363 days left

When you have 363 days ahead of you and no outside obligation whatsoever, no job to go to, not a single appointment before 7 pm, it doesn’t really matter what’s at stake; it’s hard to get up in the morning. My flatmates all have jobs and, most of the time, leave the apartment before I even wake up, leaving me alone in an epic struggle starring myself, my conscience, and my alarm clock.

My alarm clock and my conscience tend to team up against me, so I have to try to fight both of them at a time. My conscience strikes me just before I go to bed, enticing me to set up its partner, the alarm, around 8 am (which is not just any alarm by the way, I am an unfortunate owner of a Samsung phone set to its default ring tones, i.e. set to the excruciating morning pain tone). When the alarm goes off, it’s basically just me against the machine. Hitting the snooze button is a no-brainer. Now, by doing that, I’m only giving myself 5 more minutes of sleep. So the operation has to be repeated many times.

It’s usually around 8.30 (i.e. after fending off seven alarm waves) that my conscience starts to kick in, making it every bit harder to hit the snooze button. Between 8.30 and 8.45, it really takes me all the strength I have just not to get up and I start getting that strange feeling that my honour is at stake.

What kind of man can’t take on a phone and his guilty conscience both at a time? So I stay in bed, fighting a meaningless fight, being already almost wide awake. But practically every morning I manage to prove my point by hitting the snooze button up to twenty consecutive times, postponing my initial alarm by almost an hour and a half. And so, on some very strange level, mornings begin with the victory of man against himself!