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I called in today, after getting … maybe three hours of sleep last night? I woke up around 2:00 in the morning to take a piss. Not unusual; this happens most nights. Most nights I take care of business, put my CPAP mask on, and go right the fuck back to sleep. But every so often my brain decides that I would be more comfortable if I left the mask off and tried to sleep on my stomach. And last night the mask was occasionally singing me the song of its people, a sign that I’ve let it go a little too long without cleaning the air holes or just replacing the mask, and I succumbed to this stupid, stupid instinct.

I need it to be clear: I will always sleep better with the mask on than the mask off, and there are no exceptions. I don’t know how I survived as long as I did without the CPAP mask. It is virtually impossible to get good rest without it unless I’m deathly ill, and what’s happening under those circumstances rarely counts as “good rest” anyway. My brain convincing me to try and sleep on my stomach without the mask is mental illness. There’s no other reasonable way to describe it.

What’s worse? You would think that after an hour of tossing and turning and being conscious of the fact that I’m not breathing correctly, I would put the mask back on? No. On these nights, I can never convince myself to put the mask back on. I’m always right about to fall asleep, and “waking up” (I’m already awake, and miserable) to put the mask on would be a bad idea.

It would not be a bad idea, it is in fact the only thing that will allow me to break the cycle and go the fuck back to sleep, and yet I don’t do it. Some nights I can pull this mess off and not be a disaster the next day. I could tell within minutes of “waking up” this morning that school was just not happening, and I was blathering and incoherent for most of the day.

It sucked and I hate my stupid broken brain and my stupid broken fat body.

Local radio managed to really irritate me during the drive in to work this morning. I’m not going to get into the details, because I’ll just get all het up again, but let me just say that there was some major performative piety bullshit going on on the radio channel I listen to this morning, and I just absolutely was not willing to deal with it.

But this story isn’t about that, this is about how weird my brain is, and it’s nonetheless necessary to include here because it establishes that I was fully aware of the date when I arrived at my destination this morning– which was not the school I work at, but another one, because I had an early morning departmental meeting for all the middle school math teachers and it wasn’t at my building.

As I pulled into the parking lot for this other school I got a text from another math teacher at my school, apologizing and saying he was going to be late because of car trouble. I texted him back, still in my car, and let him know that I’d seen the message. “Don’t forget we’re at <other school> today,” I said, and then hit send.

And then I immediately realized something: that it was September 11, not September 18, and that my meeting was in fact not today, but next week. And that, further, I had managed to go through the last several days holding the following two contradictory thoughts in my head: one, that the date of the meeting was the 18th– I am convinced that if you asked me the date of the meeting on Saturday I would have gotten it right. Nonetheless, the second idea that I was holding in my head was that the meeting was today, regardless of the fact that the week between the 11th and the 18th hadn’t happened yet. It was Schrödinger’s meeting, happening simultaneously today and next Monday until I actually arrived at the meeting, at which point the waveform collapsed and I found myself late and at the wrong fucking school at 7:30 in the Goddamn morning on a Monday, not how I intended to start the week.

The punch line: I was not the only teacher on my team to make this mistake. Apparently three of us went to this building, two realizing in the parking lot that they were wrong and the third managing to make it into the building and have conversations with a few people before the fact that she didn’t work there got brought up.

The guy with the car trouble managed to beat me to work.

Great fuckin’ start to the week, that.