This is the story of what happened to me between 3:23 and 3:29 this morning.

I had finally fallen asleep, which was significant because lately I've been having trouble doing so. Something about switching back to a school schedule after more than two weeks off, plus I can't seem to stop thinking about biscuits, showers, and random cities in Ohio right around bed time. It's very odd, and certainly a little ridiculous, but those have been my nights lately, so it was nice to be sound asleep for once. Until the lamp by my bed blazed to light.

Here is the tangential back story: Daisy the Cat has figured out how my awesome K-Mart bedside table touch-lamp works, or else she has gotten very very lucky many many times. Somewhere in here walnut-sized cat brain, she seems to intuit that by nosing this metallic surface, she can almost instantly elicit a response out of me, as long as I'm in the room. She has only-child-syndrome (picked up from her roommate, no doubt) and starts to resent being overlooked pretty quickly, so when I'm doing things like reading, grading, or sleeping, she likes to make a ruckus, and this lamp has now become one of her primary disruption tools.

So it's 3:23 in the morning and my light is suddenly on. I know this game, so instead of rolling over, I swing my arm in the general direction of the light source, because this lamp is so great that you just have to touch it and it will turn off. However, in my haste to make it dark again, I swing a little haphazardly and instead of tapping the lamp, my arm connects full-force with Daisy trying to make a swift get away. She loses her balance as the momentum from my swing effectively pushes her into the lamp and instantly there's a whole knot of cat and lampshade and light bulb in a pile on the floor.

Great. So now I get to fix this before I go back to sleep. Sleep that I kind of need and was certainly enjoying (sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care). The thing about this lampshade is it's kind of cheap and terrible. The construction is problematic in that the shade is only attached to the base by some flimsy fabric glued to these thick spokes that are nearly impossible to reattach after it's torn, and the shape is awful because it's slightly tapered at the top in such a way that I kept getting it stuck on the spokes coming out of the base that it used to be attached to (by the fabric. does that make any sense?). Anyway, I groggily struggled with it for way too long before figuring out that if I just turn it over, the smaller top will sit on the spokes and the shade will at least kind of look like it's back on the lamp in a hobo sort of way. This arrangement was convenient A because it allowed the shade to still do it's job so I wasn't blinded in the morning, and B, the cattywompus slant would remind me to fix it for real when I got home the next day. So everybody won and I finally got to roll over and commence to try to fall back asleep.

Right before said sleep-falling occurred, I remembered a story my dad told me a long time ago about when he was a boy at Catholic school. One week he didn't have anything to say at confession, so he made up a lie that he'd broken his mother's lamp (that way if the following week was slow too, at least he could confess about lying at his last confession), and through the fuzz of oncoming REM cycles, I imagined that somehow I had just settled a tab with God (the bartender, apparently, in this analogy), and I fell back into a sleep of divine justice.

PS - Given that the Reader's Digest version of this story is: "I knocked my lamp off the table last night," you can imagine the magnitude of my desire to procrastinate right now. I'm not going to not like Ulysses, am I?