By: Katie Nelson

Center Editor

I have always been a Clock App person through and through. Every single morning, my phone starts blaring Body Like A Back Road by Sam Hunt across my room and I rush over and aggressively hit snooze. I snooze two or three times, depending on my morning mood. I also have many alarms locked and loaded in case I need just a few extra minutes (because that will definitely make up for the three hours of sleep lost the night before). 

Right now, I have a 7:00 alarm, a 7:03 alarm, a 7:05 alarm, a 7:06 alarm, a 7:08 alarm… you get the idea. There’s a lot, and they add up because I never delete any of them. For the purpose of this article I decided to count how many alarms I have on my clock app, and safe to say I was shocked: 113 alarms. 

That might sound excessive, but I could never bring myself to delete any alarms. When I scroll through, I remember why I set those alarms, and it serves as a nostalgic token. They’re like a collectible that you just can’t throw away, no matter how small it is. Like my earliest alarm– set for 3:00– was set and used once and one time only when I flew back from Europe on the school trip last year. We all went to one of the hotel rooms and hung out and played games until 1:00 before deciding to go to bed, only to get up two hours later to pack up and leave–shortest sleep of my life. We also have the 6:35 am alarm, which should have actually been set to 5:35 to get up for my morning game at the Junior Olympics two summers ago. How I messed up so horrendously and set my alarm to an hour later, I’m not sure, but the outcome was almost catastrophic. 6:35 was our departure time, and I woke up at 6:35. I’m still shocked by my ability to throw everything together and make it out to the van. (Shout-out to my coach for forgetting the van keys which gave me a couple extra minutes). 

I also refuse to change my alarm clock sounds, but that’s for a more logical reason than failing to prune some of my random alarm times. There have been times when I fiddle with my alarm clock sound and it won’t go off. I don’t know what happens, but I’ve been traumatized a few times by messing with it to change the song and it failing me. So it will be left at Body Like A Backroad, which is so random and not even a song that strikes me as a good wake-up call, and now every time I hear the beginning of the song, all I can think of is the dreaded feeling of getting up in the morning. 

Some people may think it’s a bad habit that it takes me so many alarms to wake up. I would argue that it’s actually amazing because you cannot tell me there’s a better feeling than waking up and realizing you have a few more minutes of bliss. You get to enjoy the satisfaction of being cozy in your bed, something you can’t do if you’re completely asleep. That semi-consciousness is perfection.