Force of Habit

Habit still wakes me up early. Too early, sometimes. Today, for example, it was at 5:30, not long after the daylight makes itself visible. Then I had trouble getting back to sleep, since I started ruminating on the day ahead. So I went to my office -- the house’s “fourth” bedroom -- unrolled a blanket on the carpeted floor, and laid down with my old brown radio next to my head. I fooled around with the dial for a little while, eventually settling on a Spanish station, turned down low.

Why Spanish? It was enough to get my mind off things, but since I couldn’t understand much, especially the commercials, it didn’t engage my mind either. Sure enough, the next thing I knew, I was waking up as everyone else in the house was, around 7.

It wasn’t a bad day. I had a talk with an editor I know who’s going to assign me something next week, a short quick job for the June issue of his magazine, with the promise of more assignments in the coming months. So things are moving along.