I get so bored sometimes. Especially on days like today, when I don’t have to be at work until four or four thirty in the afternoon. The night before I’m always like, I’m going to have such a productive day tomorrow. Carpe diem or something like that. And I always set my alarm for eight. That seems like a pretty adult hour to get up. I mean, I know it’s not. I know real adults have to get up at like six or six thirty. Jesus. My sister-in-law’s boyfriend teaches at a school in Jersey and he has to get up at like four-thirty. Yikes.

So yeah, eight seems like a pretty reasonable time, if not the most adult time, well, you know, it’s not eleven. That’s definitely not an adult waking up time. When I was in high school I used to be able to sleep until one, two, three in the afternoon. That was the best, just that sense of being in bed, but so overcome by exhaustion that you literally had no choice but to sink deeper into your pillow, stretching out further to touch every corner of the bed. But yeah, I can’t do that now. I’d waste the whole day.

But still, eight o’clock in the morning, it’s more like an aspiration to me than an actual time of the day. I set my alarm to eight. But it’s often the case that I’ll just kind of ignore it. Or I’ll get up and act like I’m up and I’ll turn off the alarm and I’ll prepare to really get up, get up, but sometimes, not always, but sometimes a really weak part of my brain will take over my body and I’ll just be asleep again. So what I do is I set multiple alarms, one for eight, one for eight-thirty, all the way to ten.

But much as I try to outsmart my brain, I’m just too smart, and so I can’t do it. My mind  always knows that no matter what the eight o’clock alarm sounds like, it’s really just a hollow ringing. All I have to do is get up briefly to turn it off, because there are going to be more alarms going off at half hour intervals. And by the time I finally get up and go to the bathroom and take a shower and take the dog for a walk and make coffee and make breakfast and sit down to eat breakfast, it’s already much later in the day. What happened to being productive?

So I start to freak out. I’m like, OK, getting work done starts right now. Right this second. Right after I go online and check my email and check Facebook and check the newspaper and check reddit and then check my email again to see if anybody emailed me in the twenty minutes that have passed since I checked it the first time. And then I have to get up and stretch my legs, because I can’t sit still for too long.

And I know that I really should have started writing right away, as soon as I got up. I should just get it done and then I’d have all this free time to fuck around on the computer guilt free. I should just reverse it. Writing first, online second. But I can’t. It’s impossible. Not totally impossible, but definitely improbable. And then I’m hungry for lunch. And then I’m bored. And bored is the worst, because it’s a vicious cycle. I’m sitting around bored, and it just makes me want to sit around even more, even more bored.

And then maybe I’ll have a day off. I can sleep in until ten, guilt free. I can take as much time as I want getting my day started. But everything just gets pushed back. And I can see time skipping in front of me like a strobe light, like in twenty-minute chunks. I’ll be like, what the hell, it took me twenty minutes to read one article online? No, it took three minutes, but my brain just keeps clicking to more and more online nonsense.

What I really need is no job at all. Then I could spend six to eight hours every day just totally goofing off. I’d have to get more work done that way. Right? There’s no way I would just loaf around all day looking at videos and browsing lame jokes and pacing around my living room, totally bored. Right? It’s not possible that I would just sit around eating snacks in my underwear all day long. Right?