Waking Up - Not Dog Related

When I was in middle and high school, it didn’t take a lot to wake me up. I had an ancient, 1992 clock radio with an alarm setting that allowed me to set the radio to wake me instead of the horrid beeping most people associate with alarms. After many years of use, though, the radio stopped working and would project piercing static instead.

So I turned the radio volume all the way down, and the soft clicking of the alarm kicking on would be my wake-up sound for the remainder of my school years.

Fast forward to married life. For some ungodly reason, my husband needs to have his eardrums blasted with mortar to wake up in the mornings. Due to the positioning of our bed, our “night stand” is a long dresser that butts up to my side of the bed, and this is where our phones sit to charge.

 He also likes to experiment with different ringtones to see their different effects. While this is perfectly fine for him, he had to learn the hard way that scaring me awake at seven A.M. was equivalent to waking a pride of lions with those illegal fireworks you bought in Ohio.

For a span of a few weeks he used a song titled “Rite of Spring” which was a happy, upbeat violin and tambourine mixture that sounded like something from a Renaissance Faire. At a low volume, this song was irritating, but acceptable. The only problem was he could never remember to turn his volume down before falling asleep, so every morning I awoke with a joyful, Shakespeareian ode to springtime in my face, in the middle of a dark Pennsylvania winter.

After being forced to change the tone, he chose “Trillo,” which almost ended our marriage. “Trillo” is a solo violin playing all the high, shrill notes a violin can in rapid succession, and it comes on very suddenly.

My husband’s phone is a “smartphone,” said in quotes because I hate everything about it. When the alarm goes off, you have to solve a puzzle on its screen which under normal circumstances would be easy, but in a dark bedroom where you’ve just been awoken via heart attack and you’re in a panic to just SHUT THE FUCKING THING UP, you may as well have to solve a Rubick’s Cube.

After a few months of this, I forced him to change the tone again. Thankfully he chose something calming; I don’t think he could handle too many more scars.