Be Cool

All too often, I fail to get up at a really good hour if I don't have to. I know in my brain that getting up at something like 7am if not at least 9 is the way to actually get things to happen, but it just doesn't play out that way much. What does get me up is something concrete. Even if I sleep just two hours, I can get up at any hour if I want to. The other thing that gets me up is if I get a phone call. It's just not very pretty, that's all.

It feels like it looks in the movies, except in the movies it's a plain ring, not a whimsical ringtone like I have. Still, I wake up like some hungover cop stereotype, and swear. I wonder who could be calling me, so hard is it to believe that anyone would have cause for doing so. I see who's calling, and then I answer. I try to collect my thoughts and pull myself together before I have to sound ok to the person on the other end. The easy part is answering the call and saying, "Hello?"


It gets dicey after that. I think I must invariably sound terrible, and probably very hoarse or raspy. At the start, I'm very out there, but I come down to Earth quickly enough. I just don't think I sound too good however mentally present I am. Maybe if I were ready with a glass of water I'd be able to pull it off a little better, but a conversation resulting from a call that woke me up tends to include a well-meaning inquiry into whether or not I'm all right.

I am all right, incidentally. Outside of  not having gotten to where I would like to be in my ongoing quest to become more disciplined, I'm just fine. As a stopgap, I would like to improve at fooling people into thinking that I've been awake for a while when I have not been, which I think will serve me well even when I can get myself up at a good time every day. Then again, I don't know that a lot of the people who stand atop the career ladder I'm climbing are good at the latter thing anyway. Maybe I'm fine.