Today I could not wake up.

I budgeted myself several extra hours, setting my alarm early and even creating a backup, yet still I couldn’t find the willpower to move beyond reaching an arm over to poke at my cell phone to hit the snooze button… several dozen times.

Oddly enough, I got to work at my normal time, but several key activities that I wanted to get done before my working day began (pack a lunch, bike to work, hit the gym for an hour) did not materialize the way I hoped.

Of course, I only have myself to blame for this because, fundamentally, I’m a lazy person.

Packing a lunch should be a simple thing. Pop some salad into a plastic container, pop said container into a semi-insulated tote, and pop said tote into my book bag. Sure, I could’ve done most of this the night before, but I find that handling greens with my not-so-verdant thumbs and fingers causes them to wilt and decompose rather quickly. Yes, I’m probably imagining it, but there’s a reason I wait to fix my lunch. Unfortunately, my half asleep self also reckons that it’s “hella easier to buy some hard boiled eggs on the cheap in the cafeteria, health be damned. Woo! Ten more minutes of sleep!”

It was only when my car broke down that I started biking to work, despite having purchased a 12-speed several years previous to attempt just that. Now that my car is back in working order, my half asleep mind keeps making excuses for not getting up at the appointed hour by saying “oh, we can just drive to the gym in half an hour… we’ll get there at the normal time and it’ll let us sleep some more.”

And it’s only when I look in the mirror every day and see the spare tire that I’m carrying around that makes me think that I can consistently go to the gym and actually do something about getting rid of the bloody thing. But then the aches and pains of working muscles, that are normally given free rein to relax, keep me up at night and my half asleep mind tells the motivational center of my brain in a sweet whisper that “we worked out after work last night, surely we could do the same today, right?” And says this despite the fact that I wanted to get home and go to bed early.

…Sigh.

I know I’m lazy, and I know I need to stop listening to that voice that overrides my impulse to get up and go in the morning. I know that I especially need to stop listening to it over and over again as, while it might be okay to hit the snooze button once, letting it talk me into wasting the better part of my pre-work morning is pathetic.

It’s both easy and hard to be a better person. The easy part is choosing to do it. The hard part is stopping yourself from sabotaging it.

I seem to be doing pretty bad at the latter the past couple of years.