so i think i’m going to change my proclamation about getting up in the morning, at least in an official sense.
i’m going to opt instead for a proclamation about going to bed at night, which is kind of a way of tricking myself, and i think it’s a rather clever plan that should have been obvious much sooner.
:)

you see, i have decided that there are three things which give the grog power:

1) i consider sleeping to be a leisure activity, and it’s always a little hard to stop doing things that are fun;
2) i don’t have a very healthy relationship with the notion of “work.” despite the fact that i have grand visions, and despite the fact that i enjoy working long, hard, and well once i get in the groove, there is still a part of my subconscious self that views “work: the concept” as undesirable, and i have yet to convince it otherwise despite many long and passionate debates. as with all subconscious hangups, i can trace this to things i learned from my parents, but i don’t resent them for it and neither should you. ;)
i also learned to have grand visions, to work long, hard, and well once in the groove, and to desire to understand myself better in order to help myself grow, so it seems a good package overall.
these deeper probings aside, it can simply be said for our purposes today that i have a rather large psychological bump to get over in order to get myself going in the morning, and this bump is intimidating when i am in the presence of warm and cozy and soft things.
3) i go to bed really late, so i’m just plumb tired.

1 is not something that i really want to change. if it wasn’t stressful to think about the other things i might be doing, i’m sure i would be able to overcome my hedonistic impulses, and so there’s no reason to want to make myself enjoy sleeping less, in it’s pure form.
2 (as the relative length of the description perhaps suggests) is the principal foe, but it is also really complicated and intertwined with a lot of behavioral patterns that don’t have anything to do with getting up in the morning. by trying to make myself get up at a certain time no matter what, i am trying to use the perseverance that i feel when i’m awake and in the flow of work to inspire me to give myself a better chance of having the time i need to get things done. it’s a noble goal, but the trouble is, apart from having to overcome all the other psychological stuff, it is always defeatable by arguments that stem from 3. if i don’t go to bed until 3am, i can Always pull the “you need more sleep” card in the morning, and that just makes the bump higher.
so the Real goal is to get myself in the habit of waking up early so that i feel So tired that i go to bed early at night, allowing the pattern to establish itself long-term.

and if That’s true, then why not just make my resolution be to go to bed early?!
seems to save a lot of steps.
so that’s the new goal.
11:30pm.

it’s funny that i offered this as my secondary goal, and now i’ve written several rather lengthy posts about it.
oh well.
as it turns out, the primary goal (bringing food from home rather than getting it at restaurants) is remarkably easy.
woohoo!
but more on that later, perhaps.

oh, and the president of the US is creating a dangerous future for us all; overturning roe v. wade would endanger women’s lives; it strikes me as wrong that people filing for the EITC are audited more often than people in higher tax brackets; if we believe that marriage is a sacred union then we should stop allowing elvis impersonators to perform the ceremony for drunk people long before we think about stopping loving partners from making the decision in an intentional and committed fashion just because they happen to be of the same gender; i don’t think that we should try to win the war on terror by increasing the net amount of it in the world; and it totally baffles my mind that these three facts can exist in parallel, no matter how many times someone points them out:
-alcohol and nicotine are freely available and widely accepted for regular recreational use, despite killing hundreds of thousands of people every year;
–adverse reactions to prescription drugs rank between the 4th and 6th leading causes of death in the United States (as of 2004);
-marijuana is illegal, despite killing no one.

that’s all in case you were hoping for something juicy or controversial after reading the title of this post.
;)

i love my country too much to invoke the constitution and then talk about SLEEPING for three paragraphs.
and that’s the honest truth.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 9th, 2006 at 6:08 pm and is filed under introspection, ranting, self-conscious blather, things i do. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.