Thursday, June 29, 2006
Wake Me Up
I’ve been having trouble waking up in the mornings.
My pattern, since I was in junior high, is to have my clock radio set to Morning Edition. I’ve never had to set the volume loud–usually my brain start listening to what’s being said, and that’ll wake me up.
Recently, this plan hasn’t been working as well as it used to. The radio goes off, I wake up, then I actually hear what is being said, and block it out, because I just don’t want to listen any more to news about death, explosions, terrorists attacks, or reductions in our civil rights. So I find myself for the first time since I was a teenager, falling back asleep.
Now it’s not like I’m going to be late for work–it just means that I have to skip exercising or have less time to exercise in the morning. But the whole thing is eerie. I’m a news junkie–I love the news. Say what you like about NPR, but I get a mix of state, national, and international news WITHOUT annoying commercials. (You want to know the real reason why I sometimes forget to listen to the WVU games? The awful, incredibly annoying commercials. I hate them.)
In college, being a townie, I hung out at the lair (Mountainlair, i.e. WVU Student Union) all the time. I was almost always there to see what we sometimes referred to as “The Bad News” or the lunchtime Pittsburgh news. It was amazing how they never ever had anything good to report. Just murders and fires and floods.
I’m beginning to feel that way about the news in general now. When I go to the BBC News website, I tend to check the Science & Nature and Technology news. I get daily news headlines in my e-mail. For the past several months the only ones I’ve regularly read have been the Charleston Gazette, since it gives me state news. I’m totally avoiding national and international news.
Is it just me? Or has the news really been this awful for the past couple years, and I’m only just now getting burned out? I mean, avoidance behavior is way up–I’m turning off the radio earlier and earlier to read (or recently, so we can watch a couple of episodes of Babylon 5.)
Is this feeling of dread and doom ever going to go away?
June 30th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
I use the Cat Based Alarm. If I don’t get up, after a while the cat bites me on my feet. I can calibrate what time the Cat Based Alarm wakes me up by how much food I put in his bowl the night before. The only trouble with the Cat Based Alarm is there is no way to set it for any time later than 7am.
July 1st, 2006 at 3:17 pm
We’ve got two Cat Based Alarms. Unfortunately one is impossible to set, and goes off between one and three in the morning, regardless of the food bowl status, and thus must be stored elsewhere in the house. The second alarm, using the food bowl method, prefers to awaken us at five. Which is too damned early. So the food bowl status is kept at overflowing.
And both of these alarms go off by galloping through the house, yowling.
For now, we’ll reply upon other methods.