Some people wouldn’t consider it a super power as much as a hindrance of responsibility, but I am more optimistic than those people. You see, long ago, I was in an accident that disabled my ability to hear buzzers. Well, I wasn’t so much IN an accident as I HAD an accident. But that just sounds like I peed myself or something, which isn’t true. Well, I mean, of course I did when I was really little, but… this is going nowhere.
Let’s start at the beginning. I have always been nocturnal. Always. I tortured my poor mother as a baby because I wouldn’t sleep at night. I don’t remember it, but she likes to remind me about it on a semi-annual basis, so I’m sure it was awful.
It was especially difficult for her because when she would finally get me to sleep there would be something good on TV (because we all know they don’t play the really good shows until 1:00 AM). Logically, she would decide to stay up and watch that, and then get up early anyway. Apparently this inability to control her television impulses was also my fault. Bad baby!!
I stopped taking naps when at an unreasonably early age because Mom was desperate to get a modicum of sleep when normal people are supposed to be sleeping. While naps are paramount in my life now, at the time I was sort of fine with giving them up. After all, children love being awake to see what’s going on. This was especially true in my case because my whole family was made up of adults talking about adult things, so I had to be sneaky to find out what was going on – I didn’t have time for naps.
Being nocturnal, morning is naturally my nemesis. This has unfortunate consequences in my adult life because employers generally expect you to be at work early. However, in my childhood my morning-avoidance had bad consequences for my mother because she had to intersperse her morning routine with multiple trips to my bedroom with increasingly more desperate attempts to get me out of bed. I’m actually kind of shocked she never poured water on my head, though I’m sure she thought about it.
After her eighth trip to my bedroom with escalating threats, I would finally drag myself out into the world of normal people who like daylight. However, my brain was still half asleep, so I would basically just stand there staring at my reflection in the mirror wondering what I was supposed to be doing. This did nothing for my mother’s mood when she would find me in a drool-filled stupor.
She had the fairly reasonable expectation that I would be ready to get out the door so she could get to work on time. I don’t really ever remember that happening. Usually she was racing the clock to work, which really is unfair because time doesn’t have any obstacles like stoplights and bad traffic and children who drool on themselves, so time would almost always win. I really should send her a Thank You/I’m Sorry card at some point for putting up with me. I love you Mom!
(I do apologize for the above picture. It seems I’ve forgotten almost everything I learned about drawing in perspective in the fifth grade. You get the point though.)
Fast forward to high school, and I was responsible for getting my own self up and to school. I was a grown up with a car and an alarm clock. Unfortunately, I still had an amazing capacity to ignore people/things who were trying to get me out of bed before I was good and ready. Ignoring my mom just made her mad, but alarm clocks are really sort of fine with it. I mean, the makers of alarm clocks actually installed an “Ignore Button” in anticipation of this. They call it a snooze, but really, it’s the same thing. I was a pro at finding the button. I didn’t even have to look. If there was an ignoring button Olympics, I would win with no contest. I could do it in my sleep. Actually, I kind of did.
Eventually, this skill of mine began to hinder me, especially when I had to be to school at 7:00 for early morning jazz band. It was a miracle if I got there on time. Usually they were already practicing when I would stumble in with crust still in my eyes. That’s when I got the bright idea to put the alarm clock at the foot of my bed so it would force me to wake up enough to at least sit up and reach for the alarm clock to hit the snooze button. It was a brilliant idea. It would surely snap me out of my pre-dawn stupor and make me jump right out of bed into the world like the adult I had become.
Unfortunately, my laziness and love for sleep did not enter into these calculations.
I began to simply ignore the beeping. Oh, sure, at first it worked like a charm. The buzzing that every person on earth is predisposed to hate would start right on time and I would sit bolt upright and hit that snooze with ferocity.
How dare it wake me from the foot of the bed where it cannot easily be reached? And it was always such a chipper and enthusiastic buzz. Alarm clocks are so self-righteous in their buzzing, as though it’s the highlight of its day. It did make me get up sooner though – I would only sit up so many times before I decided, “Well, I’m already halfway there.” Until one fateful day (this is the accident day… remember that from the beginning?) when I was simply too tired to be bothered to exert the energy to take care of the beeping. Instead, I went back to sleep. Thus began my long struggle.
It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it quickly spiraled out of control. I wouldn’t hear my alarm clock at all anymore; my brain simply refused to register the noise. I would have to set it an hour and a half before I actually wanted to get up because it would take my brain that long to compute that something was disturbing the silence. Luckily for me, I still had my mom as a backup. Not that she was very thrilled about going back to the old routine. (Sorry, Mom.)
Eventually I began hearing the alarm again, but it took a long time. My roommate in college used to throw pillows at me so I would shut it off. I mostly credit Doug with helping me regain my buzz-hearing-ability because he pokes me after the first beep. He works against the systematic desensitization of my adolescence to allow me to hear the buzzing like a normal person. But I do think I’ve had some loss of sensation concerning beeping in the rest of the world.
And that is why it’s not my fault when I don’t hear the dryer buzzing.
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