Thursday, January 12, 2012

The snooze function on my alarm clock has been seldom used, and if you were to grill me on the total times I’ve hit the button, the number would likely be well under five. It just never made sense to me, this ritual of delaying the inevitable in five-minute increments. Why bother, you know? To me, it’s like asking for the hangman’s noose to be deployed in quarter-inches, rather than opting for the straight drop.

But I’ve been making full use of it recently, and in trying to determine why my policy has shifted, I’ve eliminated the obvious. I’ve been going to bed at reasonable hours. Sleep itself has been sound, unbroken from night until morning. General health has been fine. Mood, level. And yet, when consciousness is forcibly recommended at 7:50 AM every morning, I find myself peaceably protesting by, like, lying down.

I’m going to attribute my sloth to shadow work. You may have read the article, too, and if you haven’t, it’s certainly worth the three minutes. Shadow work encompasses all the tasks other people would have performed for you in a bygone era–pumping gas, bagging groceries, typing, booking travel–that are now shouldered entirely by you.

When I think about my own supermarket experience, I actually make it a point to avoid eye contact with unoccupied checkout staff, especially the ones who stand right in the aisle to hail customers. I’ll go so far as to affect interest in some random sale item on the fuckin’ endcap if I spy a particularly eager candidate in my peripheral vision. Crazy, I know. But I simply want to bag my own groceries! Relinquishing shadow work invariably means I’m standing there as somebody else waits on me, and I prefer motion. All that said, though, perhaps a vacation is in order. Which I will book myself, thank you very much.