Everyone has his or her own system of prying the old carcass out of bed in the morning. Mine involves careful placement of the alarm clock — not right next to the bed, but not so far away from the bed that I can’t leap out, snooze, and leap back in before my spot in the bed 1) cools or 2) is claimed by a feline — and careful selection of the radio station. Some folks feel that the default angry MEEP MEEP MEEP MEEP is the most efficient, but that doesn’t work for me, because it’s so annoying that I lunge at the alarm, snooze it because it’s faster shutting-it-off-wise than just turning the alarm off, and then realize that I’ve snoozed it, shrug, and crawl back into bed for another nine minutes. If I want to get up at the actual time the alarm goes off, I have to use the radio, and I have to use a particular station, a station which is embarrassing. I need something relatively soothing, something to sort of ease me into waking up but that’s also irritating enough that I’ll get up and turn it off, and NPR is too soothing and I have slept through twenty minutes of its dulcet tones on a number of occasions, but anything else is too harsh. I went with the oldies station for a while, but when doo-wop invades your early-morning dreams, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the day. Big girls do cry, at 7:30, when Frankie Valli won’t shut the hell up.

Thus, the CD 101.9. For those of you outside the New York City radio catchment area, however lite your local Lite FM station, CD 101.9 is liter than that. Even its ads are lite; they used to feature a Reverend-Camden-looking guy, lavender Shaker-knit sweater knotted around his shoulders, teaching his feather-haired girlfriend to play the saxophone (…I don’t know) while laughing throatily (I…don’t know). It’s so lite that I have to weight the clock down with a brick, lest it float into the bathroom and electrocute itself in the sink because I have forced it to emit Kenny G. It’s so lite that, the other day, when I awakened to Dave Brubeck, I said out loud, “Wow, someone over there is so fired,” because the trademark Brubeck piano is waaaaay too percussive for this station. The program director might as well have put on Judas Priest.

It’s an effective alarm, though. Something about asthmatic clarinet tootling accompanied by an apologetic snare drum is maddening, maddening enough that my annoyance at its mere existence wakes me up. Still, it’s nowhere near as effective as my mother, a.k.a. The Human Snooze Alarm. I had an alarm clock in my room, an ancient fifties buzzy job which didn’t have a snooze function, so if I turned it off and went back to sleep, my mother would appear like the Ghost of College A Cappella Groups Past in my doorway and prepare to sing “Reveille.” With words. Which she knew we loathed, and which she therefore very much enjoyed caroling at us. And if we hadn’t gotten up by the time she finished the word “it’s” — “up” meaning not just “vertical” but also able to identify the current president and assemble a gun blindfolded — she’d sing the whole song anyway, loudly, joyously, to the end, while we flopped and jerked and moaned like birds on the ground after a bomb test. My alarm goes off, I shut it off, I tell myself I’ll just rest my eyes until the count of twentfffrefmmzzz…and just as I begin to subside back into a pleasant dream involving Jack Wagner and a pony (I…don’t…know), my mother whips open my bedroom door all “please welcome Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeil HAMBURGER,” takes a deep breath, and sings the first note of “Reveille,” streeeeeeetching it out, giving me a shot at the manual override, “iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii,” and I’m scrambling around, sheets tangled up around my ankles, struggling to stick the landing before Ma can finish the note and launch into the entire song, which at 6:05 on a winter morning before you’ve had so much as a single Corn Check is what I imagine a hangover is like even though I haven’t had one yet at this point, and I land on the floor, burritoed into my duvet, and spring upright squat-thrust-style, yelling, “I’m up, I’M UP, I! AM! UP!” and mercifully she stops.

“All right, all right,” but then she’s going next door to my brother’s room, and Mr. S sleeps harder than I do, so I’m standing in the middle of my room, panting from the exertion and unwinding my mummy gauze of nightclothes, and I hear the Mr. S’s door open and the long “Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii” daring Mr. S to haul himself over the Land of Nod’s muzzy border and into a standing position before she leads the charge straight into headache territory, and I’m cramming slippers on and yelling “get up, Mr. S, get UP, Mr. S, GET UP GET UP GET UP MR. S! GET! UP! MR. S! UP! GET!” “…iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…” “GET UP MISTER EEEEEEEEEEEESSSSS” and my brother is sort of shmorfling his way out of the half-tuck reverse-pike sub-pillow fetal position in which he habitually sleeps “iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii” “JAYSUS KID GET UUUUUUUUUUP” and then the [fwump] that means he’s hit the floor and maybe, just maybe, we will be spared the full-on, complete-with-hand-claps, twenty-one-mom-salute Cowsills-Christmas version of “Reveille,” he’s on the floor all Jabba the Blankett “okay, Ma, I’m u–” “-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiit’s time to get up, it’s time to get up, it’s time to get up in the MOR-NING!”

“MR. S, GOD!” “SORRY SAR I’M UP MOM SORRY SAR MOM I’M! UP! MOM!” “Ba ba ba ba ba BAH, ba ba ba ba ba BAAAAHHH!” By this time we’re literally on the run from our mother’s voice, taking the stairs in two leaps, we both land at the bottom and I break left through the dining room and Mr. S freezes, panicking, I’m into the butler’s pantry and wrapping a parka around my head to block out the sound “WE’RE UP MOM GOD STOP” leapfrogging a boot rack into the kitchen and grabbing a glass of orange juice out of my father’s hand “you did this to yourself, Sar” and Mr. S is out in the front yard somehow and circling the house in bare feet and Pac-Man pajamas with a nasty case of the pee shivers “it’s time to get up, it’s time to get up, it’s time to get up TOOOO-DAAAAAAAAAYYYY!” “MOM!” “Ba ba ba ba ba BAAAAHHH!”

Man.

It still works, too. If Mr. S and I don’t shake tail feathers on Christmas morning, my father will come in and wave a cup of coffee around to release the smell, and if that doesn’t work, he’s like, “Or I could just call your mother,” and six seconds later we’re both pulling up chairs at the kitchen table, dressed and twitching, and she’s like, “…What?” And it’s not the singing; my mother has a lovely voice. It’s the song…oh gaaahhhd the song. It is really really awful. The day we learned about negative conditioning in Psych 101, I checked out on the lecture and wrote a letter to a friend from home because I already had that shit down, so take it from me: should you ever need to bother someone to the point where he or she will flee the house in bare feet in order to get away from you, “Reveille” is just the ticket.

I could have used “Reveille” this morning, though. Or Judas Priest…something. We’re now at that point in a New York City winter where it’s, like, the seventeenth overcast day in a row and the soundtrack at the local drugstore is an endless loop of “Vitamin D?” “Aisle seven.” “Vitamin D?” “Aisle seven.” “Vitamin D?” “Aisle seven.” And it happens every year, and every year, although we all live here and we have lived here and we know it’s not going to get truly t-shirt warm until May Day, if then, we’re impatient and resentful, aloud, of our outerwear all “hel-LO, it’s SPRING,” like, we don’t get a spring. It’s cold, it’s cold, it’s chilly, it’s cold, it snows, it rains, it rains, it rains it rains it rains it rains it rains, we get that one pretty day late in April, and then it’s hot. We know this. We know this because we live here and we go through it every year, and we should know better than to get all miffy because we still can’t put our scarves away, and we kind of do know better, so then we get annoyed at our own complaining, and yet we can’t stop, we’re turning into those ridiculous New Yorkers who say things like “I could never live in Los Angeles, I’d miss the seasons,” like, WHAT “SEASONS”? We only have two and half seasons here in the first place — hot and sticky, cold and damp, and cold and…not damp. I think. I don’t remember what “cold and not damp” is like, because it’s March in New York and Seattle and London are looking at each other all “not on a bet, no sirree bob.” I lurch over to the alarm for the first snooze of the morning and look out the window, and there’s the rain, it raineth every day, and while the Stockholm Weatherdrome we all live in has me muttering that hey, at least it’s not snowing, what’s my motivation to get up? It’s not pouring, but it’s drizzling that steady, even, Hollywood-rain-machine drizzle that will get in my bones the minute I open the front door. My hair is going to look like shit no matter what I do. It’s nap weather. Birthday week is over. Unless someone is going to pay me to sit in the windowsill with a cup of International Coffee and brood, it’s snooze-bar city and I’m the mayor.

Wake me when it’s May. NO NOT YOU MA GOOD GRIEF.

March 28, 2005

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