Time to Wake Up

I’m not really a morning person. ‘Not really’ in the sense that I despise them and tend to avoid them whenever possible through sleep. Sleep can make you oblivious to a lot of things. And that’s why I’ve decided that I like it.

Normally I hit the snooze alarm at least four times. I initially set my alarm to compensate for this and everything usually works out. Note that I said, ‘usually’. The other morning was one of those outside-of-normal-circumstances mornings: the revolt of my alarm clock. It went off at the usual time and I hit the usual snooze alarm. Repeat ten minutes later. Snooze number three, however, went terribly wrong.

I wasn’t awake enough to remember hitting the button the first time to stop the CD, but I do remember being confused as to why the music wasn’t stopping, so I know I must have at least slapped in its general direction. Yet the music continued and Mr. Tommy Roe began to sing. (Sweet Pea is a good song, but I’m not so sure of its catchiness when it won’t stop playing when I want to sleep. Most mornings I don’t hear anything beyond the CD whirring and the initial drum solo.) As I woke up more and more I pressed all the buttons I could find, but to no effect. My only goal at this point is to stop the music.

The buttons are not working. I quasi-rationalize that if the cover is open, the CD will not play and therefore the music will stop. With the press of a previously untried button, the lid slowly raised. The music stops… but the beeping begins. High pitched, shrill incessant beeping that was a hundred times worse than the crooning of some teen idol of yore. At least I could turn the music volume down on the music- there is no relief from this new torture. The beeping bores into my head and begins to quicken. When will this foolish nightmare end??

My only way to kill this obnoxious monster is to remove its power source… it must be unplugged. I jump (read: fall) out of the top bunk grumbling unprintable and unintelligible phrases at the clock, Tommy Roe, and the world in general. Reaching behind my roommate’s bed I unplug the clock- and then there’s silence. I plug it back in, hoping that it has reset itself or something and has forgotten its mission to wake me up. But when I plug it back in, the noise continues. ‘Fine,’ I think angrily, tossing the cord at the wall. ‘Stay unplugged.’ Gosh, if only I could wake up this way EVERY day!

I managed to schedule most of my classes at reasonable times. All except one. At the risk of once again bringing fire upon myself from the science department, I don’t wake up until about two hours into my chem lab. Sleep can make a lot of things go away, but not eight a.m. chem lab.

Feb 23, 2001