Yes, very sad but I'm impossible to wake-up in the mornings and I'm never, ever chipper before noon and that's only after I've had at least three cups of coffee. At least in this regard I fit in with the les français pretty well: we both hate mornings, are addicted to coffee, and especially hate mornings where we have to wake up early and drink that coffee specifically for the purpose of going to work. Quel horreur (what horror)!
Where I stand-out as not being in the least bit française but instead a stressed-out, hurried, and in poor health américaine is my lack of sleep. While I can listen to the French complain about having to go to work on any given day of the week, I rarely hear them complaining because they didn't get enough sleep the night before. The French are always pretty well rested, they just prefer not to work. Moi (mwa: me/I), on the other hand, realize that while I do like teaching for the most part, I think a major reason why I dread Mondays so much is because Monday means that, for five days straight, I get less than six hours of sleep every night.
How do the French do it?? Along with skipping a meal, having messy hair, and putting make-up on in public, it seems that missing sleep is just something the French would never do. After all, being cranky and stressed from lack of sleep is not only bad for the skin, but it's just si americain (see ahm-ehr-ee-kan: so American). The French see full stomachs and a long night's sleep as key to a happy life and as a way to ward off eventually looking like a tired, strung-out American with who gulps a super-grande coffee while sprinting to catch the bus on their way to work.
Unfortunately as hard as I try, going to sleep in the wee hours of the morning is just hard-wired into my recent American college graduate psyche. Late nights are a sort of souvenir (sue-ven-eer: memento) I keep with me from all the way back in high school when I realized that I could procrastinate on all my papers as long as I pulled all-nighters the night before they were due.
Even today it's as though I'm stuck in a bagarre (bag-ar: fight) against time and the inevitable. I try to keep myself awake as long as possible, even if it's for no good reason. If I call it an "early night" (ie: going to bed before midnight) I feel like I've somehow failed myself and also wasted perfectly good hours of darkness better spent surfing the Internet, watching t.v., or reading a book until I eventually pass out with the lights still on...so not classy, and sooooo not French! Yet the painful cycle starts all over again: Monday will come, I will wake up at 5am having only slept for four hours. I'll struggle to keep my eyes open the rest of the day, and fall asleep drooling on the bus ride back home. Thankfully in America they make pills for this sort of thing.
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as they say at ragbrai, you can sleep when you die!
ReplyDeleteHaha, this was an awesome post! My computer is FINALLY fixed (it crashed during finals week last month!) and so I'm catching up on your blog.
ReplyDeleteNot having a computer is a funny thing-- I am so used to my normal tabs I check every time it comes on, that when I don't have it working and have to use public computers I rarely am able to remember all I want to do on the internet-- even some important e-mail accounts go unchecked because my routine is broken!
I love you Leith, and love these posts!!