After my swim this morning, I chatted it up with a nice lady in the locker room. She told me that she has a compulsion to always use the same locker every day and I told her that similarly, at work, there is only one toilet that I feel comfortable using. It’s the security of habit.
Then, as things do, the talk turned to the weather, and I told her it felt like last weekend’s rain just up and washed away the summer, because it has been so unseasonably cool for the past week. Then, I proceeded to muse about how it’s also disheartening that the days are getting shorter, because it’s still dark when I leave my house at 5:45 in the morning. Even though I only do this three days a week, it’s just too early.
“Oh, I know!” she said, “I got up at 5:30 in the morning every year for 30 years of work! These days, when I don’t get up until six, it’s like sleeping in!”
Her subtle jab about being up earlier than I was, and doing it for longer than I’ve been alive, reminded me of something from college my friend dubbed “The Tired Game.” It’s when you try and one-up someone by proving that you got less sleep than them. Extra points if it was because you were working on some project for school and even more extra points if you didn’t start that project until the day before it was due. Finishing a project before the deadline and getting restorative, restful sleep merited disqualification from the game. We even had a slogan: “Sleep is for the weak.”
I’ve never been good at The Tired Game. I need my eight hours every night. In my college years, I could push that to five or six sometimes, but that meant that there would be a nap somewhere in the middle of the day. (It’s true, the most important thing I learned in college is that naps are not just for kindergarteners.)
The thing about The Tired Game is that no matter how much you hate it, it’s hard not to play along with it when it gets started. I had to suppress the urge to fight back with a statement like, “Yes, you did get up pre-dawn every day for 30 years, but I’ve already completed my hour of swimming, and here you are just arriving.”
or
“Yes, but do you stay at work until 8:00 every night?” (I’m actually only at work until 5, but 8 sounds better.)
or
“Yes, sleeping in until 6 is nice, but sleeping in until 9 is better.”
or
“Don’t worry, you’ll sleep when you’re dead, which, by the looks of the lines in your face, should be any day now.”
But, that would be slightly rude, and it would mean I was succumbing to The Tired Game, a game I wish not to play, because the quality of work you do in a day is more important than how many hours you spent doing it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some blogs to read, crosswords to finish, and minesweeper to master.
