The Problem With Waking Up Later Than Everybody Else

Previously in what is threatening to turn into a series: My Problem With Blurbs. “I lose any ability to put a reasonable sentence together. It’s as if I’ve never read a book, never had a conversation, never offered a recommendation to anyone in my life before. The most deranged phrases occur to me. Suddenly I want to call things “dizzying.” All I can think of are things I’ve read in other blurbs, or lies, or gross misrepresentations of fact.”

I don’t know if you’re anything like me. I don’t know how many pieces of mine begin with “I don’t know if you’re anything like me.” Probably more than dozens, possibly somewhere in the low hundreds. It’s not quite a question, at least if we’re going by punctuation, more of a mild and low-curiosity admission of uncertainty: Who knows what you’re like! I may be a faithful representative of the commons, or I may be almost entirely alone, but I am all I know, and I don’t especially care to wade into the weeds of what does or doesn’t make a problem relatable, which has been a pressing rhetorical concern of the 2010s and 20s. If it is relatable, so much the better; if it isn’t, you had better go away and find something else to do.

What I mean to say is that whenever I have been staying with a large party in the same house, whether as a child during the holidays with my extended family or as an adult with friends on a group vacation, one of the worst things I can imagine happening to me, aside from accident or catastrophe, is waking up later than everybody else and emerging from my bedroom to find the rest of the party gathered and ready for the day in the living room. (Or kitchen, or breakfast nook, or wherever; one of the common spaces.)

There’s something about not just rising later than the rest of your fellows, but having that late rising remarked upon, that makes me murderously defensive, like an Edgar Allan Poe narrator. I take it as profound and personal an insult as Bosie took the “posing as Somdomite” calling card; I have been slandered, libeled, persecuted, and harassed, and I will not hesitate to call upon the Law to defend my cause.

There is no way to remark upon a late rising that is not immediately and perfectly hateful, by the way; this includes the comic, the reproving, the ironic, the conspicuously gentle and the sympathetic in equal measure. No one is better than any of the others:

• Someone’s up early! (ironic, affectionate)

• Look who’s up! (judgmental)

• Look who it is! (judgmental, celebratory)

• You must have really needed the sleep (consoling)

• Morning, sleepyhead (sincere)

• Morning, sleepyhead (ironic, said in afternoon)

• Good evening!!! (ironic, hyperbolic)

• Someone went to bed late last night! (indirect, speculative, libelous)

I hate it more than almost anything, certainly in a totally disproportionate fashion to the importance of the encounter, which if anything makes it worse; I realize I’m being unreasonably sensitive over something that ought to be taken in good cheer, and that awareness makes me feel additionally prickly and self-justifying. I might have slept no longer than twenty minutes later than everyone else — they might be the dearest people to me in the world — they might have said “Good morning, you’re the last one up” in the kindest and most morally neutral tones imaginable, and I will still feel like a starved lion facing a tamer brandishing a stool and a whip. My only reactions are:

• Goddamn you all

• I’ll kill the first motherfucker who so much as looks at me cockeyed

• So it’s come to this, has it?

• Judas!!!

• I’ve never been asleep in my life and you know it! That’s a goddamned lie!

• I was never sleepy! I was never sleepy! And I’ve never been sleepy! It’s you who were sleeping, you Peyton Place hypocrites! I was awake the whole time, waiting for you — I’m the only one who’s awake even now!

• As little as possible — !

• So — so!

• Give me back my clothes and my wallet — please — I only want to go home —

• How dare you say these things to me

• Oh, it’s a crime to be asleep now? It’s a crime to, to sleep at night, and to wake in the morning?

• You hate me? You woke up together to discuss how much you hate me?

• Don’t look at me — I tell you I haven’t seen him in five nights and six days — True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I have been asleep? I hear all things in heaven and in the earth, I hear many things in hell; how, then, could I have possibly been asleep?

• Enemies, then! Enemies, now and forever! Enemies until one of us slays the other, and no quarter from now until that day!

• If your wits were as big as your voice, my dear, it’s the great fellow you’d be by this! — You’ve the looks and manners of a hangman!

• These walls will never hold me!

If you are ever traveling with a large group of people and one of you happens to wake up later than everyone else (although of course someone will always wake up later than everyone else, that’s simple math), the only decent thing to do is make sure the rest of the group is split up into two or more rooms when they make their first appearance, so they don’t feel as if they’ve stumbled onto an impaneled jury.

Ideally the rest of you would go back to bed, and tiptoe out of your own bedrooms a good twenty minutes after me. But don’t be too showy about it; if it looks like you’re putting on an act it will be ten thousand times worse for you, I swear it.

[Image via Wikimedia Commons]