Comments on "Waking Saga" - Faerye Net

Re: It's all true.

2003-07-04T08:41:20+00:00

Just as long as it’s not undead, okay? I don’t want Patches the Zombie Cat in my bedroom. Plus, allergies!

Re: It's all true.

2003-07-03T21:54:45+00:00

Yeah! Nothing like opening you eyes to find a ball of fur inches from you nose! Esspecially if it’s a ball of fur with a slimy nose that it likes to rub all over your face.

Re: It's all true.

2003-06-30T17:04:55+00:00

Here’s what’ll wake you up. We’ll figure out some way to insert the kitty in your bedroom while you’re asleep. The kitty will instantly begin bouncing from wall to wall, climbing the drapes, attacking your face, and mewing incessantly. So far, it’s never failed to wake me up.

Re: It's all true.

2003-06-30T16:46:51+00:00

Yeah. That’ll really wake me up. NOT!

Re: It's all true.

2003-06-30T16:38:11+00:00

She has fangs! Real ones! And she purrs real loud, which could maybe sound like growling if we amplified it a whole lot. Also she could climb a tree with two legs tied behind her back. Oh, and she has lots of experience drawing blood with those sharp, evil claws of hers. I’ve got the scars to prove it.

Re: And I thought I was bad...

2003-06-30T15:38:52+00:00

Ooooh, that’s cool! I forgot about those card things.

Re: It's all true.

2003-06-30T15:38:13+00:00

Umm, yeah. And apart from playing the part of Miss Kitty-Fantastico, her part in the “scary Buffy thing” is what now?

Re: And I thought I was bad...

2003-06-30T15:35:49+00:00

It’s smaller and more convenient for carrying in a pocket, so if I’m going somewhere where I need a cell phone but don’t want to deal with the bulkiness of my Sidekick, I just toss the SIM card into the Nokia and use it temporarily. But yes, most of the time it’s just my alarm clock.

Re: It's all true.

2003-06-30T15:34:12+00:00

You forget that I have a kitty!

Re: It's all true.

2003-06-30T15:27:17+00:00

Plus, you’d have to have unnatural powers to get outside of my window. Either that, or the power to climb very skinny trees, which is natural only in lemurs and the like.

Re: It's all true.

2003-06-30T15:26:24+00:00

Dude, you know my trusty stake lives by my door, so that when they are miming the invisible un-invited wall, I can stake them in their exposed innards.

You guys could GET me a trusty stake. I wouldn’t mind!

Re: And I thought I was bad...

2003-06-30T15:25:21+00:00

Oooh, I see. Does this cel phone perform any purpose save alarm clock?

Re: It's all true.

2003-06-30T15:17:28+00:00

Perhaps, if Matt ever goes on a business trip, you could recruit your friends to give you a Buffy-style wakeup. We’d show up outside your window and make vampire noises, prompting you to grab your trusty stake (you do have a trusty stake, right?) and stand guard, lest we gain entrance and start sucking your blood.

That could be fun. I’d even get up early for that.

Re: And I thought I was bad...

2003-06-30T15:13:43+00:00

Your Sidekick is beefy? It breaks if you take it out in the sunshine, and it’s beefy? In the way that cows die if touched by grass?

Nonono, it’s my old cell phone that’s beefy. It’s a Nokia 3390. I love that phone.

Re: It's all true.

2003-06-30T13:39:14+00:00

Only because it lives on your side of the bed…if you go on a business trip, it’d better mind its p’s and q’s!!!

Re: And I thought I was bad...

2003-06-30T13:37:38+00:00

Threw your expensive speakers…ha ha ha!

Actually, your set-up reminds me of my dad’s at Caltech. They had very thin mattresses on top of a layer of plywood. He made a sensor that would be able to tell if he even sat down again, and affixed a fire bell with a key-pad to the end. The bell would go off, he would enter a code (come to think of it, there may have been some other stuff to do, I think with alligator clips) and the alarm would go off. By this point Dad was presumably awake, and if he got back on the bed, he’d have to do the whole rigmarole again.

Your Sidekick is beefy? It breaks if you take it out in the sunshine, and it’s beefy? In the way that cows die if touched by grass?

It's all true.

2003-06-30T13:37:17+00:00

Everything she said was true. When we were first dating and I would go stay with her, I often awoke to the sound of pulse rifle fire. I don’t recall it ever getting as bad as Ruby Rod though.

Then there were the occasions freshman year when Felicity would need to get up early to study (rather than the traditional all-nighter, Felicity would study till midnight or so, then get up at 4am, finish studying, and go take her test). At these times, I (not having a test to get up for) wanted to continue sleeping, but Felicity was too considerate for her undeserving neighbor to use the Outlook method at 4am, so she would set a clock radio alarm, and I would wake her up.

At least that was the theory. I would shake her, tell her it was time to get up, and she would say ok. I would then proceed to hold a conversation with her for the better part of a minute, only to realize when she made some completely nonsensical reply that she was still asleep.

Other times, I would tell her to wake up, and she would argue, with some excuse like, “I have to finish the plasmids.” She would persist in her resistance with similar excuses for five or ten minutes. I wish I had recorded some of our converstations.

It became sort of a game. How fast can I get Felicity to make some completely nonsensical remark?

Of course, this became old eventually. At some point, I discovered that threating her with a splash from the bedside water bottle was a fast way to wake her up when she was being difficult. I think I only actually did it once.

I don’t think she did any sleep-arguing after freshman year. Bio and Chem at the U of C really stressed her out. And she hasn’t physically attacked the alarm clock for a while now.

And I thought I was bad...

2003-06-30T12:11:13+00:00

My name is wonko, and I too am an alarm clock hater. I went through similar stages of alarm clockitude. First was the standard electronic “eee! eee! eee!” clock. To this day I hate that one the most. Like many people, I now harbor a deep, primal rage that awakens (ha ha) whenever I hear that noise. Eventually, my subconscious brain began incorporating the noise into my dreams rather than allowing it to wake me up, probably in an attempt to keep me from hurting my hand and breaking things by trying to shut the alarm off.

This necessitated a move to the use of the radio as a wake up tool, but it quickly became obvious that this was a terrible idea. On the few occasions that the radio did actually succeed in waking me up, I was left with terribly annoying pop tunes floating around my head for the rest of the day, which only served to fill me with even more hate.

Then the big guns came out. I bought some really kickass speakers and a subwoofer, plugged them into my computer, jacked up the volume, and wrote a tiny program that would play an MP3 at the time I specified. In order to turn the alarm off, I would have to press a key combination that would be randomly chosen each morning and displayed on the screen, requiring me to be awake and coherent. Unfortunately, there was a flaw in my logic. It quickly became apparent that the money I had spent on those nice new speakers had been wasted when, a few mornings later, rather than figuring out the stupid key combination again, I just threw the speakers at the wall and kicked at the subwoofer until the noise stopped.

Phase 4 in my waking up strategy was to convince my sister to wake me up every morning, since she had to be at school at the same time I did. This worked fairly well for a few days, until I began ignoring her completely and burying myself in the covers and trying to find things to throw at her. She stopped wanting to wake me up after that.

Finally, however, I’m happy to say I’ve reached a happy compromise with the alarm clock gods. My old cell phone has the best alarm clock feature of any kind, ever. The alarm is simple: three quick beeps and a vibration. At first, the beeps are quiet and the vibration is soft. Gradually, the beeps get louder and the vibration gets stronger, until it’s impossible to ignore. I put the phone near my pillow every night, and in the morning, it never fails to wake me up. So far, I’ve never had the urge to throw it at anything, but even if I did, it’s a beefy little phone, so it could probably take it.