False Starts

For absolutely no reason, I woke up at 5 AM this morning. I didn't need to go to the bathroom, there was no loud noise outside my window, I don't remember having a disturbing dream at the moment, my cell phone wasn't ringing and my alarm didn't go off, yet I was up like a shot. Normally waking up early isn't that big of a deal because I would rather not sleep the day away anyway, but a full two hours before my alarm was scheduled to go off and only five hours after going to bed is a little too early, even for me. So there I laid for the next couple of hours, desperately trying to talk myself into going back to sleep. As anyone who has ever tried this before probably guessed, it did not work. I've always wondered why some people can seem to fall asleep in a minute and a half, whereas people like me spend an hour tossing and turning. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking about this kind of stuff. When curiosity about these kinds of things leads you to think this might be a good career path for you, it is a good idea to find information about the Best Nursing Schools.

This of course made me wonder if anyone can actually talk themselves into falling asleep. Sleeping is one of my favorite activities and yet I could not convince my body this was the right plan of attack. Adding to the issues is the fact I have never been able to nap - once I am awake for the day, I am awake for the day and apparently, I was awake for the day. I actually feel that trying to convince myself to go back to bed was doing more harm than good because once my alarm did finally go off and I was resigned to having to get up that was when I was overcome with the urge to roll back over and sleep for another few hours. Alas, at that point it was too late. Even though my day technically started two hours earlier, now I was officially up. Stupid internal clock being broken.

-However, mine was not the only false start of the day. I was driving down the road this afternoon when I came to a red light. The car ahead of me (the first in line) was doing that move drivers in a hurry always do, in which he slowly but surely inched ahead during the red light so when the light does finally go green again they have a ten-foot head start on the rest of the world. The problem was this guy was a little too light on his brakes and soon enough he found himself almost a full car length over the line and nearly in the path of the cars going down the cross street so he had to stop. Not a big deal, it's happened to all of us at one time or another.

What got my attention was when the driver then decided this had to be the longest light in history and he had time to kill, therefore now seemed as good a time as any to track down something he dropped between the seat cushions. As I watched from one spot back the driver's outline began to root around in the space next him, searching for whatever he suddenly had to have (in my mind it was a quarter). It was at this point the light changed. You would have thought, given the way he half-ran the red light not two minutes earlier, that he would have stopped what he was doing to peel off down the street. But... no. (For a guy in such a hurry he sure was easily-distracted.)

Now he was preoccupied with finding whatever had previously disappeared. He actually didn't look up for so long that the car behind me had begun honking, which finally caused him to slowly pull through the intersection (I would have honked myself, but my reaction time has been slow all day thanks to the lack of sleep last evening). I can only hope that when that guy eventually got to where he was previously in such a hurry to get to he at least found what he had been searching for. It certainly would suck to be late and not twenty-five cents richer.