9. Weakness (JW)
In response to “Weakness (OW)”
Ottawa, Canada
Dear Owen,
Anyone that’s ever lived with me and heard me set goals around a morning routine could easily tell you my weakness: getting up in the morning. I pride myself on being a rational person, but sleep-brain me seems to think “yeah I know you wanted to get up now, but nah, because reasons” is a perfectly legitimate excuse to hit snooze.
It’s heartening to know that I’m not the only one perplexed by this problem. My friend Chris is a fellow owner of a totally unreasonably morning mind. I realized the extent of his affliction one afternoon while I was living with him in Toronto in 2011.
I was on the way out of our one-bedroom-converted-to-two apartment on Gerrard St when I noticed that Chris was still in bed. It was 11am, and I’d heard his alarm go off four or five times. I knew he had plans to meet a friend, so I decided to help him out.
After poking him in the face and ribs a few times to little more effect than a few grumbles, I decided to raise the difficulty of his next snooze rather than continue a physical assault. I took his phone, brought it to the kitchen, placed it in a pot, replaced the lid of the pot, placed the pot in the cupboard, shut the cupboard door, then left the apartment to continue on my day.
Upon returning to the apartment at 2pm, I discovered, as expected, the cupboard open, and the pot returned to the table. Also returned to its original resting place, however, was Chris, laying at an odd angle on his bed with one leg under the blanket and one on top, but otherwise unmoved since 3 hours prior.
Chris has gone to great lengths to iterate on his personal retaliation against the sandman, quite happy to build advanced technology to support him. One of his most recent attempts involved trying to pull off what would’ve been, centuries earlier, considered heresy. He tried to create a sun.
More specifically, he tried to build an artificial sun lamp using a custom-made grid of super bright LEDs. The standard unit for human-visible brightness of light sources is typically measured in lumens. A typical LED bulb like one you might get from IKEA is about 800 lumens. Chris’ goal for his light strip was to emit 4,200 lumens, so more than 5x brighter, with full colour control of the bulb.
As has happened whenever any of my software friends delve into hardware, Chris eventually realized part of his design was off and needed to wait for new parts to arrive in the mail. Impatient to improve his morning routine, he pivoted to using a psychological hack: soccer.
Chris’ alarm clock now comes in the form of a randomized feed of soccer highlights playing from a strategically positioned screen. As it happens, watching soccer video highlights appeals to the same part of his brain as returning to sleep does, so long as doing so doesn’t require any effort of any kind at all besides opening his eyes. So nowadays Chris will slowly regain consciousness with some assistance from his friends Messi and Ronaldo. With his eyes peeking above the covers, the athletes’ dazzling performances remind him that, hey, maybe the waking world isn’t so bad after all.
I, on the other hand, have found only one reliable antidote: social obligation. As it happens, the downward pressure on consciousness applied by the “just 10 more minutes” Jamie is easily overpowered by the “oh God I want them to like me” Jamie. It feels dumb, but it’s surprisingly more effective to ask a friend to call me in 20 minutes and talk to me rather than relying upon an alarm, even if that entire conversation consists of only “Hey, you awake doofus?” followed by “Huh? Wha? Yeah yeah, okay I’m awake.”
I hope you’ll always be around to wake me up when I need it, both in a literal and a figurative sense.
Your sleepy friend,
Jamie
