Christmas Bird

I have had the same alarm clock radio since I was 13 year old. Which is a bit of a deceptive title: only the clock works, not the radio (or the tape deck). But the alarm is the most annoying and loud thing in the world so I've never had the need to look elsewhere for my waking up needs.

Until this morning, when it inexplicably decided not to work. Instead. I woke up on my own approximately 4 minutes before I was supposed to be in the office. Which is something of an issue, seeing as the office is 15 minutes away, and it takes me something in the area of 20 minutes to get ready in the morning. I require a shower, a shave if I don't want to look homeless and drug-addicted, and the process of clothes picking can take a good 5 minutes. Or more if I have to scrounge for socks.

In my bleary state, I decided to scrap all of that, forgo everything and just put on the first thing I grabbed out of the closet. I was out the door in about 5 minutes, no shower, no shave, a too-small striped shirt and yesterdays pants barely in place as I raced to the TOM.

I made it all the way to the highway before I realized that my left contact was in wrong. I had initially thought I was just squinting a lot because I was not prepared for the bright lights of the morning. Instead, it turned out that my contact was actually folded over and slightly jammed under my eyelid. Apparently rushing through the process of sticking things in your eyes is not the best course of action. Particularly when you are doing so on about 2.1 minutes of awakeness.

Somehow without crashing, I managed to remove the offending contact from my eye, at least getting the painful factor out of the way. Replacing the contact in my eye while driving down the highway would be more of an issue. When one regularly cannot nagivate his own living room without banging his knee into the coffee table, he should not be poking at his eye while driving at 60 miles per hour. So I sort of just held the contact on my finger for the remainder of the drive, down two highways and 3 side streets all the way to my office building, and just drove with one eye open.

It wasn't until I was making the final turn to my floor of the parking garage (and I passed by a nice woman who gave me the filthiest look ever) that I realized that I had just spent the last 20 minutes with my hand in the air holding my loose contact on my middle finger, so as not to get it snagged on anything. In other words, I spent my entire ride to work unintentionally flipping off every single person I passed by, all the while with one eye closed in a deranged wink.

So yeah, Merry Christmas to you too!