Confessions Of A Splenda Stealer

The other night, CP called me lazy.

Yep. That’s right. Lazy.

He said that I have the tendency to make simple, small tasks bigger than they are. Of course I asked, “Like what??” and sadly, I could not successfully refute his examples. Yes, I hate brushing my teeth and everything related to getting ready for bed. Yes, I hate having to get up to fish through my purse for my credit card while the Delivery.com site is already on the checkout page. These are all true. But, to CP’s point, this is not what makes me lazy.

What makes me lazy is that I procrastinate so much that when I finally have to do these tasks, it makes them seem so much bigger. When I’m tired, the last thing I want to do is brush, floss, and wash my face. When I’m starving, the last thing I want is to be seconds away from clicking the “order” button, then having to delay my order by having to waste time looking for my credit card. Simple solutions such as getting ready for bed earlier would prevent me from getting cranky as I get ready for bed, and perhaps grabbing my wallet before I sit down to order would also lessen the cranky factor.

Friends, you never really realize how unique your own habits are until move in with someone who loves you enough, to be curious enough, to ask you why you do the things you do. The past six months have been a crash course in each other’s routines. My “lazy” ways of going about life are how I’ve been doing it for years (because I’ve never really dissected my own behavior before) and it will take some time for me to amend them. I mean, why would you ever analyze how long it takes you to get ready for bed?

Since living with CP, we’ve had many of these conversations, one of which happened this morning.

From the outside, it would appear that this was the morning that I woke up with a horrible headache, and took some Advil. But, in the reality of this little apartment, taking the Advil was only the final resolution after a long list of events in the ongoing saga known as, “the weird goings-on of Emily.”

Last night, I went to bed with a slight headache. This morning, at 3 am, I awoke with a slightly worse headache. Cursing myself for my perpetual forgetfulness to drink liquids other than coffee and/or alcohol, I downed the glass of water next to my bed.

Cut to 4:30 am, and intense head pain radiated from the right side of my head. And so my weird behavior commences. I don’t know about you, but when I’m in pain, I don’t want to move, which, I think is understandable. But, instead of just sucking it up to get up and take some Advil, I convince myself that any tiny adjustments I make will miraculously alleviate the pain. Personally, I always believe that the act of visualizing the blood vessel under stress will somehow relieve the headache, and when that fails, I tend to try out changes in temperature, such as switching which cheek is on the pillow, or lifting my leg out from underneath the comforter. When this inevitably fails, I try to cry, since I found that the tingly sensation of creating tears alleviates a headache for about two seconds.

When that also inevitably fails, I try CP’s pillow trick—where you turn on your side, place one pillow over your head, drape your free arm across the pillow to add some pressure, and then NOT MOVING for several hours. (I must say this trick really works wonders, but only after you have introduced some sort of pain killer into your system.)

Of course, the worse part about this all is that all the while I’m coming up with “remedies,” my brain keeps interrupting every so often to say, “You know, if you had actually gotten up to take the Advil, your head would probably feel a lot better by now.”

A few hours later, while moving even slower than molasses on not much quality sleep, CP asked me what was wrong. After giving him the play-by-play of events, he asked, “Why didn’t you just take something before you went to sleep?”

…

CP, that’s because that would be the logical thing to do, and as we’ve come to realize, the unreasonable, like the little piles of clothes I leave around our bedroom, is a bad habit I may have to break.