Y’know what I mean? Some days I feel pretty sharp. Ask me a question, the answer springs into my mind, and flows off my tongue with erudite eloquence. I write well, I spell correctly, I have my facts straight and I absorb new ones effortlessly.
Then there are the days where I feel like somebody replaced my brain with a down pillow. Ask me a question, and after an uncomfortably long span of mouth-breathing consternation, I answer it wrongly, even though I used to know the correct response. I write a sentence where I repeat the word “suddenly” about three times over the course of a comma-ridden trainwreck of run-on phrasing. I can’t spell. I can barely type. I sit there like a torpid cretin, hoping for something witty to say; but nothing comes.
What the hell is it? I’ve heard of people “waking up on the wrong side of the bed”, but it’s usually a reference to mood. Me, I wake up an idiot. At least, that’s what it feels like. This happen to any of you? Any theories as to what’s going on? Did I eat the wrong thing for dinner? Not enough caffeine? Too much? If I could just figure out how to minimize the stupid days, damn, I’d be so much more productive. Plus, I’d be spared the creeping suspicion that, at 34, I’m already seeing the signs of incipient pre-senilic dementia.
Some days at work I count the money flawlessly and quickly.
Some days a stack of 11 dollar bills confuses me until I cry. I count them over and over, and come up with ten, then eleven, then ten again. Errrrrrr…
Those are the same days I can’t figure out the POS system to save my life, even though I have been with the company and the system for almost two years.
This happens to me at least once a week, and yes, my stupidest day is much more likely to be Monday than Friday. My theory is that after the weekend, when your schedule is different, it takes some time to readjust and get back into the Monday-Friday one.
And I hate to tell ya, but it does get worse as you get older. I expect to be a complete cretin by the time I’m 65
No. I wake up retarded and hallucinating. Seriously.
Normally I’m above average intelligence, wealth of useless knowledge and excelling at any mental exercise. Every once in a blue moon, I wake up and my brain is not functioning normal, not even foggy and slow, but has actually been replaced by a chicken-dog wearing a storm trooper helmet and Miss America sash.
I can barely formulate sentences or even walk straight. I see strange things in my peripheral vision and the true state of things is warped and unfamiliar.
I don’t drink or do drugs. I attribute it to being, for lack of a better explanation, awake while dreaming. My dreams are very odd.
I recall on one occasion waking up in the wee hours and being unable to read the digital clock on my headboard. I could see the display clearly, I knew what a clock was for. I knew that the pretty pattern of softly glowing red dots-and-lines was trying its best to tell me what time it was, but I must have stared at it for 30 seconds without being able to interpret so much as a single digit. It was a very strange feeling.
Oh my, yes.
Some days I can do mental gymnastics. Other days my brain needs a walker. What’s really disturbing is that recently there are more days of the latter than the former. I blame my Job of Utter Suckitude.
In closing I’d just like to note that “torpid cretin” is my new favorite phrase. I have oh so many uses for it.
I had mentioned this in a thread somewhere about made-up words:
daymnesia - the inability to remember, in the middle of the day, what day it actually is.
Actual thought:
Huh, what day is it? Oh, it’s Saturday, so I have tomorrow off and I can sleep in…no wait a minnit, it’s actually Tuesday, damn, four more days to go until my day off…no, it can’t be Tuesday, because have an appointment to get my haircut…did I miss my haircut!!!..no, it’s not cut…and my appointment is next week, and AHA!!! It’s really Monday. Why the hell am I driving to work?! IT’S MY FREAKING DAY OFF AND I AM DRIVING TO WORK!!!
And just as I get off the highway to turn around and go home, I remember that I switched schedules this week so I could have tomorrow (Saturday) off for FairyChatMom’s festaway party. And it took me ten extra minutes to get to work. At least I did n’t go home and go back to sleep, and wake up hours later refreshed and panicking because I missed work when I should have been at work when I normally shouldn’t have been there. Y’unnerstand what I mean?
I believe the technical term for this is “hypnagogic hallucinations”. The existence of this phenomena, a kind semi-wakeful dream state as you say, goes a long way towards explaining how otherwise sane people become convinced they are regularly abducted by big-eyed, grey-skinned aliens with a fondness for sticking cold metal probes up peoples’ arses. So, you’re not really stupid, per se. Think of it as a kind of “trip”, only without the inconveniece of finding a dealer or getting hassled by The Man.
Unfortunately, I find I wake up just plain stupid some days, without the fun psychedelic reveille. Worse, the stupidity persists well into the afternoon, or even beyond. It’s like some vile force sucking out my mind. I do think this may be worse on Mondays, as others above have suggested. I should probably keep a log, and maybe I can find a pattern associated with something. It seems like a lot of work to give myself an IQ test every day, though. Plus, I may get better at the test as I take it over and over, which might skew my results. I will probably have to base my study on my purely subjective self-observation…“Today I made my stapler look witty; Zip drives have more intellect” or “at the totally-packed seminar given by the Harvard bigwig, when I asked if the study was singly- or doubly-blinded, five minutes after said speaker clearly mentioned it was open-label, I may just have earned myself the ‘Most Attention-Deficit-Inflicted Employee of the Day’ award. My how I impressed the VP with that one.”
I have days like that too, where I’m sitting, just sorta gazing at the computer as if to determine it’s function. For me it’s most often mid-week.
The worse was a day whre the phone rang, I picked it up said “Hello”. It occured to me I was at work, and I gave the name of my previous compnay, paused corrected myself. Then had to repeatdly ask for the information I was getting. I really would have felt of myself if I’d just finished smoking bud or something.
Tuesday I was in the hospital with pnemonia. By tuesday after being pumped full of antibiotics and vicaden I decided I needed to go back to work on Wednesday. Bright and early Wednesday morning i got up, got dressed, decided I was good to go and could easily skip the pain pills, and headed out the door.
I hit my first snag when I got in my car. The battery was dead because someone had left the lights on. It wasn’t me this time, the last one to drive my car had been my husband, but he doesn’t do things like that. It briefly crossed my mind that he had left my lights on to sabatage my going back to work, but then I decided that really wasn’t like him. I went and got my copies of his keys and jumped my car and headed off to work. Haha I am in complete control.
The day went more or less ok all things considered. I got tired really fast and could not actually stay the full day, but I taught all my classes, not to my usual standards but at least compatently (I hope) so it was ok. I then came home and slept for three hours.
That evening when my husband came home he said “Furli, did you have to jump your car this morning?”
I thought “AH HA he did sabatoge my car, i will play dumb.”
I said," Why yes I did hun, however did you know?"
He said," You left my car running."
The times I think I wake up smart but am sadly deluded are the times I am most dangerous.
