How to Wake Up Early

Presenting NiRei’s tried-and-true, guaran-damn-teed method of waking up and staying up:

Step 1. Relax the night before by reading a book that begins with someone breaking into the heroine’s bedroom while she’s asleep. Then go to bed.

Step 2. Wake up at 3:50 am from a nightmare. In your sleep-fogged mind, convince yourself that there’s someone in the apartment despite the lack of evidence to support that theory.

Step 3. Spend the next few minutes beside the closed bedroom door, trying to work up the courage to venture out into the living room and check the doors and windows. Logic tells you no one’s out there; adrenaline argues otherwise.

Step 4. Startle so bad you bang your knee against the doorframe when you hear a car horn suddenly blare in one long, continuous blast.

Step 5. Curse loudly when you realize that said horn is coming from your car, which has been honking itself every time you turned the wheel while driving but has now apparently learned a new trick.

Step 6. Throw on your bathrobe. Race out of the apartment (making Step 3 moot) barefoot and frantic, past the cute radiologist from next door who’s come outside to see what the hell is going on.

Step 7. Silently acknowledge that you must look as attractive as a half-drowned possum even as you stumble on the stairs in front of said radiologist, curse some more, then run to the car, fumble with your keys, and finally lunge inside to jab the horn and silence it.

Step 8. Tape the horn down so it won’t go off again while explaining to an understandably irate neighbor from the other side of the complex that you were not, in fact, leaning on the horn. Thankfully, your half-tied bathrobe, bed-head hair, and sleep-deprived mutterings seem to convince her that there’s no need to call the authorities.

And it’s as easy as that! With the adrenaline still pumping through you and the fear that your car horn will start to go off again–thus convincing your neighbors that you must die a slow and painful death–sleep is nothing but a dream. (Sorry. Bad pun. I’m going to blame it on sleep-deprivation.)

Here’s to a happy Friday.