a new relationship with my alarm clock

throughout the years I have had, not only, many different alarm clocks but a different set of relationships with each of them. In grade school the alarm was set to the radio, in combination with mom sending a wake-up flare before her morning walk–if I wasn’t up-and-at-em by the time she got home…I’d slept in.

high school was an agenda that I had to keep: early mornings for early classes or birthday breakfasts or sporting events in other cities. this was when the snooze button and I really became acquainted, however under the roof of my parents, there was still little “snooz”ing to do when the schedule actually existed.

in college, the drill became about the skill of the late-wake-up; pulling sweatpants and a tank or jacket on only to run out the door and a block (or ten) away to slink into a seat only to, then, hit the figurative snooze button. college-life taught me about the “nature sounds” alarm clock that I still own today, although in those times it was more about being transported to s different place with the ambient noise than a change-of-pace from the standard beeping that jolts me out of sleep these days.

in the first few years of working, as I am sure it will be in the future, I have become accostomed to being slave to the sounds and glow of my alarm clock. It wakes me up with whatever noise I choose in the evening, to match the mood that I believe I will be waking up with, of course. It is also the glowing beacon in my bedtroom telling me to go to bed, or that I can’t sleep, or that I am waking up each hour and, finally, that I normally wake up naturally about 5 minutes before it goes off and then can not bear to wake up with it at the scheduled time (this is where the college plan-to-wake-up-late technique really comes into play again).

more recently, I have left my job. The comfy-cozy life of the urban design studio and print shop has been traded in to work from, well, bed. Not really, but I totally can if I want. Like right now-granted, this isn’t paid work, but I think you get it. This being said, my alarm clock and I are transitioning into a new relationship. We don’t fight nearly as much anymore, slapping her across the face over and over seems to be a thing of the past. Because the business is my own and starting up rather slowly, at that, the only time that I am forced out of bed at a specified time is when I have a meeting, a breakfast, a due date or am going on vacation: all things planned by me!-making them so much easier to accommodate!

receiving a wake up call this morning from my boyfriend who had left a couple of hours before (which is unbelievable if you have met the two of us) triggered the memory for me of a time when things were not as they are. A time will come when, once again, I am bound by my alarm clock as the access point between me and the rest of my day; but this isn’t it! It’s not that I don’t want to get up and get out of bed, I am simply attending to the idea that I am now at a time in my life in which it is worth paying attention to the subtleties that differentiate it from the rest.