The Palmer Press

The first alarm went off at 5:20am, which was, as it always is, quickly disengaged and ignored. I try to wake up on my second alarm, which was at 5:40 this morning. I usually have a third alarm, but I must not have been on my A Game last night and missed setting it. Instead I woke up from some dream, already forgotten, around 6:03. The blinds were open and the neighbors’ windows were throwing light into our room. I set a timer for five minutes and rolled over to try to cuddle against Elizabeth. She immediately got up and ran to the bathroom. 

As she tiptoed back into the room, she snapped shut the blinds and crawled back into the bed. She asked, “What time is it?” 

“Six. I have a timer set for five more minutes to cuddle.” 

At this point I knew it was closer to only three minutes left, but I had actually started with five minutes and two seconds. I had accidentally scrolled the seconds wheel a few days ago cooking something and kept meaning to roll it back to zero. The alarm went off and I reset us another five minutes and two seconds of rest.

I was at this point fully awake. With less than forty seconds left on the alarm, I rolled over and disengaged it. I stared at my email, reminding myself of some of my work for the day. On my way out of the room I heard “look at you.”

I said back, “Doing the thing.”

The original plan, the usual plan, when I set the alarm was going to the gym. I am normally able to commit. I had not gone Sunday morning, to prepare for a rehearsal, and I had not gone Monday, because I was tired. Monday was a notable morning because Elizabeth was out of bed before me, and had actually come back in to try to wake me up after she was almost ready for work. We joked about it later that night. Tuesday morning I had just been lazy, so Tuesday night when I set the alarms, I announced, mostly to Elizabeth but really to anyone that could hear me, that I “must go to the gym tomorrow.”

So, at around 6:15 I was out of bed and packing some gym clothes. This was already later than I would have preferred. Though, if I showered at the gym, I could still get a good workout in and get to the WeWork without rushing. This is the largest personality difference between Elizabeth and I. I never rush. I leave early to get places and get frustrated with people and objects that prevent me from getting where and when I need to be, but I don't put myself in situations where I have to hurry. My slow departure from classrooms was noted in my middle school parent-teacher conferences. There were no late arrivals to note. 

So, with the time I have this morning, I believe I can go to the gym. After packing my bag, I went into the kitchen to fill a water bottle for my creatine (always two scoops) and some vitamins. One is a fish oil, one a turmeric. Both are vaguely joint, heart, or brain health focused. The last pill is GABA, which is purely mental clarity. It is supposed to be low in people with depression, so I take one pill. This is common advice on the internet. I take only one pill, even though the container says to take three. When I've taken two, I get a wild head rush and need to breathe deeply for a few minutes. I have a feeling the dosage is inconsistent. It’s fun sometimes at the gym, that little rush, but I stick to one capsule today. 

After I finish filling the water bottle but before I can get to the vitamins, I encounter the kitchen as we left it the night before. We joke about a 'night crew' and 'morning crew' but the night crew had a volleyball match late that night. The night crew is also fourteen weeks pregnant. So, I resolve to doing the handful of dishes in the sink and cleaning the two pots. The only food that has touched anything is a white chicken chili, so it's relatively quick work. I was also estatic that the dishwasher was dirty and at least 15% loaded. There was no risk of overfilling. 

As the dishwasher started, I saw the clock at 6:40. I could still be at the gym by 7:00. I put on my gym clothes, located a hat. Before throwing my laptop into my backpack, I remembered one administrative work task that I should do earlier rather than later. I sat down, cleared the task in under fifteen minutes, but then I saw the clock and the pile of recyclables from our recent IKEA purchase still strewn about. We had another shipment from IKEA coming today, so I knew I needed to get the big cardboard out of the way. Elizabeth had promised me that she would show her appreciation for me assembling the furniture by taking care of the boxes. When she offered that, I told her that I’d rather have her put all her bagged up clothes into the furniture once it was assembled. 

Armed with the knowlege that more large boxes were on their way, I tackled the next task. I gathered up the cardboard, and some of the milk boxes stacked beside the trash. We had gone through three half-gallon boxes of the Grass-Fed milk, partially as a result of my lattes and protein shakes, and only minimally by Elizabeth trying to eat cereal with high calcium milk.

The longest card board box is long enough to be awkward. I had been impressed when the delivery person brought it in, because it was heavy and awkward. Now it was just awkward, and even more so when trying to drag it out along with a bunch of folded milk cartons. I spent a few minutes in the front of the apartment building, tossing a hanger from the dry cleaners and chopping up the cardboard into bin sized pieces with a small box-cutter.

Coming back inside, I had given up on the gym. We were backed up on laundry, since our dryer had seized and had filled our apartment with the smell of melted plastic. When I can home and smelled it that day, I was worried Elizabeth had passed out from carbon monoxide poisoning. Luckily the worst of it was that we had to hang dry a few loads of laundry, which we ignored on the rack by the window. My goal with the laundry was to catch us back up, so I threw the top few handfuls of clothes into the machine. 

With ample time to get ready for my day now that the gym was off the schedule, I shaved my face and trimmed my nose hair. I hate to shave, but it had been long enough that I needed it. I shower after I shave, because I always cut my face. Usually the bleeding stops in the shower. In the shower, I had the radical thought “What if I deleted the email app on my phone?”

I thought about Jack White, the musician in the White Stripes. I am not crazy for his music, I don’t dislike it but I almost exclusively hear it blasted at stadiums instead of through my AirPods. He doesn’t have a cell phone, so he just texts or emails through a MacBook. He’s a rockstar so he can get away with it, but I feel like he probably has more urgent emails than I do. Maybe I can try It. I haven’t had access to Reddit in two months and don’t miss it. Maybe losing access to constant emails would feel the same in two months.

After the shower, I pulled a pair of socks off the drying rack. The Ohio State laundry bag that we had been keeping our clean socks in was fresh out of anything that one would actually wear in public, so the drying rack was the last option. 

Dressed and out the door, I knew I wanted to make it to the WeWork with enough time to attempt getting a reservation at 4 Charles, a nice steakhouse where we once saw Liam Neeson, for Elizabeth’s birthday. I had enough time to walk one step into a deli by the uptown train station, only to decide I’d rather wait to buy a drink and a protein bar at the Whole Foods by the Harlem WeWork.

Before the 180 in the deli doorway, I noticed the way the light hit a local grocery store. I usually walk past it earlier in the morning, when it’s still shaded by the buildings across Broadway. But by 8am, it looked like what I imagine when I think of Parisian fruit mongers. Somehow the buildings of the Manhattan skyline and the celestial bodies had aligned to cast a golden few minutes on Barzini’s overripe fruit.  

On the subway platform, I started to record my day, retracing from when I got out of bed. I definitely wanted to record the line about the celestial bodies and how they transformed the usual “Ratzini’s” into something appealing. I then remember that the dream was somehow back at Ohio State, conversing with a woman for whose child I had made balloon animals for at a birthday party. The conversation was about how Elizabeth and I had our first child on the way. I had six minutes on the platform, which is usually torture. But it was a cooler morning and I had skipped the gym, so I used the time to start capturing this note.  

Off the train and through the Whole Foods checkout, I was at the desk by 8:45. Reservations for 4 Charles open at 9am, twenty-one days in advance, and today was the day. Our friend Wei was also in position on the reservations site at 9am, but we ultimately failed. It was worse than US Open tickets, just trying to get a table at this restaurant on a random Tuesday in October. 

At 9:01, with the excitement from the frenzied attempt at booking settled, displaced by disappointment that I had not solved my ultimate task of the birthday dinner plan, I logged onto my first call of the day.