I know what it means! I can waste all the time I want and the sands will keep flowing.) (Apple apparently resisted using the hourglass image for a long time because they thought users wouldn’t know what it meant. As I scrolled in bed, the hourglass would pop up on my screen as an on-the-nose reminder of the passage of time, of my one wild and precious life slipping away from me in 15-minute intervals. I sheepishly set up stricter screen time limits on my iPhone - in a moment of ambition and/or delusion, I set my Twitter limit to 15 minutes a day. Maybe, I thought, I should resign myself to blue light and scrolling. I had already made two earnest attempts at - and spent some money on - trying to be an alarm clock person. I brought my phone back into my room.Īfter that second failure, I figured that maybe I was hopeless. A delicate chime does not rouse me from my reverie. I found that this clock’s alarm was soft, elegant, and tasteful - and therefore useless to me. I splurged on a fancy Swiss quartz clock with excellent reviews. I decided to try again with a new, nicer alarm clock. I brought my phone back into my room as a backup alarm, which sort of defeated the purpose of the whole enterprise. I started sleeping through the alarm, once waking up disoriented at 8:58 before a 9 am meeting. Either that, or my body again became too powerful. I felt good!Īfter about a year, this clock sort of stopped working. I started plugging in my phone in the living room each night, setting the alarm in my room, and waking up to a hideous screeching blare each morning. In May of 2020, my boyfriend kindly bought me a more straightforward solution: a normal alarm clock. And while the phone bed sort of solved one problem, it didn’t solve the more immediate one: that I would need a device to wake me up if I actually wanted to sleep away from my phone. I realized I could just put my phone in a drawer for free. In the end, I could not justify the phone bed. If a calm night of sleep away from the chaos of the phone could be bought, who was I to say no? I shielded my eyes each Sunday from the unimpeachable evidence of my minutes and hours squandered. I had started to dread my weekly Screen Time updates. A couple months into the pandemic, I was almost tempted to get one. It is mini and made of wood, with white sheets and velvet and satin lining. The phone bed can be purchased for $65 - down from its original price of $100 - on Thrive’s website. My time became silky and slick, like an eel determined to elude my grasp The phones, sleeping head to toe, resemble Charlie’s grandparents in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Her company, Thrive, called this product a “ family bed,” as it can charge up to 10 devices at once. I recalled reading about how Arianna Huffington, a paragon of hustle culture, recommended tucking your phone into its own designated bed each night. Maybe I would feel better if I got up at a regular time each day and didn’t spend the 30+ minutes before and after sleep funneling blue light into my eye bulbs via my phone. As time went on, I started to wonder if maybe I wasn’t being a little too kind to myself. Each morning, I woke up right before my workday needed to start. I let myself sleep in later and later in the name of self-care. My time became silky and slick, like an eel determined to elude my grasp. I generally strive to be responsible and on time, but waking up - especially when my apparently powerful internal clock tells me it’s not time - has historically been a challenge for me.ĭuring the pandemic it became that much more challenging. I famously slept through my last morning of high school. Though I recognize that it’s virtuous in some slices of our culture to wake up at dawn to rise and grind, I prefer not to do that. (I now find it sweet.) I remember lying in bed before school picturing this “Freaky Friday” scene, wondering what my life would be like if I had a headboard. That annoyed me so much that I would eventually relent and get up. “I would put my face right down by your head and whisper in your ear and (try to) kiss your cheek,” she recalled in a recent text message. When I was in high school, I too engaged in a battle of wills each day with my mother and my alarm clock. The bedside clock is small and black, with loud red digits. An alarm clock blares as they start their day with a battle of physical and mental wills. At the beginning of the movie Freaky Friday (2003), the mom character (Jamie Lee Curtis) pulls on the feet of her daughter (Lindsay Lohan) as she clings to the bars on her bed’s headboard.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |