The sound (of my alarm) and the fury

New job gives me some flexibility on arrival time. My immediate reaction was “Whooo!”, shortly followed by “Oh no. Okay, game plan. Self-control. Make a routine. No deviations. This is not a drill.”

In college, I’d ignore my alarm as I created a litany of excuses about why attending class was unecessary - 'I went last Monday!' 'I did the reading!' 'I didn’t do the reading so I won’t understand anything anyway!' The best/worst example of this was in my freshman year math class, in which we had 10 10-pt. quizzes throughout the semester. It was week 5, and I’d gotten all 10s so far. While half asleep but still able to re-program my alarm, my brain said to me:

“You keep getting 10s. You’re basically a Calculus genius. Even if you get a zero this week, you’ll still end up with a 90% average on these quizzes. They only make up 60% of your grade! At worst you’ll get an AB and at best, your homework and participation will boost you to an A! This is a FOOLPROOF PLAN that only requires you to go back to bed immediately for another hour and a half.”

By quiz #7, I was scoring somewhere in the 30% range. I had to attend a 7-hour extra credit project alongside my kind TA in order to land a very low B. (But damn, was I well-rested for it.)

By senior year, I would plead with Tali to wake me up. “Listen, I have ballet tomorrow. I’m out of absences. I realize this is not personally your problem, but I will fail beginner ballet if I don’t go. If for some reason I am not in an embarrassing leotard in the kitchen making coffee at 7:30 AM I need you to come in and club me. Ok?” It was surely fun for her to be burdened with the weight of my college career while I slept peacefully in the next room.

You can see where I’m going with this. It’s go-time, on the ‘wake up to your alarm, you’re an adult’ situation. The only thing that has been ensuring my timeliness at Job #1 is sheer guilt and the fear of getting caught for being late. I’m not sure I can handle the personal responsibility that is coming up in one week.

Any tips? I’m really a morning person once I’m out of bed- I just try to delay that moment for as long as humanly possible. And no, setting multiple alarms 5 minutes apart doesn’t deter me. It just makes BF want to smother me with my pillow, so don’t suggest that.