The other night my batterry on my cell phone was taking its last breaths for the day as it blinked green. Odd since green is the color used to indicate abundance and the ability to move forward. On a Blackberry however, it means your battery may be too low for radio use. Having left my charger somewhere the night before, I paniced. My fiance was out of town so I couldn't use his iphone alarm as a back up. What if my phone completely died over night and I slept right through the 7th morning of my new job! What was I going to do? In an effort to conserve whatever battery I had left I called him from google phone. "Does my computer have an alarm clock in it?" I asked. Assuming it must considering it's a mac and they can do just about anything including spreadsheet creation, complicated mathmatical formulas and even take your photo. "I don't think so," he said not nearly as disappointed as I was. "Sleep with the shade open, the sun will wake you up." That was his only suggestion. He was right that it would...at 5am. I have no tolerance for light when I sleep. It has been one of the things I wish I could change about myself along with my metabolism and the fact that I didn't become a segment producer of the today show.Finally we're about to get off the phone when he says, "why not just use the alarm clock?" Wow, the alarm clock. That thing that if I didn't look at it instinctivley when I am running late in the mornings would become completely obselete by digital, battery operated, multi-functional devices.
Our alarm clock saddly was gathering more dust than I'd like to admit and that's more a figurative description of its lack of use and a very practical description of my dislike, and as a result negligence, for dusting. I picked up this now doubly neglected foreign object and thought it would be easy to remember how to set the time for the alarm. Hold the button that says alarm down and keep it down while you set the time. No. This now made the current time 12:31am which thankfully I realized avoiding a daybreak disaster. But...how do I set this damn thing...help. After about 5 minutes, 5 minutes longer than it should have taken, I figured it out. I settled into bed pleased with both my survival skills and the fact that sometimes borderline hoarding behavior can come in handy and that we hadn't gotten rid of that old alarm clock that we never really use any more anyway.
I woke however less pleased...at 5:30am even though the blinds were drawn. I tossed around in bed for the remainder of the hour I had left before the world outside had to become a reality. And as the alarm beeped on time at 6:30am, I thought two things. Maybe my mom is right about the necessity of having a telephone land line and that it's probably time to invest in blackout shades.
