Snoqualmie

The sultan's lack of energy.

I've been having an amazingly difficult time for the last couple of months getting out of bed in the morning, getting dressed, and generally doing anything that leads to leaving my room on time for anything. Having just now figured out a large part of why, I feel simultaneously brilliant for the discovery and really dumb for taking so long to catch on.

Around, say, November, my roommate and I redecorated our room for a house party. This was the kind of party where people give their rooms themes and exciting decor and activities, and people troop around from room to room sampling the environments and intoxicants. I believe I've mentioned our theme in passing -- The Sultan's Love Palace, no? We put up about 20 yards of silky red and maroon fabrics over the walls and ceiling, and pilfered cushions from all over the house to make the whole thing as much like a soft and opulent tent as possible. These things have some kind of gravity, I've since discovered, so that a week later I found an embroidered maroon wallhanging in the free pile and a housemate even went so far as to bring me a purple and gold tapestry from a trip to the edge of Tibet. The more the merrier, of course, so I added all of these things to the already outrageous accumulation in my room. For a month and a half it's been as near to a womb as anything I've been in as an adult, a cozy cave in shades of warmth and softness against the increasingly grey Bay Area weather.

For a month and a half my attendance at work has been increasingly spotty, the frequency with which I turn off my alarm clock has risen, well, alarmingly, and more and more when I do show up to morning commitments it's with bleary eyes and unbrushed hair. I can't drag myself out of my room unless I'm expelled by the sheer force of my own panic 10 minutes before I have to be someplace.

Put this way, it doesn't appear to take a genius to figure this all out. But until twenty minutes ago when I started taking down drapes and blinking in the brightness of perfectly ordinary blue walls, it never occurred to me that my decor could have any downsides. How could a cozy, comfortable, dim, enervating maze of glorified bedclothes ever be a bad thing for a girl trying to get to work on time in January? It couldn't possibly.

I feel a bit like Theoden being released from Wormtongue's spells, actually; the curtains have been thrown back, the cobwebs of the mind dispelled (though not those of the room, as it turns out), and I can see reason again. It's fairly glorious. To war! Or, since I have to get up early tomorrow, to bed! Er, hurrah?