Stupid Jobs and Stupid Overrated Paychecks.....stupid.....

A co-worker once told me that she hasn't needed an alarm clock in years. She gets up at the ass crack of dawn as it is, and is so used to it at this point, that about thirty minutes(ish) before she needs to be up she gracefully and slowly regains consciousness. So for close to half an hour before she has to rise from the warmth of the bed, she lays in thought and peacefully meditates.
I hate her.

On the other end of the spectrum, my mother wakes up like a wolverine coming out of sedation. Confused, alarmed, angry, and immediately on the defense and ready to claw someone's face off at the first sign of danger.

Then there are those that pop their eyes open, project themselves from the bed like it was on fire, and rush through their morning rituals like their employers have literally threatened execution if they arrive even one minute late..

All of this I thought of this morning as I realize that I have woken the same way for the last few years now, and it ah-sucks.

Although I am not employed, I wake around 7:30 every morning to get my daughter ready and off for school, and to assist my boyfriend with his morning tasks and see him off to work. However, my waking process inadvertently starts a good while before I intend.

Around 5am, I am roused by the impending sneeze that feels like it has been preparing itself for ages. Once it finally reaches the surface I explode with (allergy related) sneezes. Once this two minute installment of "Try to Push the Brain Out Through The Nasal Cavity" is finished, I settle myself back down into my pillow. Throat sore from the audible contribution of the sneezes, sniffles from all the god-knows-what that has attempted to release itself from inside the passages, I then will myself to go back to sleep.

Then around 5:15, I am again jolted awake by that automatic urgency ones body gives when the nose is running, and is coming dangerously close to purging itself to all its surroundings. I then have to scrounge in the dark for the box of tissues that never seems to be in the same place. Once this activity is over, and an adequate amount of mucus is projected and properly disposed of, I lay back down and drift back into slumber.

At around 6:30 to 7-ish (depending on the day and the weather) I am annoyed out of sleep by the rapidly growing sound of the highway outside my bedroom window.

Now, when I say that the highway is right outside my bedroom window, I truthfully mean: RIGHT outside my bedroom window. A major highway, one of four major highways in this town, runs parallel, and extremely close to my apartment. How close, you ask? So close that from my open window I could throw a rock and it would probably land two or three lanes in. And we are talking about my wimpy-girl-arm-throws..... its that close.

Once the time hits for your average "Joe and Jane American" to be heading off to work, via highway, they pass right by my stuffed and clogged head and mucus filled nasal cavity. I thought that once I lived here for a while I would get used to the sound of the highway. After two years I have mostly tuned it out..........while I am preoccupied. But when my brain and my body tells me that it is supposed to be "quiet time", the sounds coming from outside make me want to shove something into my ear canal just so I can get an auditory break. This I have not attempted yet, but it is sounding better and better as each morning passes. All this in addition to the fact that my neighbors, whom I share a bedroom wall with, will get up early on the weekends to share their love of 80's techno music at an alarmingly high volume with the entire building and all who come within a two mile raduis..

In the beginning, when I was trying to be glass-half-full about it, I saw this waking process as being made aware that I still have more time to slumber before I am forced to start my day. Now I just see it as being cheated out of two or more hours of wonderful, wonderful sleep. I like to think that instead of the cat hair all over the apartment, the large amount of flowering trees planted all over this town, the excessive amounts of grass-type weeds everywhere, the dust all over the apartment from not having vacuumed or dusted in over a week, the food molding in the trash from when I cleaned out the fridge last......that it is in fact the car exhaust and emissions that I am allergic to. And it is this that is waking me out of my slumber, night after god-forsaken night. Its the worker-drone citizens of this town, with their overrated jobs, and their stupid paycheck-getting habits that harass me.

They have jobs. They get money. They have somewhere to go on a daily basis. And they are smugly and inadvertently rubbing it in my face. Or more appropriately, my nose and all its contents.

Bastards.