August 4, 2004

It's late again. The night sneaks up on me, daily catches me out.

I honestly think I need two days. One for work and family, and one for me. For writing and walking or running or just cleaning out my wallet. I mean, how many receipts can one keep?

Here's another neurosis I'll expose: I used to keep my Safeway grocery receipts so I could make a log of money spent on groceries per month. I long ago stopped that practice, but now I keep the receipts in my purse so I can take them home and recycle them. Because they're paper. And because I don't want to believe Penn & Teller's Bullsh**t episode about how recycling really does the planet no good. However, since the Safeway receipts also have my name on them, before I put them in my recycle pile, I rip out the part of the receipt that has my name. And that part goes into our little garbage bin of paper to be shredded.

I think of the "to be shredded" bin (really a nice wooden box D. made years ago) as a temporary pile, but in reality, I rarely take care of it, so it's the place any savvy identity thief should go directly to for easy criminal convenience since it contains a ton of personal information like account numbers on receipts and our signatures.

So another thing I could do in my second daily day would be shred that stuff.

HOWEVER

Since I do not have the luxury of two days per day, and since (as I've already pointed out), I don't like to spend too much time window shopping when I can't buy the item in question, less whining is called for.

And, as I'm just starting to see (thanks to Clare for the book that points this out), less thinking is what's really required.

I have a very very noisy brain. And an interesting personal relationship with the snooze alarm, too. I am the only one this happens to? Because the snooze alarm goes off (more than once) while I'm in a some almost waking state, my brain creates all sorts of wildly interesting explanations for what the alarm really represents. For example, I distinctly recall once understanding with brilliantly clear insight that if I hit the alarm button just right, I could get a few more ounces of sleep per minute, and as long as I didn't abuse the privilege, the time would not be too great for me to sleep another pound or so.

This morning I reminded myself that the snooze button's name was really Lolly, and that we'd been friends for a long time, so I could hit her once every seven minutes and she wouldn't mind. After the 3rd time, I remembered that her last name was Gagging.

This makes sense because every time I hit her, she shut up.

Please don't bother to post to say that I'm sleep deprived, because I know all of you who post are probably getting less sleep than I am.