Day 199: How Did You Sleep?

If you live in the continental Uniter States, there’s a 31% chance that you saw somebody wake up this morning. Don’t ask me where that stat came from, I just made it up. If you’re in that 31%, there’s an 80% chance that you’re going to ask that waking person a question. What’s for breakfast? What time did you go to bed last night? What do you want to do today? What day is it? Who is the president? Who are you? Where am I? How much did I drink last night? And most commonly: How did you sleep? This question is asked all the time. It’s the one juicy piece of hot goss that you can get out of somebody who still has their eyes closed. It’s such an easy question to answer. And yet, it’s almost always answered incorrectly. They could choose to say, “good”, “bad”, or “fuck you, I’m still sleeping” but instead almost always use similes. And a lot of them make no sense. For example:

Like a baby– Oh, so you went to bed before the sun went down? And even though the sun is out now, you’re telling me that it’s 5 AM? Because babies usually wake up around 5 AM. Also, you’re not crying, that’s kind of weird. And that also means that you woke up several times crying, so you went and drank some milk. So now I don’t have milk for my cereal. Great. Now I have to go to the store at 5 AM, even though it’s clearly noon and replace the milk that you drank. I really hope you enjoyed sleeping like a baby, because it’s ruining my day!

Like a rock– Unless you’re in a tough situation or you’re Bob Seger selling Chevy trucks, you probably don’t know much about rocks. They’re inanimate objects. They have no feelings or emotions. They also certainly never sleep. Nor do they breathe. So you say you slept like a rock? I call bullshit. You were definitely breathing. If that was your best rock impression, it was pretty damn awful.

Like a log– No, you didn’t. Worms didn’t start a colony underneath your body. Nobody sat on you. They wouldn’t make a celery snack based on you. I saw you sleeping, it was very much not log-like. Saying that is basically the same as sleeping like a rock. The only difference is that a log is a living organism. Or at least it was a living organism. A log is a dead tree. That’s not you. In speaking of dead…

Like a corpse– Once again, corpses don’t sleep. They’re just not alive enough to do that. And if the corpse was alive, it wouldn’t be wasting its time sleeping. Have you ever watched a zombie movie where the humans get a 10 hour reprieve while the zombies sleep? That’s not a thing. You didn’t sleep like a corpse, don’t flatter yourself.

There’s plenty of things in the world that actually do sleep well. You could say that you slept like a cat. Cats are really fucking good at sleeping. If I slept like a cat, I’d say my night was a huge success. The average squirrel sleeps 15 hours a day. I’ve never heard anybody say that they slept like a squirrel. But they should. Or you could go the most obvious route and say that you slept like a bear in Winter. How is that not everyones go-to simile?

At the end of the day, I don’t like being lied to. I also don’t like being lied to at the beginning of the day. So do me a favor. If you slept well, tell me you slept like an armadillo.

– TeeCoZee