I had my Benjamin Button day today. I haven’t read the story or seen the movie, so all I know about it is made up in my head. But I did everything pretty much backwards, as if my schedule were upside down, or I was reading my agenda in a mirror. I ended the day as a whimpering mess, but that’s the norm these days.

It all started when I slept the morning away. I had reasons to get up and get going, but they weren’t as good as the reasons I had for staying in bed. I always need to catch up on sleep on the weekends, and today it was more than I could fight against. I was overwhelmed, and under the covers was the best escape, and also the best way to get started.

As a result of sleeping so late, my feeding schedule was way off. I have to eat all four meals, and they have to be substantial, but they don’t have to follow the menu plan in the book exactly. So I had breakfast at 12:30 pm, and lunch at 3 pm. Breakfast was less than the book calls for, and lunch was more, and after that dinner had to wait until after 9:00. But since I don’t sleep at night, that didn’t matter much, except that I didn’t feel like making chili that late at night. That’s what the menu plan called for, but instead I made tomorrow night’s dinner, a gigantic salad. I’ll make the chili tomorrow instead.

In between breakfast and lunch, I did what I usually do on every day except the weekend: I worked. The Kennel employees have been feeding me the wrong daily income totals for the last several months, and they finally caught their mistake. I had no idea there was an error, but once I knew, I wanted it fixed immediately. It turns out we’ve made more money this year than I’d been led to believe, which is good news. But it took the whole afternoon to get things straight.

Then tonight, when I should have been relaxing and watching the Giants game, I worked on quarterly taxes (with the deadline coming up in less than a week). I also did the monthly payroll for our outside bookkeeper, Sanjaya, who is very slow and not particularly accurate. But he does things I don’t want to do, so I let him get away with it, and we even pay him for it.

Maybe “backwards” isn’t the right way to describe the day. It was more like throwing all my tasks in the air and letting them land wherever the winds of chance blew them. Yet somehow I didn’t end up with a feeling of accomplishing anything more than filling the hours. Maybe I’m expecting too much of a sense of peace to come from such an undisciplined mind.