There are rituals…

Everyone has them. They follow them everyday. Rituals, of various kinds. How many times we snooze the alarm, letting the cat out before we head to get ready, girls have lots of morning bathroom rituals of course–cleansers, moisturizers, sunscreens, makeup to make us look like the we already have the tan that we are trying to screen against– but there are other rituals. “Morning Coffee,” I believe is what I heard JT call his ritual… something about the first few minutes he spends in front of his computer each day… there are cartoons, forums, email, livejournals to be caught up on. Mine is always Trillian, email, winamp, livejournal. Cartoons are for lunch break, with more livejournal, and of course, boredom throughout the day leads to livejournal, too, because on my big cluttered monitor, the little typing window is subtle and may even look like I’m working.

I guess my point is that I never knew how set people could get in their rituals until I thought about changing mine… I made this “plan” to wake up early and go to the gym before work. Yet, I lay in bed in the mornings thinking that if I don’t get to hit that snooze button the right number of times that I’m going to be pissy and tired all day, and I have seemed to enjoy going straight to the gym AFTER work, so why the effort to get up early and lose sleep over something I can do later. EVERY morning I do this routine in my mind… one little inner voice says “Oh! Gym! Get up!” and some other little inner voice says “piss off,” then tells the arm to hit that snooze bar. After, what, almost three weeks of this, I’m thinking it’s a lost cause. I feel like a quitter, though, because I really wanted this to work. It’s just teaching myself a new habit right? Not sure what else to try.. have tried going to bed earlier to make up for lack of “morning sleep” time, set the alarm even earlier (led to more snoozes), perhaps I’ll work on an intricate system of levers and pulleys that lets me tick off a certain number of snoozes before dumping the bucket of ice-water all over my head.