and then I’ll address the waste elimination needs, and then I’ll go have breakfast, and I’ll get around to the tooth-brushing sometime later, probably when I get in the shower eventually.
But wait, my clothes are in my room and my breakfast is in the kitchen, and I don’t want to go back and forth more than is necessary, so I guess I’ll get dressed before starting breakfast. I don’t really want to get dressed, but getting dressed is a mandatory thing unless I’m not leaving the house. Am I leaving the house? Fortunately I’ve just catalogued all of the food items and I can use that list to decide whether or not going to the grocery store is mandatory, and based on that decision I can decide whether or not getting dressed is mandatory.
I roll over to adjust my back and moving reminds me that I really need to pee, so I decide not to move again, at all, until I have a Plan, because if I do move then I’ll have to pee immediately and if peeing isn’t the first Thing in my Plan then I’ll have thrown the whole Plan off from the get-go, and then the whole day will be All Wrong.
Okay, so I have enough food at home — assuming my food catalogue is accurate and I didn’t forget that I’d finished something — that I can put off the grocery store another day, which means that getting dressed is discretionary, which means I’m going to skip it. Unless I’m too tired to cook food later and decide to order delivery, in which case I’ll have to put on clothes… but that’s a problem for Future Subjunctive Peter. So the Plan so far is this: get out of bed, have vitamins, put on my podcast, get on the toilet, then go straight to the kitchen to have a chocolate croissant and a glass of milk and a cup of tea. But wait, the kettle needs time to boil; if I put the kettle on when I start eating my croissant, I’ll be done with breakfast before the tea is steeped and then I’ll just have to wait around for it, which is inefficient and therefore Feels Bad. But if I put it on before going to the bathroom, that’s more delay — I really have to pee — and an extra trip to and from the kitchen, which is even more inefficient, and the water will have cooled more than I’d like by the time I’m done with the bathroom anyway. Okay, choosing the lesser inefficiency.
“Maybe this would be easier if I didn’t have so much uncertainty about whether or not I’ll have additional Things later in the day,” I think to myself like an idiot, and pull open my phone to check my emails. There are new emails but I can’t really focus on them because I really, urgently need to pee. I add “Remember that there are now some emails that are marked as ‘Read’ but which you haven’t actually read yet” to my list of Things for the day.
Honestly, I’m pretty exhausted after all this Planning — Planning is, of course, itself a Thing — and I briefly entertain the notion of going back to sleep. Maybe if I move really slowly and don’t disturb my bladder, I can manage it. I try it for a few minutes, but it turns out that I really need to pee, so I resolve to get started on my Plan as soon as I have a Plan.
So what’s after breakfast? I’ll finish making my tea. I can’t drink it right away, because it’s too hot. By then I’ll have finished my podcast, so I’ll need to be doing someThing else. I could start writing something or working on those emails, but those are Things that should probably wait until I’m caffeinated. Ideally I’d plop down on my beanbag with my productivity laptop and catch up on social media until the caffeine hits me, but there’s no good place to put my tea that I can reach from the beanbag, so I’ll need to put it on the desk instead. And I’m not going to get up from the beanbag unnecessarily once I’m sitting in it, so I’d better just sit at my desk instead. Except that’s where my desktop lives, and that’s for gaming, and I’ll be bored for the 2 minutes it takes the tea to cool so I’ll probably end up playing 2 hours of videogames instead, interspersed with sips of tea and self-recrimination.
“I really should just form a routine for this stuff,” I think to myself like a real Pollyanna, before remembering that all of the priority weights are different every day and so is my likely Thing budget, and that any routine would require so much adjustment and tailoring each day that it wouldn’t actually be less work — in fact, justifying each deviation from the “standard” routine would be another Thing.
I’ve been awake, if this state can reasonably be called “awake,” for over an hour. I’m still in bed. I’m still, and again, so tired.
I really need to pee.
