Early Morning Confessional

There are a couple of things you may not know about me:

• It sort of takes a lot for me to get going in the morning.
• I love to sleep under 12 blankets in the winter.

I live three minutes from work. It’s beautiful and glorious, yet still, when all is said and done, I struggle getting out of the door without having a mad rush. A lot of my friends are growing up and getting married, and therefore get a built-in alarm clock out of the deal. I look forward to that.

But what to do in the meantime? Back in the days of high school early morning seminary, my dad would obnoxiously sing the Cougar Fight Song. This was obnoxious because he didn’t know all the words. I used to use a small alarm clock. It was far too easy to snooze into to missed classes. Then I bought an alarm clock that I plugged in across the room, forcing me to get out of bed. But then I turned it off and got back into bed. Or I would use my cell phone, which had the same struggles as the small alarm clock. When I lived at home, I used my CD player, and had it up really loud so I would get up to turn it off before I woke up my parents. Sometimes I used all three at once. That actually worked really well. I tried this method again in my new home, but I just got annoyed at Jimmy Eat World waking me up. You see, my roommate works nights, so she’s gone when I wake up, and I don’t have to worry about the noise, so I’m in no hurry to shut it off, other than that it’s annoying. It basically ended up like the previous alarm clock that forced me out of bed. But unfortunately there was nothing to stop me from climbing back into bed.

So basically, in my history of waking up in the morning, I’ve discovered there are more effective methods and less effective methods. However, when the weather turns cold, it’s a whole new ballgame. My new bedroom gets particularly chilly, so now when I get out of bed, I turn on a space heater, and crawl back into bed to wait for it to warm up the room. However, this often means I fall back asleep.

What’s a girl to do? This week, I made a discovery that basically incorporates all of the things that help me wake up.

Megan’s New Waking Up Routine.

Step 1: Set CD Alarm the night before, for 45 minutes before I have to wake up. Insert Pride and Prejudice (or any other soothing music) into said CD player. Make the volume a little noisy.

Step 2: Go to sleep and dream about attractive men.

Step 3: When the track “Dawn” starts playing, say goodbye to the man of the hour while slowly heading back into consciousness.

Step 4: Enjoy the next few tracks.

Step 5: After “The Living Statues of Pemberly,” turn on Bedside Lamp, get out of Bed, pause the CD Player, turn on the Space Heater, TCB.

Step 6: Unpause the player, crawl back into bed, situate 12 blankets, and play out the CD.

Step 7: Get out of bed to a warm room, feeling refreshed and awake.

I think the secret to this process is Step 5. It wakes me up enough so then when I get to Step 6, I’m too awake to fall back to sleep deeply. Also, the lamp helps. Seriously, I’ve done this for the last two days after getting a short night’s sleep, and it’s seemed to work. I figure if I get used to the Soundtrack, there’s plenty more where that came from: Little Women, Sense and Sensibility, Becoming Jane, Finding Neverland, etc.

I think the moral of this story is that it’s hard being me.