Naps.

Here's the problem with naps: when I'm down, I'm down. I blame it on the mission, when a P-day nap was an opportunity to catch up on all the rest of the sleep of which you don't seem to manage to get enough during the rest of the week, no matter how many times you eat breakfast while you're studying your scriptures so you can nap during breakfast time. So on P-day we would throw in our laundry and crash for like three hours. And I guess my body got used to it because if I go to sleep during the day now, it's a two- or three-hour proposition. Even if I set an alarm, it's usually at least two hours before I'm awake enough to not just press the snooze button again and keep napping.

So if I nap too late in the day, it's a bad situation because I end up getting a two- or three-hour stretch of sleep, making it so I'm not tired at bedtime. This of course means that I stay up too late and am therefore tired the next day. And of course I get the most tired in the late afternoon or evening, just when it's the worst possible time to take a nap. It's a vicious cycle.

So today I was determined to resist. I was trying to keep myself awake listening to television programs while working on some of my tedious but necessary website work. Then I got too tired to even work on the website, so I decided to just listen to the television program. Then I got a little more comfortable on my pillow. Then I decided that I would set an alarm and get up when it went off... and about three hours later I regained enough consciousness to decide that it was much too late to be napping and I should get up.

I should know better, but the good news (if you can call it that) is that I'm still tired... so maybe I'll be able to go to bed at a reasonable hour after all. Or maybe I'll be getting my second wind just as bedtime rolls around and decide to do a couple hours worth of things (you know, I have a couple of people I want to write letters to) and end up going to bed late. Or worse yet, maybe I'll get in bed and just lay there not sleeping like I did last night. Which is, of course, the reason why I felt so tired later today...