**Cross-posted from the livejournal because it sounded vagualy diarylandlike.**
It's becoming painfully clear that I'm not seventeen anymore. Not only does it take longer for my body to recover from injury (I'm still wearing a back-brace to the gym) but it's also taking me longer to recover from sleep-dep! Gone are the nuit-blanche successions of days in high school when I could show up to a math exam on 96 straight hours of partying, and also gone are the "got less than four hours last night" university days wherein I could stay up half the night studying and still be able to understand all the questions on the morning exam.
Nope. Now we've entered the land of being utterly USELESS the entire day after sleep-dep (downright sketchy and unable to use a stove safely even without the substance abuse), and ALSO being mostly useless the day after that!
Yup. I got zero sleep except in fifteen minute bursts on Wednesday night due to the blood pressure monitor going off every twenty minutes. I spent Thursday cancelling meetings and drooling copiously whilst doing nothing but surfin' livejournal because I was incapable of any useful thought or action. I got home Thursday night and managed to stay mostly awake through a rather excellent movie (The Specials -- everything that Mystery Men wanted to be but had too shitty a director to manage) and proceeded to pass out without managing a complete disrobe.
This morning I woke up feeling slightly more energetic and thereby assumed that a full night's sleep had repaired the faltering pathways in my brain.
Not so. OH NO, not so.
You see, I have a very small but important routine involving my workpalce access card.
It's like my housekeys -- if I don't keep them in exactly the same place all the time then I end up wasting countless minutes searching for where the hell I may have thought was a good place to put them last night. Being a pragmatic sort of disorganized person, I tend to develop routines instead.
My access card routine involves removing my access card the minute I step over the threshold, and putting it in the exact same place at exactly the same moment. Last night, I was so tired that I faltered in that routine and didn't end up taking the card off until quite a while after I'd gotten home, when I was already upstairs (I think).
This morning I remembered having the "I need to remember to find my card" instinct, twice in fact. The second time was in my car on my way to work as I searched through my pockets, purse, under my carseat, between the carseats, in my gymbag, my lunch bag, and between the seats again. Having gotten halfway to the office I realized that THERE'S NO WAY TO GET INTO THE GARAGE without an access card, so I was screwed and wouldn't be able to park once I got there!
Ignoring my 9am meeting and the fact that it was ten to 9 at this point, I turned back, got home, searched the house top to bottom, woke up poor slumbering Dave, searched frantically at him (this makes sense I swear) and stormed back out of the house realizing that this would be the third time I was late for the same Friday morning meeting.
On my second way to work I called the building superintendent (because I have her contact info because I'm weird) and found out from her that there's a secret sensor that will open the garage during work-hours just for retards like me who forget their passes. I drive in, I park, I head into the elevator.
As I ride up to the 17th floor, I start unbuttoning my coat and realize that I'm wearing my access card, and then it all flashes back to me -- the first time I reminded myself to grab my unusually-placed access card this morning was when I espied it on my desk and put it on before I could forget it.
I hadn't forgotten where I'd hidden my card, I'd forgotten where I was wearing it.
My boss was so amused by this story that he forgave my lateness, and I've mostly caught up on what I missed anyway.
It wasn't until after the endorphin rush after this afternoon's workout that my brain did get around to kicking in properly. Which proves that I'm officially too old and decrepidilated.
After all this, two questions remain:
How long is it going to take to recover from baby-rearing sleep dep if we ever get around to sprogging again?
and
When I got on my two-weeks solid training in February-March and have to break from the workout routine, am I ever going to manage to get back to it?!?