My morning routine for the past month:

• Snooze through alarms for an hour.
• Wake up. (Meh face.)
• Stay in bed to catch up on Twitter and text messages and emails.
• Shower.
• Putter around in a comfy robe, seeking coffee and breakfast.
• Sit on my bedroom floor in a pool of sunshine with my coffee and breakfast, listen to a podcast, and start applying make-up from my nightstand-doubling-as-a-very-short-vanity.
• Remain seated with coffee and a podcast and some make-up until five minutes remain on the clock.
• Attempt a hair thing.
• Get dressed.
• Shuffle out the door with a long sigh.

Some parts of this have been working really well for me. Ever since I stopped standing at the bathroom counter to put on my make-up (in silence, without food and drink, not a scrap of natural light to be found), I've been a much happier human being. And I like that I'm not rushed and don't have to get out of bed right away.

Kyla Roma's most recent post, "10 Ways to Make Waking Up Easier with a Seasonal Morning Routine," has me re-thinking other parts of my routine, though. Like maybe I should find time to walk around the block and/or calligraph a new word every morning. I don't have many evening commitments currently (a welcome change, I might add), so there's no reason I couldn't go to bed earlier and maybe spend less time hitting the snooze button in the mornings.

Then again, this Netflix queue isn't going to watch itself.

The "new music Tuesday" playlist from Spotify today includes "11," by Hitchhiker, a song that is nearly indescribable. Imagine a psychopath making the "wah-wah-wah" sound that little kids create by smacking their mouths when they're pretending to be Native Americans. (Has society come up with a politically correct alternative to that? Or have children abandoned make-believe in favor of educational iPad games? Cynicism!) Now imagine that sound being ten times more annoying than you ever dreamed possible. It's downright impressive, actually.

"Caught in the Act" is an endearing article on Al Pacino published in the September 15, 2014, edition of The New Yorker. One section in particular focuses on Pacino's admiration for Oscar Wilde and his work. "Part of Pacino's fervor for Wilde comes from a desire to claim the writer's intelligence and eloquence . . . Pacino, whose formal education ended in the tenth grade, grappled for years with a sense of intellectual inadequacy." There's a quote later on from Pacino himself, talking about how he overcomes this on the stage (emphasis added):

You don't need a college education. All the things that you were inhibited to talk about and understand—they can come out in the play. The language of great writing frees you of yourself.

New copier repair man did not come to the office today, so my anticipatory anxiety remains. If the dad from Calvin and Hobbes were here, he'd assure me that this experience will build character. Then I would pack sandwiches and comic books in a knapsack and run away from home with Hobbes.

I'm happy to report that Adam and I had another successful Librarypalooza adventure. He navigated toward the non-fiction this time, and we wound up in an aisle with all sorts of books on American history. (The distribution per topic was perplexing: Native Americans, six shelves; George Washington and the American Revolution, two shelves; James Madison, two books; Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, ten shelves; any other president or important leader or era, four books.)

It struck me as I stood amidst so many nondescript titles with equally nondescript covers that I really don't know which authors to trust when it comes to non-fiction. I loved Gore Vidal's Lincoln, but would I love any other book on the same subject? Are the books in the Local Library's Weirdly Unbalanced History of the United States aisle meant to be enjoyed casually, or are they only in the library for the high school students who need to fulfill a bibliography requirement for an essay?

In the end, I walked away with Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, by Catherine Clinton. I can't imagine how someone could make the Underground Railroad boring, and the gushing reviews on the back cover seemed sincere enough. I also picked up Live and Let Die, the next book in Ian Fleming's Bond series, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman. We celebrated our literary outing with root beer floats, which is one more reason that Adam is the best little brother in the world.

Meanwhile, the new copier repair man is scheduled to diagnose and fix yet another problem at the office tomorrow morning, so if you need me, I'll be building my own underground escape tunnel to anywhere else in time and space.