Rise and Shine

Lately I've been having trouble sleeping. It's not so bad, it just takes me longer to fall unconscious than I'd normally like. The problem is then getting up on time in the morning.

As a student, getting up early in the morning is especially tough. No one depends on me to be awake in the morning. I don't have a job. Nothing terrible will happen if I miss a lecture - especially since all of the notes are put online now.

One of two ideas tend to come into my head:

1. I'm paying for this. I'm paying about £2,000 a year to skip lectures. I have about 23 weeks of lectures, each of which actually contain about 8 hours of lectures. That's only 184 lectures. Each lecture costs me £10 - whether I show up or not. £10 is a lot of money for someone with no money... I'd better go!

Or,

2. This is the only point in my life when not getting up won't have seriously negative consequences. At least, until I retire... I'd better make the most of this!

Of course, any day that I get up late I end up feeling guilty about. So, in an attempt to combat the temptation to sleep in, I moved my alarm clock to the other side of the room last night. That meant I'd have to get out of bed to switch it off.

I was worried that I'd be tempted to get back into bed after doing so, so I stuck a post-it note on top the alarm clock. It said,

"Wait! Don't go back to sleep! Think of all the stuff you could do! Notes? Breakfast? Something?!"

I'm sure the note would have worked brilliantly. Unfortunately I decided against actually getting out of bed to turn off the alarm clock, because I had set it to play Radio 4 in order to wake me up. Instead I dozed and listened to the news.

I eventually got up half an hour later, when a programme too boring to bare came on.