Then there's the way I got up this morning.
My mother is something of a worrier, and she's definitely one of those crazy people that advocates for getting up hours before you have something to attend to. Today, the issue was an 11:00 AM doctor's appointment at a place that is 30 minutes away. I ran this through the little time calculator in my brain and it popped out 9:30 -- one hour to get ready and half an hour to get there. I set my alarm for this optimal time, but in the back of my head somewhere, I knew that there was no way in hell I'd get away with it. She had her mind set on 9 AM at the latest, and it never took her that long to stomp up the stairs and investigate.
Naturally, this meant that she was up in my room no later than 14 minutes after her imposed deadline, staring me down and wondering how dare I not wake up on her schedule. Of course, I couldn't just let this go -- my dream of Perez Hilton trying to take over the world by buying up all of the world's cereal boxes and the only way to stop him was to cover his house in golf clubs (I don't actually know if this was my dream, since now, I don't remember it, but it must have been that interesting because I remember being really pissed about my dream being interrupted in that moment) was being heartlessly truncated -- and I started a half-awake argument with my mother. This is the kind of argument where everything you say is really intense and it feels like there are actually 10,000 people in an audience watching you and you're not really in an argument, it's actually a boxing match and your words are giant puffy boxing gloves. Using gold mines like, "I did set my alarm!" and, "No, that isn't cutting it close! Not in the real world! Maybe in your fantasy world, but not in the real world!" I managed to demoralize my mother quickly enough for her to exit the boxing ring and go downstairs. Despite this small victory, I had still lost overall -- I was awake and there was no way to change that now.
I "went to bed" (more like collapsed melodramatically on my mattress and stuck my head in the nearest available pillow) at 4:30 AM. Why? I was in a group chat talking about the "most trusted name in pumping" and the wonder of dual-ended dildos. (If you must know, we were making fun of the contents of an online Canadian sex shop.)
In case you don't have a brain calculator like I do, that means I got roughly 4 hours and 45 minutes of sleep. Much like arguments, at that level of sleep deprivation, everyday tasks become intense tasks.
That is a face of intensity.
By the time my brain solidified and I was coherent enough to list off the scientific name of at least 5 different oral antibiotics, I was ready for the appointment. Intense driving, however, is not generally recommended for your health, so I resigned to the passenger's seat and watched as the road in front of me grew gradually longer.
You know how sometimes, when you have a really bad headache, everything sounds about 150% as loud as it actually is? Imagine feeling like that at an Adam Lambert concert with a boulder on your head and a middle-aged woman screaming in your ear about Enrique Iglesias water-skiing nude. My mother jumped from subject to subject with remarkable agility, covering Craig Ferguson's last monologue, Inception, Enrique Iglesias, Inception again, how much everyone in New York sucks at driving, a conspiracy theory concerning Tim Hortons' pricing in different areas, the ownership of a local restaurant, and another local restaurant's rumored involvement in the Mafia before abruptly switching to singing along to George Michael's rendition of "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me." I really tried to contribute to the conversation when a response came to me -- like "they charge more in higher income areas and less in lower income areas" or "Enrique Iglesias is totally not the biggest thing in Latino music," but all of my responses bubbled and foamed from my mouth like I had rabies. It's really hard to understand people when they're talking if they have rabies.
This is all I set out to say with this blog post, but I feel compelled to add some sort of moral, so the moral of the story is to never interrupt a dream involving Perez Hilton, world domination, and golf clubs. It makes you have a bad day.
