The other morning, after staying up unprudently as late as I usually stay up, or a perhaps just a little later, I had an especially epic waking up experience.

I maintain a 70-minute "snooze" bracket, during which I intensify the pleasure of sleeping by waking myself up every ten minutes to remind myself that I'm asleep. If you've never formed this habit you wouldn't understand.

Somewhere around 8:30 I decided I should go ahead and get up. (The hard deadline for getting up is 9*, but 8:30 is a far more comfortable time to get up.) Since I was up and it was 8:30, I decided I could certainly take the time to put in my contacts. I opened the contacts case, and I noticed my contacts were blue. I don't have blue contacts. I've tried them on before, and it would be fun to have a pair, but the fact is, I don't have them. So I knew they weren't real. But I was like "hey, as long as I seem to have them, I might as well put them in and see how they look." (Like, if I got a love letter from a secret admirer, and I realized no such secret admirer existed, I'd still want to read it if it were legible and the words didn't dribble off the page...).

*8:50 real time, I think. I try not to know precisely how far off my clock is.

But when I tried to put one of the contacts in, I realized it was way too big for my eyeball. I put more solution on it and washed it and tried again, but whenever I raised it to my eyeball it was too big to get in past my eyelids. I was like okay, these are some funky contact lenses. They weren't even just blue anymore, they were like entire eyeball-covering lenses that made the white part of your eye look really white. They also were like alien or weird eyes, like costume contacts.

Probably about then my alarm went off again and I verified I was still in bed and another ten minutes of my morning was gone. I think I got up and went to work, but I don't remember for sure because the alarm went off again and I was back in bed. Finally, toward 9 I fought off the blanket and assessed my state of sleeping-in. Apparently with all those snoozes I'd been sleepwalking and stuff, because I had my work clothes halfway pulled on over my pajamas and other various chaos. Then the door opened and two friends of mine came in the room. Apparently this had all been a prank. I sat up and said, "Well anyway, I need to get up and go to work."

They were like, Um, it's Saturday.

I fell back in bed with a sigh of relief. Duh, all that snoozing for nothing. That's right, come to think of it... the day before was friday. This was Saturday. No worries. Peace. Calm. Rest.

Beep.

Beep.

9:00.

"No, it's NOT Saturday," I said emphatically, and genuinely got up. Really.