Dozing through the day

Do you know the feeling of absolute grogginess? The kind that gets up with you in the morning, follows you around all day, and (like a best friend, or maybe just a clingy acquaintance) refuses to leave your side? Grogginess was with me when I greeted the day grumpily at 7 am. When I tried to fend it off with coffee, it only pressed in closer, a great big smothering hug. Thanks. American Literature went until 8:50 tonight - always a monster, that class - and I honestly yawned twelve hundred times. And constantly popped my new retainer in and out of my mouth because I couldn't focus on anything else (it's extraordinary that a retainer can become so fascinating when you're tired).

Grogginess is terribly difficult to shake. But somehow I fought through a stats presentation, six and a half hours of classes, practice with a voice student, a meeting with a professor, and planning for small group with it enveloping my head in laughing gas. And I actually might have absorbed a little bit of something in American Literature. Was it extreme fatigue or actual comedy that caused me to laugh when my professor said, "Walt Whitman wasn't writing any prissy poems. He was writing about grass!" Perhaps my chuckles were a little much...

These days when an alert, conscious mind seems impossible to summon are never fun. People ask you questions and make comments, and you either give some inane response or grin like an idiot. Or make an excuse. "I'm just tired, sorry." Well, hello, everybody's tired... this is college! You can't be talking. Sympathy is hard to come by unless you're deathly ill or have like 24 credits and five majors. We've all got it hard.

Solution? Everybody should go to bed at 10:30 and sleep until they feel like waking up. What a wonderful world it would be. Except you'd miss sunrises. And early morning mist. And the soft morning light that brushes your cheek so sweetly, turning the corners of your mouth into a smile. And breakfast, and coffee, and cheery "good mornings" as you walk to your destination. Mornings contain newness, freshness, a dose of hope and excitement found nowhere else.

All this musing makes me want to go to bed and wait for morning. Goodnight, and sweet dreams!