The semester without REM cycles
OK, for some reason, this link to an evil and Wrong item called Clocky -- courtesy of dooce -- hucked me almost bodily into the fall of 1992. The walls of my cube were suddenly replaced with the cinderblock of the dorm room I shared with one K.L., a freak and total spasmoid of the first order (and I mean that in a bad way), and I recalled -- nay, lived! for a moment! -- the early mornings of that watershed first semester of freshman year.
Among her many other bizarre fantasies and confabulations, K.L. fancied herself a rower of crew, having been (allegedly) a Junior Olympic competitor in kayaking. This meant that she (allegedly) got up at 5:00 a.m. three mornings a week -- OF COLLEGE -- to go to some godforsaken part of Manhattan with the team to practice. She may -- MAY -- have actually gone thrice.
But all goddamned semester, the bitch most definitely set four -- FOUR -- alarm clocks for times ranging from 4:30 to 5:10. That's a.m., ante meridien, as in, IN THE MORNING. They'd ring -- sometimes right next to young Gleemonex's sleepy and/or hungover head in the top bunk, because K.L. moved them EVERY NIGHT to make it harder for her to snooze them and/or sleep straight through -- and they'd ring and ring and ring and ring and ring and rinnnnnnnnng.
And she wouldn't even get up. She'd torture my ass for over an hour, most mornings, with the ringing and the snoozing, and the lurching all over the room knocking stuff over in the dark trying to find the clocks and hit snooze, and the throwing herself back onto her bunk with the greatest possible force and maximum shakeage of Gleemonex, and then finally decide, fuck it, she's missed the van to the river, and she'll go work out later.
Homicidal rage, people. Homi-fucking-cidal.
Oh, and there was also her high school friend and fellow alleged rower of crew, a Russian guy (not her boyfriend, another person entirely, whom she'd get bizzy wit on the lower bunk while I "slept" on the top bunk) with no social skills named Orgo or Olga or Oly or some shit, whom she invited, sans discussion with me, to bunk on our floor on crew nights because he lived off campus -- that motherfucker was there 2-3 times a week, smelling up the place, taking up the entire floor of our tiny double, and participating in the alarm clock derby.
I was getting the shakes from this, the DTs -- my hair was falling out, my sentences became gibberish, I tried earplugs and discussions with K.L. and all manner of remedies, and nothing worked. I don't even remember why this all finally came to an end, but mercifully, it did, and a couple of weeks into the spring semester, I moved down the hall into my best friend's room (her roommate having dropped out to get married, if I recall), K.L. moved to another floor to be closer to some crew jock she was infatuated with, and life resumed a little normalcy.
But I came so close to killing her in the wee hours, Internets -- thisclose, I swear to you. If she had had Clocky, I'd be blogging this FROM JAIL.
Among her many other bizarre fantasies and confabulations, K.L. fancied herself a rower of crew, having been (allegedly) a Junior Olympic competitor in kayaking. This meant that she (allegedly) got up at 5:00 a.m. three mornings a week -- OF COLLEGE -- to go to some godforsaken part of Manhattan with the team to practice. She may -- MAY -- have actually gone thrice.
But all goddamned semester, the bitch most definitely set four -- FOUR -- alarm clocks for times ranging from 4:30 to 5:10. That's a.m., ante meridien, as in, IN THE MORNING. They'd ring -- sometimes right next to young Gleemonex's sleepy and/or hungover head in the top bunk, because K.L. moved them EVERY NIGHT to make it harder for her to snooze them and/or sleep straight through -- and they'd ring and ring and ring and ring and ring and rinnnnnnnnng.
And she wouldn't even get up. She'd torture my ass for over an hour, most mornings, with the ringing and the snoozing, and the lurching all over the room knocking stuff over in the dark trying to find the clocks and hit snooze, and the throwing herself back onto her bunk with the greatest possible force and maximum shakeage of Gleemonex, and then finally decide, fuck it, she's missed the van to the river, and she'll go work out later.
Homicidal rage, people. Homi-fucking-cidal.
Oh, and there was also her high school friend and fellow alleged rower of crew, a Russian guy (not her boyfriend, another person entirely, whom she'd get bizzy wit on the lower bunk while I "slept" on the top bunk) with no social skills named Orgo or Olga or Oly or some shit, whom she invited, sans discussion with me, to bunk on our floor on crew nights because he lived off campus -- that motherfucker was there 2-3 times a week, smelling up the place, taking up the entire floor of our tiny double, and participating in the alarm clock derby.
I was getting the shakes from this, the DTs -- my hair was falling out, my sentences became gibberish, I tried earplugs and discussions with K.L. and all manner of remedies, and nothing worked. I don't even remember why this all finally came to an end, but mercifully, it did, and a couple of weeks into the spring semester, I moved down the hall into my best friend's room (her roommate having dropped out to get married, if I recall), K.L. moved to another floor to be closer to some crew jock she was infatuated with, and life resumed a little normalcy.
But I came so close to killing her in the wee hours, Internets -- thisclose, I swear to you. If she had had Clocky, I'd be blogging this FROM JAIL.
Labels: balls o'clock a.m., bitch, Jesus H. Christ in a sidecar drinking tequila
posted by Gleemonex at 9:49 AM
2 Comments:
And all that happened to me is that my roomie would knock me over while I was studying and try to drive the chair leg into my chest. Really... that was preferable to screwing with my sleep.
I tried the multiple alarm clock thing. Due to attrition, I ended up back at the one alarm clock thing with many replacement parts.
Occasionally, I'll use my cell phone to remind me to wake up. Usually though, I just wake up since I finally decided that it I'm not gonna wake up anyways, why bother with the insanity of trying.
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