Day 13

What does your ideal day look like?

Short answer:

My ideal day revolves around my mom.

Long answer:

Is it strange to say my circadian rhythm revolves around my mom? I wasn’t always like this. I think it started in recent years, the condition might had exacerbated by the pandemic. Now, I basically wake up when she wakes up. My alarm is her YouTube video blasting from her tablet through 2 closed doors at 5 AM.

I went to bed early 2 nights ago only to find myself awake at around 4 AM. I check the time on my phone and discovered the internet was down. No wonder the house is so quiet and peaceful. No internet = no YouTube.

YouTube usually plays through the night, with angry commentators exchanging remarks in Mandarin about current global economy and other stuff but no, it was quiet, eerily quiet. I got almost 2 more hours of sleep before mom knocked on my door once before striding into my room asking me why is the internet down and that I need to get up ASAP to fix it.

I checked my watch, a few minutes to 5:30 AM.

“Internet’s down.” I said. “They’re doing maintenance. It’ll be back at 6.”

“How am I supposed to work? How am I supposed to check the market?” No one in the company works this early and the market doesn’t open for another 2 hours. “Have you tried resetting the router? Have you tried calling them?”

In the mean time, my brain was asleep and my eyes struggled to stay open. I ignored her and went back to sleep before being woken up again demanding I get the internet up and running pronto. There wasn’t anything I could do. We weren’t the only one being affected. The entire city was down.

The internet didn’t come back on until 3 hours later at a quarter past 8, mom stopped mumbling “That’s ridiculous,” and “unexpectable” beneath her breath. I began working my 8 hours, taking care of the 50+ emails littering in my inbox before finally call it a day at 4 PM.

Dinner is served at 4:30 PM as it has been since the start of pandemic in 2020. Mom believes it will give the body more time to digest before bed, thus will be lighter when stepping on the scale in the morning.

At 5:30 PM, mom headed upstairs, leaving me in the dark as I watched TV downstairs. At 7:30 PM, she shut her door, YouTube blasting, and she called it a day.

Meanwhile, with my door shut, I begin writing and blogging in the privacy of my room, ears perked up, listening for any intrusion into my room by mom. As soon as I finish writing, I’ll climb into bed and read until I can no longer open my eyes.

It is not what my ideal day looks like but it’s one I’ve lived on repeat for the past few years to the point I no longer have any expectation other than to survive and try to add a little something in there to make each day just a little more special and different from the previous.