Sunday, September 8, 2013

Stupid Shit I Read in People Magazine (August 26 edition)


Two years have passed since (Oprah's) last show, and what does Winfrey...not miss? The early hours. "Now the most exciting thing is to be able to wake up when my body naturally wakes up. lately that's 7:24 a.m." She has a ban on alarm clocks. "I hate them! I don't want to be jarred. It ruins my day."

God I know this feeling. If only I had a gazillion dollars in my personal Swiss bank account so I could banish alarm clocks, too!

And why the hell 7:24, by the way? Why not 7:25? Why not 7:30? It just seems so random and arbitrary a time. Is there some mystic explanation for 7:24? Could Dr. Phil offer a psychological underpinning? Could the author of The Secret tell her the reason she wakes up at 7:24 every morning is that generation upon generation of the world's greatest thinkers have woken up at 7:24 in the morning, too? That in order to truly embrace the Secret, all righteous thinkers have to set their body's inner alarm clocks to go off at 7:24?

I asked Corb about this strange time sequence, and he nodded, in that sage manner he has. As if such a thing were perfectly reasonable. "Oh yes," he said, in a tone most people use for discuss such solemn things as the pending bombings in Syria or the new twist in the Paula Deen scandal. "My inner body alarm wakes me up at 5:03 each morning, actually."

What he's NOT saying is that his inner self then goes over to the nightstand where his inner body alarm rests and SHUTS IT OFF FOR ANOTHER HOUR AND A HALF. I know, I have the proof! I'm the one who has to sit there and listen to him snore for the next ninety minutes. Or is that just the sound of his inner alarm clock ringing, which he just forgot to turn it off? 

The world may never know.

And then it dawned on me. The really scary thing about Oprah being able to finally wake up when her body wants to wake up is that she's STILL waking up ten minutes earlier than I am on most days. Damn her! Way to go, Oprah, now that you're slacking off, you're still making me feel like a slacker. 

Not that I don't try to wake up earlier. As I lay me down to sleep, my brain teems with thoughts of what I could do, if I just made the effort to make it an early to rise kind of day. I could squeeze in a blog entry more than once every two weeks. I could work on that extra report for the boss man. I could get that much closer to publishing my book. I could start building the addition to the deck that Corb's been craving for years.

Yeah, I know, I could do all that. Unfortunately, though, I'm stuck with a body that naturally likes to wake up at the very last possible minute before I have to go to work. Every day. Without fail. Even with one of those annoying alarm clocks that go off and jar you and ruin your day. 

Maybe that's why I don't have a gazillion dollars in a personal Swiss bank account.

Or maybe it's taken Oprah all these years to catch up with me? Yeah, that totally has to be it...