I am a very light sleeper, I suppose that is part of the reason I have a hard time understanding how someone could sleep through an alarm clock louder than a nuclear power plant evacuation bell, and carry on conversations while they float in the purgatory between sleep and consciousness. For as long as I have known Butterfinger (nine years now - can you believe it?) he has been able to carry out these feats with the greatest of ease, angering himself and I in the process. He truly believes I am at fault when he sleeps through a meeting or snoozes for an extra few hours on a Sunday afternoon, and I accordingly place blame on his inability to rouse himself.

For example, Butterfinger fell asleep at approximately 9:30 am today, after remaining awake for an entire day previously. Before he went totally unconscious I made sure to ask him what time he wanted to start to be woken up, he proceeded to give me the utterly unrealistic time of 10:00 am. I consequently added about 2 hours to this projected time and after taking a trip to 7-11, doing wash, and talking on the phone with my mom, I tried to wake him up. My wake up methods at first usually consist of gentle shaking and speaking in a normal tone so I do not frighten the sleepy baby. After awhile I usually get little or no response from this behavior, which causes my voice to deepen slightly, become louder, and the gentle shaking evolves into pinching or snake-biting.

I can not say why failed wake-up attempts frustrate me to the extent that they do, but I can literally feel my blood pressure rise the longer I have to continue trying to revive Butterfinger. My anger translates into him being angry when he finally does wake up, which makes him not want to wake up and spit out any number of excuses as to why not to wake up including the ever-so-popular “my stomach hurts” or babbling nonsense. After this hour or so long scene transpires I am left exhausted and beaten - how can I be this awful at the simple task of getting someone out of bed?

We are both to blame in this situation, Butterfinger needs to work harder on establishing a constant sleep cycle to avoid oversleeping, and I need to better hone my patient wake-up method. Lately I have been trying WWE wrestling moves to get him out of bed, but that was not possible today due to my scrambled egg intake a few minutes prior to the wake up call. Attempts to wake someone that does not desire to be woken up is always going to be a disaster, and Butterfinger really needs to work on rebooting his system a little more expeditiously. I would really hate for this to get to the point of having to douse his comatose frame with ice cold water when he does not respond to numerous wake up attempts, but you never know…

If anyone has any tips on waking the living dead, please send me a comment. All of your tips, as always, are greatly appreciated:)

August 19th, 2007 | Startup Relationships, Roommates