I don't have a job. I substitute teach sometimes, but it is rare. We moved here because Husband got a great job and we loved the idea of coming back to the small town where we both went to college (before we knew each other), and agreed that unemploying me was worth it.
And it was worth it. Husband's doing a great job, and while I've had some rocky times when I felt like a lazy bum who doesn't contribute, I've also started learning to sew and I've vastly improved my housekeeping skills. Though laundry still eludes me.
The main sticking point has been that our primary breadwinner wakes up at 6:45 every morning and his wife does no such thing. I love sleeping in. I am not suited to waking up anytime, if I'm being completely and embarrassingly honest, before 10 in the morning. I cannot tell you how lazy that makes me feel, coming as I do from a family with a rigid German work ethic on one side and a kind of fraught compulsiveness (she's Welsh, but I don't know if that has anything to do with it) on the other. My unemployment is not easy for them to understand, but coming as it does during these economic times (which are by all accounts quite bad), the joblessness is at least explicable.
I have grappled with guilt over my sleeping habits ever since I became a full-fledged adult, or more accurately, since I was old enough to be considered a real adult by everyone else. But I still slept in most days when I could, sprawling delightedly in our big bed after husband had left for work or (on weekends) heeded his internal alarm clock and retired to the living room to read the paper with Dog faithfully by his side. I snoozed, waking two or sometimes three hours after he left our bed, feeling groggy and lazy and guilty! guilty! of sloth. Actually, when he's home on weekends I don't feel so bad sleeping in. He makes me feel like a pampered princess--he says he loves letting me sleep because he knows how much I love it. So when he's home, I am content to sleep in. When he goes to work and I wake up hours later, realizing that his day is like one third over and I've been unconscious for all that time, it's a different feeling entirely. "Pampered" turns to "spoiled" and the decay in decadent really starts to show. I feel sheepish and guilty and lazy and spoiled--spoiled like rancid milk, like that brat in Willie Wonka.
But still I would sleep in. Not every day, but while we're on this embarrassingly honest train I might as well admit that most days, I slept until at least 9:00. I would wake, make some coffee and hopefully clean up last night's dishes. I would peruse the Internet aimlessly, and then frustratingly realize I'd wiled away like an hour or two and it would be late, late morning and I would shake myself and scold myself and feel like a bum.
BUT STILL, I would sleep in! What is wrong with me? Jesus.
Anyway, on Tuesday (which was like Monday this week), I think I drew the last straw. I think, I hope, that I've turned over a new leaf.
For some time now I've known that my dreams get weirder the longer I sleep. Eight a.m. dreams are a little less pleasant than middle-of-the-night-with-Husband-beside me dreams. Nine a.m. dreams are weirder still. This phenomenon has been getting more intense of late. It would seem that the rigidity and compulsiveness that are my birthright have infiltrated the deep recesses of my subconsciousness. Because Tuesday morning I had some truly fucked up dreams*--dreams I fervently hope I'll never dream again. My subconscious, it seems, is waging a full-scale war on my youthful, care-free laziness. If I want to wake up in anything other than a state of drooling, haunted, skeeved-out confusion, I will continue following this virtuous routine:
Wednesday I got up as Husband was putting on his shoes. The coffee was brewing by the time Dog and I walked him and the trash cans to the end of the driveway at 7:45. This morning I was standing at the coffee maker at 7:37, bemoaning the fact that he won't be home until 8:00 tonight, but accepting it like the total grownup I am, and kissing him goodbye as I set out to start the laundry.**
This is my new leaf:
I have turned it over.***
*The content of the dreams doesn't really matter, you know? Besides, if I tried to recount them, I would probably lose the one reader my little blog can claim: namely, me. Then there wouldn't even be a tree to fall in the forest, let alone someone around to hear it.**That's bullshit. I did no laundry. I sat down with my coffee and read the internet. Then I wrote on it.
***I actually went outside to take this photograph. I was an English major. I know that metaphors do not need to be illustrated. Is this an unintended consequence of the internet, of the blogosphere, that everyone will think it's OK to use a cliche as long as they have some twee digital photographic essay to cleverize it? Ugh. Any sense of self-congratulatory smugness (over waking up during the virtuous seven o'clock hour) went straight out the window when I posted these photos. I leave them here as a reminder to myself: Never forget. You are sort of a douche.
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Acknowledgments
Joan Didion, whose title for a far, far superior essay I filched for the title of this dumb little act of procrastination.
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