Several Ways To Die Trying

My usual dose of morning disorientation is pretty severe. The process of finding and silencing my alarms has reached almost cartoon levels of comedy, mostly involving me slamming my fist into the alarm clock repeatedly for about 5 minutes, until I realize that it is actually my phone alarm that is going off. Repeated by snooze, every 12 minutes.

This morning, though, it was an entirely new plateau of disorientation. It was like I woke up with no functional knowledge of who or where I was. I was just blindly swinging my arms to try to silence that horrible noise, all the while wondering who I was and why, exactly, I thought I needed to be up this early. I came up with no acceptable answer to either question for a long, long time.

That never bodes well for a morning. But then I hit the shower, which tends to make me at least semi-lucid, or at least enough so that I can get to the office where there is coffee available to provide that little fix of my addiction to get me over the hump into consciousness. Instead, today I fell asleep standing in the shower, slumped over against the wall. And when I woke up (probably only a few seconds later) I had the worst case of water-in-the-ear ever seen or felt by mankind. It is still affecting me as of this writing.

I wasn't aware of this before, but I am physically useless with water all up in my ear. I can't hear, I am slightly off balance, and I'm constantly shaking my head to the side like a wet dog. (Which, with my way-too-long hair that I'm sporting, makes me look like a sheep dog gone horribly, horribly wrong.) Seriously, I might as well just be curled up in a little ball under my desk (which is where I would really like to be, truth be told) . I would be equally effective down there. And I could get some more sleep. Mmmm, sleep.

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In other news, it is goddamn cold outside (28 degrees this morning) and the Truck of Malfunction has officially decided that it no longer wants to provide heat anymore. And with this final heating malfunction, the TOM has officially manifested every single car problem in the history of car problems, short of anything bursting into flames under the hood of the car. And even that happened once, so nevermind. Short of the engine exploding and rocketing out from under the hood (don't get any ideas, TOM), every malfunction has occurred.

Haiku for the TOM

Oh my poor, sad truck.
Malfunction is all you know,
Jason's early death.

I did, however, reinflate the mostly flat tire I had been sporting all last week, so I have forestalled said death for at least a little while longer, unless it is by frostbite. With my luck these days, the cold will turn the water in my ear into ice and the entire right side of my head will freeze up and become functionally useless. At least then I'd stop having to shake my head all the time.

Oy, can you tell that I have no idea what is going on right now?