Up Front: Something Chronic
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ooh ooh I found it!
Till Someone Loses an Eye
I was woken by my flatmate's
alarm. Her room lies acrossfrom mine, and her alarm is a meditative
tape by an Indian Guru. His thicklyaccented evocation of bubbling
brooks and Placesof Peace went on
and on as she slept off herlate night. I told my friend Giovanni
about this, and he suggested the violentdrowning of the Guru in one of his
Series Of Still Pools. He told methat a German company in Italy
marketed an alarm that was voiceneutralised. The TV ad had eager
people in pyjamas sitting upand chirping, ‘OK Mr Brown!’
to stop it beeping, thenbounding out of bed. A friend of Giovanni's,
whose mother bought one, regularly shouted,‘Shut the fuck up!’ through the bedroom wall, while
she slept through everything.Anyroad, I'd been following a young, sprightly,
and occasionally goofy EdHillary around Te Papa on his first
visit there. (It was closed to the public,like Disneyland for The Prince Of
Pop.) I was trying to jot down the greatman's impressions
as he dictated them to me, when I cameacross someone representing Bill
Rowling sitting at a Formica tablein the kitchen. Seeing as we
were back in time, I knewthat he was dying. He had a terrible,
pale, dirtybrown complexion. Dreams are
in colour. I asked ‘Bill’ as he rosein greeting, how he was
going. He said, ‘Not too bad,’in a wise Indian accent,
and he meant it. -
Well done! So now to complete the story I must tell you that James' book was published by Michael Laws, whom I met at the time being wholly ignorant of his political past, so I think you can imagine my surprise when I discovered the many other less savoury sides of his personality beside "publisher of excellent poetry".
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The TV ad had eager
people in pyjamas sitting upand chirping, ‘OK Mr Brown!’
to stop it beeping, thenbounding out of bed.
I can't tell you how disturbed that makes me feel.
Fucker alarm clocks. Like the one that requires you to do a shape-sorting puzzle to switch it off, or this one, or this one. But then, when I was at varsity I could get up, walk across the room, switch my alarm clock off and get back into bed without waking up.
webweaver: our first DSPS column and discussion thread contains a deal of sympathy for the 'smug early-rising fucker' point of view.
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Snap on the walking across rooms to turn off alarm clocks in my sleep. I can still do it, I've discovered in the last few weeks but I think that's late pregnancy rather than CFS. Once when I was sick I answered my phone, had a brief phone conversation and hung up without waking up. It was v surreal for the caller apparently. I had no recollection at all.
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When I was at high school I resorted to putting the alarm clock over the other side of the room wrapped up, with copious sticky tape, in a note telling me why I needed to be out of bed.
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our first DSPS column and discussion thread contains a deal of sympathy for the 'smug early-rising fucker' point of view
Hey, deja vu
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I've sometimes fantasised about being a in position to decree a meeting at 11pm - particularly to educate those who think a 7am "breakfast" meeting is somehow morally superior just because it happens to suit their body clock.
Lordy, I'm as useless at 11pm as at 7am. Possibly more useless. On the plus side, I have the luxury of working somewhere that doesn't demand either of those. Many people don't, which is weird when you get right down to it. Why wouldn't companies want to pay for the time when you're at your peak? Sure, sometimes meetings have to happen, but not every day, and not with every employee, and surely not necessarily at 7am.
I would, however, find a breakfast meeting at 7am to be significantly more tolerable if actual breakfast[*] were involved. Also if it were some kind of unavoidable one-off, as opposed to standard practice.
[*] Proper breakfast, mind. Not a paper cup of drip coffee and a muffin made of meh.
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Oh look! It's 5:40am! And I am up. And fucking smug.
(Actually, I would soo much rather be in bed. I hit the snooze button so many times today, in my sleep, I was very late.)
I am an 'up at night' person, forced to start work at 5am. Which is fine, because 5am is still night. It's the afternoons that kill me.
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My first post was 6.45am, so not quite so smug, but fully as up.
The whirly bird catches the perm.
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a muffin made of meh
as they often are
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Who needs an alarm clock when you have small children? I bought one recently to keep my son in bed longer. With ample bribes, it worked, so I get to sleep in to the grand old hour of 6:45 now.
Nothing so far about having kids has been harder than being woken (and having to get up and cope) at 5am, after working through until past midnight the night before. Intranight feeds were nothing by comparison, I could all but sleep with giving a bottle, and knew I'd be slipping straight back into phase 3 sleep within seconds of my head hitting the pillow. But it's pretty hard when you know that's your lot, mate, no more sleep for another 19 hours.
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Ben is describing my upcoming weekend. I have the bounciest, liveliest daughter in the world, three years old. I wake up and feed her breakfast at about 6am and then put on morning TV and curl up on the couch and hope she doesn't want we for anything other than grunting for a couple of hours.
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Having any more, Kyle? My experience is that two feels like way more than twice as hard as one. With one, you get breaks. With two, the other uses all those breaks. It's not about the looking after, which is actually slightly more efficient per-child. It's the complete loss of respite.
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I have two but the oldest is 12 and sleeps like a teenager. In fact, he's slept like a teenager since he was about 2.
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Ah, yes, he could even be of use occasionally.
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Friend of mine used to work with an insomniac. He'd come into the office at 2am and work until 10am. Seemed to work for them.
I've found that I'm surprisingly productive at odd hours. I blasted through the end of my MA thesis by getting into the office at 7am and working through to 11am - worked for me at the time.
A friend of mine has a serious annoyance with the whole "get up an hour earlier to be more productive!" schpiel. As she points out, it makes precisely as much sense as "stay up an hour later to be more productive!" - but if you invert it, it sounds less puritanical and thus a bit more sus.
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I have two kids but they are absolutely useless as alarm clocks. When your first baby prefers to be up past 10pm and sleeps the morning away it's pretty cool but now they are having to fit into school timetables I could wish for at least one lark in the family. Both boys crawl out of bed at the last possible minute and are slow and surly until we are well and truly late. In the holidays I rarely see the 8 year old before 10.30am.
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Sue,
speaking of kids
for a while there is seriously considered getting pregnant just so i could see if it stopped my CFS -
Have second child arriving approx 6 weeks from now and I have to say Ben you are not selling it to me.
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I think having two is way easier than having one plus one. And by the time you get to the third they practically start raising one another.
Better?
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Sue,
i read on a blog once, maybe dooce i;m not sure but
with baby 1 if they drop something you sterilize it before letting them at it again
with baby 2 you run it under hot water
with baby 3 you get the dog to lick it clean
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with baby number 4, if you drop the dog new chewing toy you get the bay to lick it clean
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Twins plus one two years later. Somehow in the two interceding years we had forgotten everything. I think this is what is meant by natural selection. If not for a naturally occurring selective memory, the species would be doomed.
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My little dude has ruined me by being mellow and cheerful and an excellent sleeper (so far). So now I'm four months in and suffering from pleasant delusions. "Sure, we could totally do two!", I'm thinking, like a complete idiot. I have clearly failed to internalise the concept of "quitting while ahead".
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Or I'm told there's the "get it over all at once" line of thought - to say nothing of the "wouldn't it be great if he had a playmate?" angle..
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