Eat the Rich
Waking up before noon is a bourgeois value.
I tell this to myself most mornings, trying to be okay with the fact that I’ve slept til 10, 10:30, 11, 11:30am once again. It’s always before technical noon when I wake up, but just barely, and that aphorism is really about waking up at 6 or 7 or something anyway. Rise and shine, breakfast time, exercise, start your day, GMA.
Sleeping eight hours a night is NOT a sin. That’s something else I have to remind myself every morning. My family takes a bizarre amount of pride in how little they sleep— 6 hours a night is considered a wasteful amount of snoozing, and going for the entire holiday season on barely 4 hours a night is standard (my family is a matriarchy, and Women Get The Shitwork, so I think their sleeplessness is a pride-by-deflection— the pride of a survivor, not of a marathon runner— rather than a protestant belief in early rising). I used to do it, too, because I had internalized the values (before I understood their source). So I did grad school on 5 hours a night or less, working all the waking hours, and felt slothful when I napped from exhaustion on the bus. That was time I could have been reading, after all.
So, yeah, when you go to bed at 3am, it’s probably okay to sleep until noon, but still. I feel so … the word isn’t “decadent” — “decadent” is eating chocolate at breakfast, this feels more like… oh, it feels like depression. Hehehahahahaha. Lol. Depression, our old friend. But plot twist! It’s not depression! It just feels like depression.
And that, dear readers, is a bourgeois value system. It’s a feeling that I should do this or that, because society does one or the other, and going along with society is what normal, healthy people do. But why? Rising with the sun only makes sense if you’re sleeping when it sets, and none of us are, so we’re already outside of the biological imperative. And friends, we haven’t been farmers in a generation or two, so it’s not like we have fields to tend and donkeys to feed. The values of the bourgeois— including waking up at dawn— are stupid leftovers of a runaway crony capitalist system that’s left us broke and barely hanging on, in debt and unable to get healthcare … blah blah blah, you know the rest.
So fuck it, I’m allowed to sleep til noon. And so are you. We’re all allowed to sleep til noon whenever we can. We’re allowed to relax. We’re allowed to binge-watch our favorite show; binge-read a good book; and get “nothing” done for a few days without it being a sign of The Depression. This reminder is my holiday gift to myself. Don’t call it “self-care” — self-care is remembering to brush your teeth and take a shower when The Depression (or his brother, The Anxiety) has actually taken up residence. And it’s not “I’m okay, you’re okay” either, because we are NOT okay, none of this world is okay right now and it would take an egocentric monster not to be affected by it— it’s more like “we’re fucked, the system is fucked, but we’re still here, so let’s make do”.
It’s December, y’all, and I am pummeled: body, mind, and soul. My very right to exist continues to have a tenuous relationship with the state and I have lived on the precipice for so long that the soles of my feet are shredded from the edge, and I still have it better than so many. Fuck, y’all. I thought this post was going to be about sleeping, but nah. It’s about Nazis. Fuck. Why does it always have to be about nazis anymore? Fuck nazis. Nazis are inevitable in the arc of bourgeois values. Damn.
Anyway, it’s December, and we’re still here, and we’re allowed to be unproductive for a while. I’m done apologizing for it.
