My Predicament

I used to be the first one in my family to wake up. I'd hop out of bed, refreshed and excited for the day to begin. That was, however, about ten years ago. These days I'm not as excited. In fact, I rather loathe getting up, which is why I almost always wake up at least fifteen minutes later than I should, usually half an hour later.

To solve this problem, I have four alarms. I have my normal alarm clock, and my phone. My alarm clock goes off at five. This is the ideal time I'd like to wake up. In theory, my sister and I should leave our house at 6:25 to get to school at a comfortable time. However, this, like my waking up on time, rarely happens. My phone alarm goes off at 5:15, 5:30, and 5:45, so as to ensure that I will get up eventually.

There is another problem I have with waking up. My sister does not wake up on her own. I think she has two alarms. Even with those two alarms, I wake her up every morning. Around 5:45, I open her door. Our rooms are connected with our bathroom, so she usually wakes up to a combination of the light from the bathroom, my music drifting over to her side, and the sounds of my drawers closing and opening. This is probably a perfect situation for her; she gets to sleep much later than me and doesn't have to worry about getting up for her alarm. This situation is not perfect for me, though, because I cannot choose to sleep late.

This is what happened yesterday. I responded to my first alarm like I always do. Shaken out of my precious five a.m. sleep, I stumbled over to my alarm clock and turned it off. Fifteen minutes later (which feels more like fifteen seconds), another alarm went off. I turned it off. Another alarm went off fifteen minutes later. It too was turned off. My last alarm went off, and this time was different. I was lying on my stomach, and raised my head off my pillow to squint at the time. 5:45. This is not a very good time for me to wake up; it always leaves me feeling rushed. I felt so exhausted, and I knew that my sister would not wake me up- she depended on me to wake her up. I turned off the final alarm, sighed, and put my head back on my pillow. Today I wasn't going to wake up.

Of course, almost any idea seems better at 5:45 in the morning when you've only just woken up and are a bit disoriented and very tired. When my mom woke me up at 6:30, I realized that making a conscious decision to skip my early bird class was probably not such a good idea.

My predicament is this: I have to wake up on time to get to my early bird class, but I don't like to, and sometimes I can barely bring myself to. My sister depends on me to get her up as well, so if I shirk my responsibility, I'm putting two people's grades on the line. It's a catch-22 of sorts, and I'm a bit (no pun intended) tired of it.

Ah well, it's near the end of the year, and as long as I can keep reminding myself to get out of bed, and as long as I don't decide to miss class in my half-conscious states, I think I can handle it for a few more months.