How I Spent My One-Day Vacation

For the first time in a very long while, I had nothing on my schedule last weekend.

Saturday, I got some things done that needed to get done.  Sunday?

The Disney Princesses Jumbo Activity Book is my bitch.

Sunday, I slept in.  I got caught up on three weeks’ worth of Newsweeks.  I out of nowhere remembered the song “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia, downloaded it, and listened to it nine times in a row while lying on my back in the middle of my living room.  I colored a picture in a coloring book using as many of the 96 colors in my Crayola selection as I could get away with.  I opened a window and listened to the rain.  I watched four episodes of Arrested Development.

I thought about how I have a pretty great life.

My landlady, apparently feeling sorry for me after I railed about how much Newsweek in digital format is terrible (which it is – since when do I wait three weeks to read Newsweek?), has started giving me her old New Yorkers.  The New Yorker comes out every week and is a beast of a magazine; some of the articles are long enough to be novellas.  (Actually, some of the articles are novellas.) There’s almost always something in there worth spending half an hour reading, though, and in a recent issue there was a piece about sleep.

DID YOU KNOW that when you are lying in bed at night, trying to drift off but failing miserably, there is a good chance you are falling asleep for short periods of time and then waking up again (and not, as you might think, remaining awake the whole time)?  Furthermore, DID YOU KNOW that prior to the advent of electric lighting, most people did not sleep just once a day?  For much of human history, most people went to bed at sundown, but then maybe they’d wake up in the middle of the night and do some shit and then go back to bed.  (Ben Franklin reportedly liked to use the time between his “first sleep” and his “second sleep” sitting naked in a chair reading.)

That made me feel much better about the way I wake up many mornings around 3:00 a.m. for a brief spot of contemplation before going back to sleep.  (I used to only contemplate how dumb it was for me to keep waking up in the middle of the night, but now I’ve been given leeway to contemplate on how much like Benjamin Franklin I am…sans the naked reading and whatnot.)

Thusly, last night, when I felt tired shortly after the sun went down (even though daylight savings time meant I should have been the opposite of tired), I went with it.

Add “went to bed early in an attempt to stave off daylight savings jet lag” to my list of accomplishments from yesterday.

Do I know how to milk a Sunday or what?