Yesterday, as I was fumbling for the fast-forward button on the remote to skip the ads in a DVR'd episode of The Suze Orman Show, an ad came on for a local gym. People were smiling unrealistically wide for the camera while using treadmills and watching what looked like the morning news as a cheerful female voice boasted the gym's early open time.
I'm paraphrasing, forgive me:
"Yeah, it's really great that the gym opens so early. Most of the people who are in here get up at 5 and are in bed by 8 so this is the only chance they have to work out."
Getting in bed by 8 is what elementary schoolers and really old people do. The only other excuse is mononucleosis. It is not what functional, normal, middle-aged people do. My brain insisted upon this repeatedly as concrete fact.
Then I thought about it for a second and realized that I know little about middle-aged people, less about normal people and nothing about functional people. The time I go to bed is determined by the time that my eyelid droops to the point where I can no longer see the top of the computer screen. This does not ever happen by 8 PM and would probably not be considered by many to be the behavior of a functional person.
I just can't get past the idea of how boring that life would be. How do you do anything? How do you watch The Suze Orman Show? You don't. Unless you DVR it, but that's not as fun, because Suze's brand of insanity is much more satisfying when it's late enough for you to laugh at just about anything.
I have to wonder, though, if that's the reason for the unrealistically wide smiles in the advertisement. Does getting more sleep make a person happier? There are a lot of things I might do if I got more sleep -- I'd get to school on time, I'd be less cranky in the morning, and I'd spend less time writing blog posts about sleep. Maybe I'd do my homework earlier, work out more often, eat healthier, find a cure for cancer, save the world, invent the Presto Change-o Gay Ray I've been dreaming of for so long and fire it at Joseph Gordon-Levitt and be happy for the rest of my life. None of it matters because I am not physiologically permitted to go to sleep before my eyes begin caving in.
I can't really remember a time in which I wasn't this way. Even as far back as when I had that old creaky wooden bedpost with cupboards that faced the door (I section off epochs of my life based on when the arrangement of my room furniture changed), I used my cheap-o Mad Catz screen light to play Pokemon games on my Game Boy Advance until the obscure hours of the morning. Now I play Scrabble and watch CNBC's late-night programming.
I might always be tired, but I will always have one of the larger vocabularies in the room and I know not to ever take money out of my 401(k) once I have one because Suze told me so. Ever.
