A Peek into My Morning Routine

First off, I'd like to make a clarification to yesterday's post. My little mini-rant on the specialization of knowledge at the at the neglect of well-rounded experience wasn't just some high-minded idealism. No, my real reason behind that post was to fight for my favorite board game ever. I don't care about people's intellectual well-being as long as they're able to put up a little competition at Trivial Pursuit. I mean, you can't put up a fight in that game unless you've got a broad base of experience (or at least book learning). With categories as wide-ranging as geography, entertainment, history, arts and literature, science and nature, and sports and leisure, you can't just be good at one category and expect to win. You've got to be like me and know the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, the creator of the little black dress, the biggest blowout in college football history, the name of the largest landlocked country in the world, and the name of the first recognized novel in the Western world. I may be a bit stronger on the history, science, and geography categories, but I can rock your world for the last pie piece and a win with some Coco Chanel trivia too. Playing on teams is for pansies unless there are too many people to play a person to a pie.

Yeah, right, Hank. I'm still gloating about that win in my basement in Adairsville at least four years after the fact.

I'm also a bit pissed off at the moment that the incident discussed on Friday resulted in just a single day of ISS for the student. I'm hoping the only reason is that 9 weeks tests are this week, but three days ISS would have let him take the test and still stay far away from me so I don't sucker punch him in the kidneys while he's walking down a hall on the other side of the building from my room. Besides, taking the exam is pointless for him. Not doing a single thing for an entire semester kind of makes the exam pointless. Hopefully, he's satisfied his probation or welfare check attendance requirements now and can skip the last few days of class.

And finally I make it to the point of today's post. Most mornings are a bit dull for me. I struggle out of bed, the world a hazy grayness seen through eyes that don't wake up as quickly as my legs. I stagger into the bathroom, turn on the hot water and head back out to undress while the water steams up. I bathe on autopilot, sometimes coming to at the end of the shower without any memory of having done anything while standing there, but being able to tell from the feel and smell that I somehow managed to scrub off the night's grease and stink. On these typical early mornings I hate myself and the world and nihilism looks like an attractive personal philosophy. This is typically a rather short-lived depression, as by the time I finish showering I'm usually much more chipper depending on my level of exhaustion.

However, some days are much happier for unexpected reasons. Maybe I get enough sleep the night before those mornings. Maybe K injects me with strong antidepressants during the night before those instances, but today was one of those days. As I started scrubbing Herbal Essences Dangerously Straight Honeyed Pear shampoo (not sure where it came from, it just showed up with no alternatives a couple of weeks ago) into my long, flowing locks I started bellowing forth fragmented lines from "Here Comes the Sun" and "Taxman" by The Beatles, inspired perhaps by their appearance as characters in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which I watched last night. Usually my shower tunes involve a mix of Built to Spill and Scorpions. I can really wail on on that one line of "Send Me an Angel" that I really know.

After running through my catalog of partial Beatles refrains (and a couple of other snippets that have now slipped my mind) I finished showering and pulled back the curtain to grab my towel and start drying off. As I'm methodically drying, I noticed that K (in a state of partial dress) reminded me of that chick who ripped off her shirt and ran around in her sports bra after winning the soccer World Cup. K's class was competing in their grade's Field Day games and this athletic pop culture connection set me to giggling. K turned and asked me what I'm laughing about and I said, "I just imagined one of your kids winning the egg toss and you sprinting around the playground in celebration in just your sports bra." Her only response was, "Luckily, we don't have an egg toss," and she went back to applying coconut-scented sun screen.

I guess she wasn't as in good of a mood as I was at the time. Ce la vie.