SKIMBS

Wake up (wake up), grab a brush and put a little makeup, hide the scars to fade away the shake-up… etc

I wake up mad I had to do it. My family called me “Saddam Hu-Sadie” throughout my first decade of moody mornings while I picked at my breakfast, typically arranged like a face in a futile effort to make me laugh. I guess I’m a good Jew in the sense that I refrain from labor on Saturdays, but it’s not like we ever had a pressing ceremony to get to on the weekends (we’re bad Jews). My late grandfather, who would’ve given everything to spend his days reclined and watching the Alabama ball game, at least had some Methodist vigor about the family’s Sunday routine: “I’ve got to get to goddamned church,” he told the cop who told him, “No, sir, you cannot drive through the barricade during the Mardi Gras parade.” He did it anyway.

When I was little, I had a phase where I got up at the ass crack of dawn just to prove that I could. I plummeted out of bed every morning and did 36 jumping jacks (a perfect number) and began my day. This typically involved arranging my Polly Pockets for what could be considered a race war if they weren’t all white (blondes v. brunettes) that was also obviously homoerotic and intricately plotted (I don’t think any of this is clinically significant).

This chapter didn’t last long. I sleep hard in the mornings, mostly because I work hard at night. My middle school sleepovers at Zoe’s house were probably the most productive years of my life, pulling all-nighters writing extremely violent Hunger Games fan fiction (perhaps clinically significant) and boarding school melodramas starring all of our friends from 6th grade homeroom (obviously homoerotic and intricately plotted). These days, I write at night with less conviction and more caffeine.

My 2025 New Year’s resolution was to drink less coffee. In the midst of my January suffering, this seemed like a sound idea: if I didn’t sleep at night, I ran the risk of re-introducing Saddam Hu-Sadie to the world. Now it’s April, though, and I’m facing the peonage of my overzealous promises. And who cares, right? In my head, the constant will-I-won’t-I battle with the campus café’s cheap and profoundly nasty drip coffee is an overwrought affair, but to my friends, who are likely growing tired of my newfound personality trait of Quitting Coffee, this charade is getting dull.

So now I get 2 cups a week: 3 if I’m a good girl that washes her sheets and writes her newsletter. But the other days must remain strictly unsullied by $2 battery acid. Here’s the routine: wake up (wake up, grab a brush and put a little makeup…), drink water, feed Javier (though he usually cries for breakfast closer to 5 and I oblige because I’m a weak woman who loves her son), stuff myself with my manifestation of parsimony (fucking oatmeal), and meditate. This final step has taken some getting used to. My therapist showed me this fantastic little narrative meditation in which I leave behind all my various selves and responsibilities and personalities at a little bench, tell them it’s gonna be okay, leave the head-honcho bitches in charge of the endless sufferers, and go on a walk without them. A smug little Saddam Hu-Sadie is pissed I didn’t do the dishes last night? My therapist gave me permission to smack that hoe out of my line of sight and carry on with my hike through my mind palace. Hats off to me: it’s devastatingly scenic.

Luckily I work at night, so I forgive myself for sleeping in. Plus, the last few hours of sleep produce the zaniest dreams (fortified by sertraline and a strict no-marijuana policy, of course). A recent dream from my Notes app in which I went to dinner with an old crush: “…then he leaned in to ask the server for a glass of Pinot and I KNEW HE WAS GAY!!!” Or better yet, my dream where I went to Italy to marry a pre-involuntary manslaughter Alec Baldwin, but as he leaned in for a kiss, he smelled like gasoline, and his lips were so tiny that I ran away.

There’s acuity in the morning when you let it happen. Sometimes after a walk through my mind palace, I journal several pages. Sometimes I even head out to the bakery and order a latte with some lavish syrup like salted honey or vanilla bean or blueberry pomp and circumstance, iced with whole milk (I recently rewatched Napoleon Dynamite at the dentist, an amazing way to tackle my periodontitis and fear of milk fat: “I see you’re drinking 1%. Is that ‘cause you think you’re fat? ‘Cause you’re not. You could drinking whole if you wanted to.”). Sometimes I am extremely lovely before or after my coffee, with or without it. Sometimes I am a little mean (Catherine says it’s my Scorpio rising, mostly). That’s okay. I just close my eyes and smack that revolutionary Socialist out of the way. Is it wrong to say he was right about most things? Are you even still reading this?