Starting January 1st, I will have one hell of a Wednesday.  To understand my future Wednesdays, let’s start with Tuesdays.  Actually, let’s start with Mondays.

On Mondays, I have to wake up at 5:30am.  I have to do this because I require a shower, coffee, breakfast, and newspaper reading time before showing up at work by 8am.  Because everyone seems baffled by this and why it would take so goddamn long to get ready in the morning, I’d like to define the following:

Real Shower – hair washing, drying, straightening, possible leg shaving if it’s not freezing outside, which everyone who shaves their legs knows just makes it grow back instantly so what’s the point? ;

Real Coffee – I will kill the next motherfucker who suggests Sanka ;

Real Breakfast – cold Pop Tarts in the car, surely you jest ;

Newspaper Reading Time – I cannot be expected to function in the world if I am not informed.  Also some DListed and friends’ blogs may be included, so let’s just call it “Reading Time.”

I understand that all of this doesn’t have to take 2 ½ hours, but I’d rather not rush while doing it.  I want to sit down, scowl, and think about what a pain in the ass it is to get up so early.  I especially want to think about what a pain in the ass it is that I only got 4 hours of sleep that night, and yes, I understand that some of you are parents and it’s not a big deal to you, but I am so far unimpregnated and can sleep for double that time on the weekends.  Which I do, which is why I can’t get to sleep before midnight on Sundays.

SO.

As if Mondays weren’t disgusting enough, I spend them with the knowledge that Tuesdays are worse.  In addition to waking up at 5:30am on Tuesdays and going to my real job at 8, I have to leave my real job at 5pm and go directly to the bar job.  Depending on whether or not I have customers, I’m at the bar job until any time between 11:30pm and 1:30am.  It didn’t take me long to decide that 20-hour days can just suck my balls.

I don’t know how I fall asleep on Tuesday nights.  I’m never awake long enough to find out.  Usually I can remember lying there and thinking about my day, but Tuesdays are like a delightful fifth of whiskey followed by half a dozen Quaaludes.  One moment I’m conscious, the next moment it’s morning.  I don’t remember a thing in between.

Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I like to know that I’m sleeping.  Nothing pleases me more than waking up at 2am on a school night.  I can look at the clock and know that not only are a couple of hours of sleep behind me, but that I have more than a couple ahead.  This is especially difficult to gauge at this time of year.  It doesn’t get light until just before I’m ready to leave the house, so waking up in a dark bedroom could mean anything.  Checking the clock = fool’s gamble.

Okay, right, so I can expect about 3 hours of sleep before Wednesday morning.  Which sucks.  I don’t work well with others at the best of times, and it gets ugly when I’m fatigued.  I’m nauseous.  I’m cranky.  I abandon my lusty interest in vocabulary in favor of growls and hisses.  I am awful when I’m tired, and this is something I really have to fix before January.

My sister got a job.  SHE GOT A JOB.  This is a huge deal, okay, because she’s 25 and still lives at home and has a kid and hasn’t worked in several years.  (I KNOW.)  It’s only a part time job offered by a friend, but it’s still employment and the fact that she’s actually going to show up somewhere in return for a paycheck is pretty amazing.  When she was trying to work out babysitting arrangements, she found that no one could help out on Fridays.  Logically, she asked my nephew who he wanted to watch him on Fridays.

“Erin!” he said.

Oh.  Hells yeah.  I’m so popular and you’re so jealous and I was my 3-year-old nephew’s first choice.  Swish. I am the coolest.*

“I think she has to work,” my sister said.  Because I do, and I can’t watch him on Fridays.  But I do get out at 5pm on Wednesdays, which led my sister to ask me if I could pick him up from his other sitter after work and watch him until 7:30.  His other sitter lives in Lemay, by the way, a location which will require me to get on the interstate at 5pm and go to LEMAY.

THEN I have to pick up a squally, hungry child (after I’ve somehow learned to use a carseat) and take him all the way back home to the city, make him dinner, tell him repeatedly that we sit down while we eat, and wait for his mother to get home.  Probably him shrieking the plot of Disney videos will be involved.  I don’t know how this will happen on three hours of sleep, and I kind of resent that this is happening despite my aforementioned ability to not get knocked up if I don’t want to.  I also resent that this won’t be any funner than the Chuck E. Cheese birthday “dinner” of his that I’m going to this Wednesday night.  What I mostly resent, though, is that I am a sucker, because this never would have happened if he hadn’t chosen me first.

* It’s really not that hard to be the coolest to a 3-year-old boy.  Saying “butt” and “poop” make you the coolest, most hilarious person in the world to him, and I say both all the time.