Time management is not a strong
attribute of mine. If you ask my parents, they would both groan, and my dad
would shape an A with his fingers, and say, “Annalee lives life on the edge,
right on the tip of the A. She has no margin of error,” Over the past year, I
have become very familiar with his sign, as he would flash it like the bat sign
whenever we discussed my flopped attempts to control my life, in his and moms
efforts to help Annalee become a Responsible
Adult, before I went off to College.
Funnily
enough, these faults of character have evolved and followed me to College.
The facts are these: I stay up till
the early morning hours, and justify hitting the snooze button on my alarm
until its way past the time I should get up, causing me to be perpetually late
to everything, and having to spend my day chasing lost time. Recently, this mad
chase results in me staying up late to finish homework, and so the cycle
continues.
Last night I was too lazy to reset
some of my alarms, and so decided that I would just fix them in the morning. So
today, as I blearily opened my eyes to the screeching and vibrating of my alarm
(in a desperate attempt to fix my sleeping-in issue, my parents bought me an
alarm clock that shakes my bed), I reached for it, intending to set it thirty
minutes later, and promptly fall back asleep. The second time I woke up, it was
to the angry vibration of my cell phone. I opened my eyes to find white cords tangled
up around my head. Strange, I
thought. I grabbed my phone, and to my horror, saw that my coworker had texted
me, telling me what floor she was on. Muttering made up curses under my breath,
I tried to sit up to find my blasted alarm clock to check the actual time, and
then I discovered that I had been cuddling something in my arms. This is not
unusual. I’m a snuggler, and when I sleep I cling to my blankets, pillow,
friend or family member, or, recently, Sir Percy—my fuzzy dolphin pillow pet,
named after Sir Percy Blakeney from the
Scarlet Pimpernel—during the night.
Unfortunately, it was not Sir Percy
who I was curled around.
In my befuddled mind, I could not
make sense of exactly what it was, other than being a foreign object in my
bed. I studied it curiously for about a
minute, before my brain began to work again. It was my alarm clock. My hard,
rectangular, too cheerfully blue, plugged in alarm clock that, as I had an up
close and personal view of the time, was supposed to have woken me up a thirty
seven minutes ago.
At
first, the situation struck me as funny, and I chuckled about it.
Then, I
felt very unsettled by what happened. I slept with the very thing whose purpose
was to wake me up, and should have woke me up some time ago. And, on top of this weird paradox, I felt strongly that somewhere, amidst my covers, Sir Percy
was staring at me with his black bead eye.
Through
the rest of my day, I thought about why this bothered me so much. Then, an echo
of Shakespeare’s sonnet 55 came to me, “But you shall shine more bright in
these contents/ Than unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time,”
It hit
me then. I had been besmeared with sluttish time! Or in other words, because I
fought to control and haggle with time, I, continuously, have been screwed over
by a lack of time. This is the cause for my eternal lateness, innumerable
amounts of stress, and of course, my slow descent into insanity.
I feel like it should be noted that
today I have only gotten two hours of sleep.
Moral(S) Of the Story
-Shakespeare relates to everything
-I need to go to bed earlier.
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