Day 2 is the bane of my existence

In case you missed my last post, on Monday I embarked on a grand quest to align my chakras, fung my shui, and generally get my crap together. I resolved to:

• Get up at 6 every day. AM. For realz.
• Spend only 15 minutes half an hour some amount of time less than an hour staring into my coffee every morning
• Haul my carcass around the neighborhood as if chased by something threatening but not very fast
• Not forget to ingest calories besides the cream and sugar in my coffee
• Notice that I have 5 other family members plus a dog all getting ready to start their day and try to help someone besides the dog, who has got his post wake-up nap routine solid

Tuesday morning I didn’t exactly pop out of bed, but I more or less managed to do it. Coffee was consumed in moderate quantities, although slower than I would prefer, which means I need an espresso machine for Christmas. Suck-Up Dog was roused from slumber and unceremoniously dragged through the neighborhood. Something resembling exercise happened, or at least that’s the explanation I decided on for why I was so incredibly sweaty gross and disgusting smelling before breakfast. I even sat down and wrote a couple more paragraphs of The Book, bringing the grand total to… a couple of paragraphs. I was feeling pretty smug.

Celebrating, I stayed up until about 12:30 reading, hyped up on victory and certitude.

Wednesday morning came crashing in like a thing that does a lot of crashing.

My similes are suffering. I am seriously tired.

I came to about half a mile from my house, where I discovered to my shock that I was wearing clothes, sweating, and moving at what Stevie Wonder might call a “run” if he saw me doing it.

Suck-Up Dog didn’t get walked, but he didn’t do much this morning besides look smug as he laid there looking like a bag of mulch with a tail in the middle of the living room.

I think I ate someone’s leftover breakfast off their plate.

Mrs. Nostrikethat drove the kids to school. BUT I WAS AVAILABLE TO HELP.

The first 24 hours of any new habit is pretty awesome. Newness in general is usually reason enough to try something– we are novelty seeking creatures in a world that provides endless opportunities to try something New and probably Improved, too.

The second 24 hours are where dreams are shattered.

I’m not going to sit here and pretend I am a big man because I managed to get up at the same time twice in a row, because on the scale of Hardest Accomplishments of Mankind this comes in at the “buttering toast using fake butter” level of difficulty.

My three year old manage to do it every dang day without an alarm clock, and he can’t even wipe himself. It can’t be that hard.

I am, however, going to sit here and pretend that even this tiny bit of self improvement is worth doing, if only because it’s funny to sit here and think of new ways to describe my fat dog, and because Gandhi said “Be the change you want to see in the world…unless it involves waking up too early then you might want to reconsider.”