Early Morning Breakdown

(From the college years...)

I've never been a morning person. The closest I came was during a certain semester in college when I had an 8AM class. Previous 8AM classes had been routinely destructive to my GPA. But this time I had a deus ex machina, a sky rack-- a bed on stilts so high the mattress was a foot from the ceiling. My desk sat under the sky rack; my clock radio sat on the desk. I intentionally did NOT put a ladder on the bed. This meant I had to stand on the desk and haul myself into the bed-- hard enough at night when I was tired, but almost impossible when I was barely awake in the morning. To make sure I got down in the morning I would set the clock's radio to the most obnoxious station possible, with the volume all the way up. That was the only noise I couldn't sleep through. So long as I set the alarm and slept in my bed, I got up.

I was in full zombie mode, walking into walls, searching for brains (my own), but I was up! It worked pretty well throughout the quarter.

Fast forward to final exams. On the morning of the third in a row 8AM exam (after staying up til the wee hours each night cramming), the alarm went off. I forget whether it was bad disco music or bad country music, but I came close to murdering the poor clock. Once mostly dressed, I sat down on the sofa to put on my socks (I'm not sure why, as I almost always went barefoot). Suddenly the light in the room changed drastically. This was seriously spooky. I stared around the room, confused. What just happened? Then I saw the clock. I had fallen asleep sitting upright on the edge of the couch, with my right leg over my left knee, sock half on. Frozen like a statue, I'd slept through the exam. Instead of "The Thinker", I was "The Sock Putter On-er".

That was the point I gave up having to do anything regularly at 8AM for any length of time.