I'm terrible at waking up. I set two alarms and spend at least half an hour hitting the snooze button until the absolute last drip of sleep has been extracted from the warm cocoon of my morning bed. This is a pretty embarrassing habit to have when someone is sleeping over. It's terrible to share a bed with someone soft and warm and then hear the harsh blare of talk radio coming from one side of the bed, and then the staccato jingle of my cell phone alarm from the other side a few minutes later. Variating between the two for twenty or thirty minutes, like some languorous cat trying to figure out the world's simplest Rube Goldberg contraption, has to leave a bad impression.
Mornings are a generally embarrassing time for me. In addition to torturing myself with alarms, I tend to look like a train wreck right when I get out of bed. A few years ago my friend P surprised me from out of town, knocking on my door early one morning while I was still asleep. When I opened the door, bleary-eyed and in my underpants, the first words out of his mouth were "Are you alright? You look pretty rough."
I was fine, but I sleep hard. My eyes have pits underneath them in the morning and my skin loses a little pallor as my blood pressure drops in sleep. I also have a mangy head of hair that tends to exaggerate its volume and spastic shape after a full night upon a pillow. I'm also prone to morning breath. I'm pretty sure I don't have halitosis but my mouth is, I'm sure, a rank cavern most mornings.
I do a short workout in the mornings, which is also pretty silly looking. I do a cycle of pushups, leg raises, and some boxing with light weights before work every day (the avoidance of which is another good reason to stay in bed a few minutes longer – who wants to do ab exercises first thing in the morning?). Through the course of this routine I make all sorts of ridiculous faces and bizarre breathing noises as I try and squeeze out those last few reps. I can only imagine how preposterous that must look from the cozy vantage of someone still half asleep in my bed.
I'm sure this routine could be cute for the first few weeks or months. It might be pleasantly irritating in the same way that it's nice to be teased with a little by someone you're attracted to. It's so easy to run away with the wildness of being attracted to someone new, and a few comic reminders that they aren't quite as idealized as you might imagine can be comforting.
But after the early romance has outgrown its puppy dog years and become a full-grown beast, all those foibles must gain a dull weight. Putting up with your man's snoring, or his thirty minutes of alarm jockeying every morning must inevitably turn into a galling watermark of how high the infatuated wave was when it broke against the crass reality of a man in his underwear moving around half awake at seven in the morning.
A few weeks ago, my friend L suggested to me that I was torturing myself with the erector set of alarms I was relying on everyday. It's true. Trying to squeeze a few extra minutes of sleep out of a prematurely ended night is hopeless. Forcing someone else to listen to the drawn out blare of the alarm just because I wanted to put off the pain of waking on a Tuesday with a whole week still lying ahead is all wrong. It's the kind of lazy baggage that is so easy to start laying on someone else as soon as they're close enough to hear. So I have decided to stop. For three weeks running I've gotten out of bed right after the first alarm has gone off.
Sadly, I still look like a marmot wrestling an octopus when I work out. Would you hold that against me?
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Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You With The Cardigans
Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog
Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home
Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party
Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays
Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date
Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson
Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap
Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction
Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex
Date Night: In Which I Try To Believe In Aliens
Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines Redux
Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog
Date Machine: Rate My Politics
High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies
Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux
Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN
Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings
Love Machine: What Work Is
Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked
Love Machine: Breaking Up in a Text Message