Starting Your Day Counterpoint

Starting Your Day. Part Two.

It's true, what you've been told: Starting your day is really an incredibly important part of starting your day. And there are so many ways to do it the fraudulent way. Let's define a standard weekday morning. (The weekend morning is critical in its own way and deserves its own section. That will come later. So calm down, you.)

The most crucial thing about starting your weekday is waking up, and the best way to wake up is by failing not to think immediately about something that really, really annoys or frightens you about the day ahead. Or existence in general. Do this before you even open your eyes. Think about that special someone who f***ed you over last night, or about the presentation you have to give your boss tomorrow that you don't even know what it's about, and why the hell are you supposed to give a presentation but if you don't you will never ever get a raise ever in your life. Think about that.

Then open your eyes. The day is already a real poopcake, and you sort of want to die. This is the correct way to start your day. Then you go to work, and the rest of the day is poopcake too. That can take care of itself. You don't need our help there.

Weekends.

Weekends have an awful specialness all their own. Yes, there is the inherent joy that comes with knowing you don't have to wake up for work. But in its place is the knowledge that you have to fill an entire day on your own. If you do it correctly, you will wake up well past noon, automatically making you feel like a failure for wasting most of one of the two free days that you wait for the entire week. Your head should be reeling from too much sleep, and you should spend at least an hour staring at your wall wondering if you should fall back asleep. But waking up should already be the worst part of your day. You'll only confuse things by having to wake up again.

Stumble to the coffeemaker and take a minute or two to lean against the refrigerator, unable to keep going because the weight of existence is burdening you and only you. Then sigh out loud and continue on making the coffee. The coffee is important. It's free at work, so you're addicted to it, and if you don't drink it, that awesome headache will come. So do it, you. Make that coffee.

By now, it should be well into the 3:00 hour, and you've done nothing but make coffee and possibly stare at the walls. To anyone else, this would be an utter crapstyle life, but to us, you and I, this is success. Because we're not dead. Yet.