Rise and Shine! No Thanks.

I think almost every one in the world will agree, the worst thing to do is wake up and get out of bed. Unfortunately, it’s a task most people have to do daily. It’s so hard because your bed is nice and warm, you’re comfortable, and you have to go through the monotony of your life all over again. The first step to your day is swinging your leg out of the blankets and onto the floor. It sounds easy enough, but it’s usually the hardest step of the day. Unless you’re on bed-rest, you hate getting out of your bed. If you are on bed-rest, or in any other way confined to your bed, you’d like nothing more than to take that step out of the bed, I’m sure. But the rest of us wish we were held prisoner in our bed.

The last step of the day is back into the bed. It’s interesting, because I put off this step for as long as I can too. I don’t really know anyone who likes going to bed. I’m not sure why we find it so hard to leave, and then go back at the end of the day again. I never say, “thank goodness it’s bed time,” unless I’ve had an awful day. But even then, I lay in bed and thoughts of my worst day run through my mind and are never exhausted. The time that I spend lying awake in my bed is often the most stressful time of my day. I realize that I didn’t do everything that I should have, or wanted to, and I forgot to do something important for the next day. Then you finally drift off to sleep and have nightmares about whatever you were worrying about before sleep found you, and you toss and turn all night long until it’s time to wake up again.

The worst sound in the world is whatever wakes you up. At any other time of the day it could be the most beautiful sound, like the laugh of your child, but when it wakes you up you want to destroy whatever makes it. That awful alarm clock sound is sometimes played on radio commercials and it’s still the most awful sound in the world, but it’s at least a thousand times worse when it’s pulling you from your REM cycle and a lovely dream. A while back I heard about an alarm clock that would go off and, after you hit snooze, it would move to a different part of the room. If I had one, I would hunt that thing down with a baseball bat and need to replace it daily.

There are some days that waking up is a good thing. Well, every day waking up is better than the alternative, but you never see it that way. I don’t know anyone who wakes up and says, “Oh, good, I’m alive again!” unless they’re really old or ill. The days that something exciting is going to happen, like Christmas, when the monotony will be broken up, it is easier to get up. If you know you’re going to see a cute boy that you like, it’s much easier to get up and not push snooze a bazillion times because you need to shower, do your hair perfectly, apply your make-up so you look flawless, and dress your best to impress that boy. Those days are easy-to-get-out-of-bed days. Twitterpation is useful for that. Until you get married and the person that you’re twitterpated about is in your bed. You’ll never want to leave again.

Unfortunately, on days that will be easy-wake-up-and-get-out-of-bed days, the night before you have trouble sleeping because you are excited. You want tomorrow to come, and when it does, you leap out of bed to meet the new day. As it goes on, you begin to lag and don’t fully enjoy whatever you had been excited about because you only got three hours of sleep the night before.

This sleeping thing should be easy, but it’s actually pretty rough. We could just do away with it, it’s over rated any way, right. Wrong. If you don’t sleep, you die. I guess we’ll just have to fight to fall asleep, struggle to wake up and stay that way until we quit and don’t wake up any more.