Friday, January 11, 2008
Time
I don't nap. It's not that I don't like naps, it's not that I don't sometimes need a nap, it's just that I hate waking up. Waking up is the most traumatic thing I do in a day. I already have to wake up once every day, why would I subject myself to that more than once in a single day?
I have never done well with mornings. That made being a student tough. It made working morning shifts in TV tough. I'm simply not a morning person. Left on my own, my body will generally settle into a 2am to 10am sleep pattern. For whatever reason, my body wants to be awake until 2am. That was really tough before the advent of 24 hour cable TV networks, though in the Rapid City market, David Letterman came on at midnight while I was in high school.
It was never a question of when I went to bed, though, it was the getting up that was the hard part. Everybody handles waking up differently. For me, I set the alarm and when it goes off I get up. It's simple. I hate it but it's simple. I don't lay there for a couple of minutes, I don't use the 'snooze,' when that alarm goes off, I just get up and jump in the shower.
I have an added complication though. I have a completely unreliable alarm clock. It was a gift from my ex-wife from when we were dating. I don't hang onto it for any sentimental reasons, it's just that I rarely have to get up early for any reason. Rest assured that if I had any reason to consistently get up early that I'd have a new alarm clock. I've actually had my eye on an alarm that my iPod would fit in to. Having the option of listening to my iPod before I go to sleep without headphones is very appealing to me, though the "wake to iPod" option is less so. I need an annoying alarm, something that I can't ignore.
Since my current alarm is so unreliable, I find myself, when I need to use it, not sleeping well at all. I wake up every hour or so and look at the time to make sure I haven't overslept. This pretty much assures that I awake before my alarm even goes off. If I've set my alarm for 6am and I look at the clock and it's 5:45, I just get up. I figure that 15 more minutes of sleep isn't going to do me any good, that the extra time would be better served having a leisurely breakfast or getting some other sort of early start.
My ex-wife, who bought me my current alarm, had a completely different way of waking up. She hated an alarm, preferring to wake up to music. An alarm would actually make her a little angry. She would set the clock to go off 15 minutes or so before she wanted to get up and let music play until she decided to get out of bed. That would generally put me back to sleep. It put her back to sleep too sometimes, making her late for whatever it was she was doing that day. But being late for a scheduled appointment didn't bother her.
It bothers me. I'm on time for everything, actually, I'm almost always early. Part of that comes from years of working in television, where you're kind of ruled by the clock. I never go anywhere without wearing a watch, the clocks are all set to the same time in my apartment. The alarm clock isn't set 7 minutes earlier than the actual time, the clocks in the living room aren't set to yet a different time, creating defacto "time zones" in my own apartment. This happened when I was married, I had no control of the clocks, the only time I could trust was that which I could see on my wrist.
The ex-wife refused to wear a watch, set clocks to different times around the apartment, and wouldn't allow herself to be awakened by an alarm. Before we were married, she stayed at my place one night when I wasn't there. She didn't understand exactly how my alarm worked, mistakenly set it to wake her by the annoying alarm and then couldn't figure out how to make the alarm stop. Her solution? Unplug the clock. Now I think that's stupid, but I respect the resourcefulness. Her aim was to make the horrible buzzing stop and unplugging the clock did that.
But she was staying at the place of a person who's a little anal about time. She was at my place. She proudly told me how she'd made the alarm stop when I asked why my clock was unplugged. She hadn't bothered to plug it back in. She knew how I was about time but didn't bother to even attempt to make it right.
We had an argument.
For some reason, I still married her even though we were so fundamentally different.
BOJ
I have never done well with mornings. That made being a student tough. It made working morning shifts in TV tough. I'm simply not a morning person. Left on my own, my body will generally settle into a 2am to 10am sleep pattern. For whatever reason, my body wants to be awake until 2am. That was really tough before the advent of 24 hour cable TV networks, though in the Rapid City market, David Letterman came on at midnight while I was in high school.
It was never a question of when I went to bed, though, it was the getting up that was the hard part. Everybody handles waking up differently. For me, I set the alarm and when it goes off I get up. It's simple. I hate it but it's simple. I don't lay there for a couple of minutes, I don't use the 'snooze,' when that alarm goes off, I just get up and jump in the shower.
I have an added complication though. I have a completely unreliable alarm clock. It was a gift from my ex-wife from when we were dating. I don't hang onto it for any sentimental reasons, it's just that I rarely have to get up early for any reason. Rest assured that if I had any reason to consistently get up early that I'd have a new alarm clock. I've actually had my eye on an alarm that my iPod would fit in to. Having the option of listening to my iPod before I go to sleep without headphones is very appealing to me, though the "wake to iPod" option is less so. I need an annoying alarm, something that I can't ignore.
Since my current alarm is so unreliable, I find myself, when I need to use it, not sleeping well at all. I wake up every hour or so and look at the time to make sure I haven't overslept. This pretty much assures that I awake before my alarm even goes off. If I've set my alarm for 6am and I look at the clock and it's 5:45, I just get up. I figure that 15 more minutes of sleep isn't going to do me any good, that the extra time would be better served having a leisurely breakfast or getting some other sort of early start.
My ex-wife, who bought me my current alarm, had a completely different way of waking up. She hated an alarm, preferring to wake up to music. An alarm would actually make her a little angry. She would set the clock to go off 15 minutes or so before she wanted to get up and let music play until she decided to get out of bed. That would generally put me back to sleep. It put her back to sleep too sometimes, making her late for whatever it was she was doing that day. But being late for a scheduled appointment didn't bother her.
It bothers me. I'm on time for everything, actually, I'm almost always early. Part of that comes from years of working in television, where you're kind of ruled by the clock. I never go anywhere without wearing a watch, the clocks are all set to the same time in my apartment. The alarm clock isn't set 7 minutes earlier than the actual time, the clocks in the living room aren't set to yet a different time, creating defacto "time zones" in my own apartment. This happened when I was married, I had no control of the clocks, the only time I could trust was that which I could see on my wrist.
The ex-wife refused to wear a watch, set clocks to different times around the apartment, and wouldn't allow herself to be awakened by an alarm. Before we were married, she stayed at my place one night when I wasn't there. She didn't understand exactly how my alarm worked, mistakenly set it to wake her by the annoying alarm and then couldn't figure out how to make the alarm stop. Her solution? Unplug the clock. Now I think that's stupid, but I respect the resourcefulness. Her aim was to make the horrible buzzing stop and unplugging the clock did that.
But she was staying at the place of a person who's a little anal about time. She was at my place. She proudly told me how she'd made the alarm stop when I asked why my clock was unplugged. She hadn't bothered to plug it back in. She knew how I was about time but didn't bother to even attempt to make it right.
We had an argument.
For some reason, I still married her even though we were so fundamentally different.
BOJ
# posted by Blind Orange Julius @ 6:33 AM 
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One of my favorite episodes of "I Love Lucy" was when Lucy set the clocks back an hour so she and Ricky would arrive at a party on time. He had been trying to teach her a lesson about punctuality, but it backfired, of course.
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