A Day in the Life

The alarm goes off at 5:30 (the beeping, never the radio. The radio works its way into the plaster cracks of my dreams, becoming part of the walls, part of the atmosphere until it startles me awake, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes after it was supposed to), but this is only first alarm, meant to prepare me for waking an hour and a half later, so I get half out of bed and stretch over to the wall to turn it off before returning to my cocoon. The heat is off (we’ve decided it doesn’t get that cold at night anymore) so my bed is the only warm part of the room. I curl up, blankets to my chin, and then

The alarm goes off at 7:00. This is the real alarm, the one I was preparing myself for, and I hoist myself up on my arms, staring at my clouded-over eyes and my unclean, unsmooth hair in the mirror at the foot of my bed for a moment before emerging from my blankets and tottering toward the bathroom, flipping off the alarm as I go. Weigh, dress, stumble down to breakfast (peanut butter and banana sandwich? eggs? apple?), flip on the radio to WBUR, and flip open my computer. The news is coming at me simultaneously from the screen and the speaker, and I switch my focus from one to the other, ignoring stories about the war if there are too many of them. Don’t forget to check the comics (oh, those Pattersons—I can’t stand you anymore and yet I can’t bear not knowing what happens).

This is where my day gets amorphous—sometimes this lasts twenty minutes, sometimes an hour. At some point, work begins. It’s just a matter of switching programs on the computer and tackling specific problems (focus! focus!) rather than letting my mind bounce around from thought to thought along a daisy chain of ideas like it had been doing during the news. It’s the magic of DESIGN! I search the web, looking for photos! SPARKLE! I use the selection tool in Photoshop! FLASH! I create a layer mask! ZOWWING! Graphic design isn’t terribly exciting as it happens. It would make a horrible reality show (armed with only their laptops and their pen tablets, they are… THE GRAPHIC DESIGNERS! Yuh-huh. That’s right).

I try to get outside at least once by lunchtime (especially if it’s a nice day), tramping around the neighborhood, down to Harvard Square or up to Porter. On Oxford Street, there’s a playground next to the Maria L. Baldwin Elementary School. Walking by it, I watch the kids as they cavort, and giggle, and scream (why do kids scream so much?) and it recharges my batteries.

More work, and then at dinner time, I emerge again, and head over to the co-op, roommate in tow. Dinner is always so good—colorful, favorful, real food, good friends and good conversation. Sometimes the conversation peters out by 7:30 (an hour after the food is set out) and I head home, but more often it stretches ahead to 8:30, 9, 9:30 and I have to pull myself away, and go home to clean, or work more, or just unwind.

Other days, I eat a quick dinner at home, grab my climbing gear, and drive over to Everett, past the Teddie Peanut Butter factory (it’s strange to drive by where one’s peanut butter is made) and meet with other friends at the rock climbing gym. We start at about 6:30 and stay till ten, traversing the walls from handhold to handhold. I’m still a beginner, only starting to become sure of my legs and their ability to push me up on a ledge half an inch thick. I like it. It makes me feel powerful and agile, not clunky like some things do.

Still other days, Sam and I stay in and watch movies or see what’s on TV (we’re going to get use of our cable while we’ve got it) marveling at the increasingly alien display of Sturgeon’s Law that it presents to us. Eventually, it’s time for bed, and I sweep through the house, turning off lights, locking doors, and up to my room, where I prepare my bed and set two alarms, and then read until I go to sleep, ready for the whole thing to start over again.