Narcolepsy

Okay, so I have never been diagnosed with narcolepsy but it IS one of the many many diseases that I wish I had so that I can divert the blame for my laziness away from my self and toward a tragic birth defect.
But then again, who knows. I, like most people, LOVE to sleep. Maybe the fact that I love to sleep is what keeps me from hearing alarms, explosions, earthquakes, etc. - while sleeping. OR, maybe I suffer from some form of narcolepsy that puts me into a deep, hypnotic sleep and which makes it nearly impossible for me to wake up in the morning.
As an adult, I have managed this problem by simply having a radio go off at 6, a CD-clock go off at 6:30, a traditional beep alarm go off at 7 and a wake-up call at 7:15 to help me get going. That still doesn't work, but sometimes.

Now that I'm analyzing myself here, I do think it's possible that one of the reasons I have trouble waking up is that I associate waking up with trauma. My body and mind know that waking up is a horrific experience and so, they choose to shut down. But more on that later.

I hope I never go into a coma. I'd be totally healthy and not want to wake up out of a combination of fear and laziness.

Almost as soon as I started to HAVE to get up for school, I had trouble doing it. My mother had always encouraged me to stay up as long as I wanted. She liked to force-feed me ice pops and keep me next to her while she watched horror movies. We had to keep the sound down to an almost inaudible murmur so that "daddy won't wake up". Of course "daddy" did wake up every hour or so to go pee and complain in a much more audible tone while heading for the loo.
"Gosh damn TV going all night. No wonder nobody wakes up in this house."
He'd say that same thing every night that Mom was home.
(Some days she worked through the night and I would have to lay in bed alone, trying not to imagine that demons were in the attic above my bed trying to dig through the ceiling so they could eat me alive.)
So, when the horror films from "Chiller Theater" were over, I would finally go to bed. On Sunday nights, when Mom was always home, I would usually go to bed well past midnight and have to wake up at 6:30 to get ready for school and be there by 7:30.
I pretty much never woke up before 7 though.

Most Monday mornings were the same in my early school years. Aldo's alarm would begin to ring at 6:30. He didn't have to be up until 7 but since he had pretty much the same problems I had with sleep, he didn't hear it either.
I vaguely recall hearing my father washing his face in the morning. It was always a rather noisy affair - much louder than the alarms - even my Raggedy Ann N' Andy Alarm, which was hands-down the most annoying alarm ever. I had a girl cousin who loved Raggedy Ann and so, naturally, she and her mother thought it would be appropriate to buy an alarm clock for me featuring Raggedy Ann and her equally unattractive and retarded brother, Andy. (Andy was basically Raggedy Ann's producers trying to open the boy market for their extremely-annoying-doll business.) So, my cousin bought me this clock, which I think was actually supposed to be annoying because by the time I was 4 years old, it was pretty clear that I liked sleep a little too much and my extended family had heard about this - including my cousin. The clock used the voices of two really annoying kids to SHOUT every morning, something like this: "Andy Andy, Please get up. You must be on your way! So, brush your teeth and comb your hair and start your happy day!" Then it would repeat until you started your happy friggin' day. I guess that alarm actually didn't last so long. I think about one month after I got it, I found it in my backyard smashed to bits. I heard Aldo later brag to his friends that he'd, "helped Raggedy Ann and her stupid brother die". I guess it was kind of harsh, but I apparently didn't hear the damn thing anyway so it was no loss to me at all.

So, back to my father and his morning routine.

For some reason, even though I had this love for sleep, my father NEEDED to come into my room before the alarm clock rang and say, "KIDS! UP! SCHOOL!" and then go to the bathroom to do whatever he did in there. I am still not sure what it was, but it apparently involved a lot of water because the bathroom was always very wet when I had to use it, and it smelled like Aquavelva had been splashed into every corner of the room.

Needless to say, I never got up when my father preceeded the alarms. All those pre-show warnings just put a deeper, sleep-inducing fear into me so that by the time I felt my father's rough hand yanking my ankle I only had about a milisecond to drop my hands to the floor to avoid getting a cuncussion. I remember feeling the seams in the hardwood floor scratching against the skin of my back as my pajamas rode up during the dragging process. But this wasn't the worst part. I was always basically still partially asleep when the dragging happened. It wasn't until we got to the bathroom across the hall that things got really scary.

Lying on the carpeted hallway floor, I was fairly comfortable and could just start to feel the sleep seeping back into my body when Dad would lift me up by the pajama collar, or the seat of my pants (which always gave me an annoying wedgie), pull me into the bathroom, turn on the cold water in the sink full-blast and dip my head over the vanity. He didn't really put my head all the way into the sink. It was too awkward as the sink wasn't that big and even as a child I had a huge head. Anyway, his method was more jarring than mere water-pressure-to-the-face stuff. He took his sand-paper-feeling hands full of freezing cold water and smooshed them into my face so hard, over and over and over until I begged him to stop.
"Okay, okay, Dad!" I'm up, I swear! Stop it. I'll be ready in five minutes." I would always say that and it was never true. The fact is, I would always go back to bed and lie down, thinking to myself that I just needed to rest for ten seconds to recover from the recent trauma and get up and put my uniform on and go to school.
The reality was that I almost always fell asleep for about ten to thirty minutes when my mother would come in the room whispering something about how my father was going to kill me or leave without driving me to school or something. The leaving without driving me was what usually got me going. I didn't want to have to take the bus. I mean, I could sleep on the bus, but I usually overslept on the bus and missed my stop, so it was generally a bad option.
So, I usually opted for suiting up, going outside to my father's truck, in which an enraged Dad had been sitting - engine idling for half-an-hour. I guiltily crawled into the passenger seat, often next to some Irish carpetbagger-construction laborer who smelled like beer farts and said, "quick dad, I'm late!"
"Late because you can't get out of the bed", he'd reply. "In Estonia, we woke up at five o'clock in the morning! We fed the chickens and miked the cows; had breakfast, run around playing with the pigs - like that!"
I just stayed silent as he repeated the same things over again about how in Estonia kids were not so lazy like these Americans here, as if I were some "American" he didn't know and as if I had a house full of farm animals to care for. It was sooooo anoying, but the guilt I felt about being lazy coupled with my tender age, kept me quiet through all those rides to school until I was old enough to drive my self.

When you do things for yourself, you have no one to blame but yourself. It's better that way - at least it is for me.