Morning has broken

I may be 31 but I am still a teenager at heart, as well as a sufferer of hyponarcolepsy, a rare narcoleptic derivative that is completely fabricated in order to explain a propensity to sleep when stressed. As such, I cherish my sleeping hours with a vehemence that many consider perturbing. My slight hysteria about sleep reaches its zenith at around 7.25am each day, when I awake and realise that my alarm will go off shortly. Desperate to pack in as much kip as possible, I try every trick in the book to scrounge a few more seconds of snoozing before my iPhone's reveille kicks in. Any noise, any interruption during this time will be met with red-eyed anger and possible neurotic whimpering as the exhaustion I am experiencing tells my brain that getting up will be a categorical impossibility without the maximum remaining sleep possible. Without the few minutes left on the clock, I reason, I will reach such a state of exhaustion that I will be forced to stay in bed until mid-afternoon, lose my job and become homeless, a concept that initially seems appealling, allowing, as it does, a fair bit of time to rest. Eventually, good sense kicks in and I either snooze, or panic about not snoozing, until it is no longer possible for me to stay in bed and get to work on time. Then I lie with my eyes open, whimpering further, groaning occasionally, and stretching langorously for a few minutes, all the while desperately searching for a plausible reason why I must stay in bed. Then I get up, always saying 'Alright, I'm up! I'm up!' to some invisible nagging parent.

Such is the waking nightmare I go through every weekday morning. You'll see why I'm not convinced that I'm ready for motherhood. Bad enough, you will agree, without further incidents with which to contend. But this morning, at approximately 7.16am, a full fourteen vital minutes before the first alarm was set to bore its way into my repose, I executed an unexpectedly vigorous rotation, accompanied by an abnormal duvet flick manoeuvre, and in doing so, knocked my (full) glass of water down the back of my (walnut veneer, art deco, bought on eBay, imported from Italy) bedside cabinet, all down my (matt painted) walls, into the back of my (ageing, past-fixing) stereo, over the (four-gang) plug socket beneath the bedside cabinet, over my (dusty) carpet, and deep into the (unreachable) crevice between the skirting board and the carpet's edge. As I typically do in these situations, I lay still for a moment, wondering if it would go away. But realising that I have to be a grown-up these days, I got up, found tea towels, and mopped. As always, I was struck that my average-sized water glass had managed to contain over three litres of liquid. It was 7.23am before I got back to bed and, naturally, I had to stay therein for a long time to recover from the stress. On the upside, I found a long-lost hairclip under the bed.

In unrelated news, I didn't like this joke, but I laughed because it was sad. I think my father will enjoy it, so here Dad, for you, is a joke I read on a BBC blog this afternoon:
A woman is looking at herself naked in the bedroom mirror. "I feel horrible," she says to her husband. "I look old and tired, my hair is grey and my skin is saggy. I could really do with a compliment." Her husband looked up and said, "Well, your eyesight's good."