This is very important, particularly since I didn’t, how shall I put it, wake up at the usual time. Basically I spent this week sleeping through the book of Job every morning. My alarm would thunder catastrophically. I would stare at it in horror. I would turn it off. I would push play on the guy reading the Bible. I would wake up two hours later, bleary and disoriented. I’ve actually slept through the whole book four times. That must count for something, mustn’t it?
Anyway, the ‘article’ is wonderful because one of the ‘successful’ people—and I do think that’s probably not the word they’re looking for, lots of people can be successful, but only a very few people get to be Benjamin Franklin or Winston Churchill—postulated that all women should get at least one day a week where they shouldn’t have to get out of bed. Boy, in a sane world, this day would be that day for me. I would stay right here where I am, listening to the wind howl and the partially dead tree outside my window sway gently back and forth, contemplating the nature of reality, and why it is that dust accumulates so quickly around everything on the bottom shelf. Instead I will arise and do all the same things I did yesterday, only with even less enthusiasm than previously experienced, as if that were even possible.
Where is the listicle, in other words, about how to ‘go back to work’ after something as routine altering as the Christmas holiday? I combed through all the #thursdaymotivation tweets looking for the one happy trick that will make my whole life better, and came up, you’ll be shocked to know, with literally nothing. So I guess I’ll have to make my own—Anne’s definitive guide to surviving the first work week after a major holiday.
One-buy an extra bag of coffee and an extra box of tea
You should do this BEFORE the week starts—so like Saturday if you have to start working again on Monday. You won’t though, because on Saturday you’ll be wandering around your house in a tight panicked circle trying to pick up confetti off the floor and failing. So you’ll end up going out mid week when you don’t have time because you blew through an entire box of Bewelys in two and a half days. You’ll stand there in the checkout line, the awkward but agreeable teenager asking you if you really want plastic bags, the lady behind you ostentatiously waving her reusable ones that she remembered to bring with her, and you’ll decide to pay, at the last minute, with all the cash you have at the clanking around at the bottom of your purse. It’ll take you a while but you’ll manage. And while you do, you will rejoice over your small ability to ruin someone else’s day no matter how tired you are.
Two-go to bed earlier than you ordinarily would because you need fifteen hours of sleep now for some reason, instead of the usual twelve
And no, it’s not because you have a thyroid problem, it’s because you can’t remember, Every Single Morning, why you keep setting the alarm for 4:30. At ten o’clock at night you’ll set it without thinking, because that’s when you get up. But you are insane. That’s when you did get up months ago, or whenever it was that was before Christmas. Now you get up at 9am and eat cookies. Your body has completely adjusted to this new way of life. You know you should go back to the usual single banana at 11am, but you can’t remember why or how to get there.
Three-remember mid week that Sane You knows it takes four weeks to reestablish your ordinary life
That is, four weeks or whenever daylight savings happens again. That’s how long it takes. You’ll be waking up breezily at 4:30 sometime in March, and that’s when they’ll take the hour away that they ‘gave back,’ and that will give you the opportunity to start all over again. This is the meaning of life. And that’s really what you’re looking for, not success, but meaning. If you understand who you are and why the universe is the way it is—Annoying—you’ll be able to be happy and successful as you wend your inexorable way towards death.
You’re Welcome.
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