It’s that time of year again. I’m sitting in the living room at 6:41 AM, having breakfast, and the sun is rising outside my window, although sunrise doesn’t officially start until 7:05, meaning that the sun runs like a Swiss train. When I woke up 25 minutes ago, it was still nearly dark on the side of the house where my bedroom is. Less than three months from now, sunrise won’t officially be until I’m at work already, and it feels like ages ago that I basically didn’t see darkness on weekdays.
When I was thirteen, my parents took me on what might be described as a new-age Judaism bicycle retreat, which are a lot of words you might associate with my parents, but possibly not all in the same sentence. My memories of that weekend aren’t many (Kiddush wine got me like whoa), but one of the few involves having gone to a meditation session in a pagoda and dozing off. My head started rolling from side to side, not in that zen way that you do at the beginning of a yoga class, but in an overtired teenager way. I conked out.
One year ago last night (as in, the first Sunday after the end of the holidays) last year, at around this exact minute (9:44 PM), I was sobbing over a half-eaten bag of Starburst to Lindsay via FaceTime, telling her how much I miss home and several other things that are slightly too embarrassing to recount publicly. I was a homesick, SAD- and post-holidays-blues-stricken, hormonal mess. It wasn’t pretty.
Back in the day at UConn, in between turning over cars to celebrate winning championships and scaring off all the frat boys by talking about genocide education, I used to enjoy having a glass of wine in bed while watching a TV show in the evenings. It was a nice, relaxing way to end the day, and invariably let me sleep like a rock for eight hours. I also used to have dark colored bedding, which was a good choice on my part, because my bed may have weathered a few spills when I got a bit excited about whatever was happening on the TV.
