I bought a real alarm clock.

Here's how it's going. (So long, nighttime scrolling.)

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“Why does your alarm clock sound like a church bell?”

He asked me this on a Saturday morning in 2004, our sleepover disturbed by a rare weekend when I had to be up for something at dawn.

“I don’t know,” I told him, “This clock has three different sounds. I guess I thought the bells were better than the regular BLEHP-BLEHP-BLEHP.”

He groaned and rolled over in the bed. (See? No one likes waking up to that sound.)

Many years later, on the first night I owned an iPhone, he asked me again as I tapped through the many tonal options.

“Will you wake up to the same sound?” He meant the church bells.

I laughed. “I think so. I’m used to it now.”

So used to it, the bells tolled and roused me from sleep for another decade-plus before I could no longer bear to be awakened by them. Not because of the sound itself, but because I no longer wanted to start my day with a small computer, that infuriating, thieving, stupid tiny brick that has stolen so much of my attention and focus every goddamn day, for so many years.

And thus, I recently made a change, an obvious one which sleep and lifestyle experts have nagged us all about for years.

I decided I would leave my phone outside our bedroom at night, charging elsewhere. It would no longer wake me up. It would no longer tempt me from the moment I regained consciousness. It would no longer be part of my morning routine at all.

At the end of January, I told him, “I bought an alarm clock. A real one.”

He nodded, asked me if it was a sunrise one like his, which miraculously wakes him up as it dawns a faux day every morning, while my body has learned to ignore its light completely.

“No,” I said, “Not a sunrise one. But it has lots of sounds to choose from.”

Church bells are not an option on the new clock, but “Gong” is. It sounds like a mix between a sound bath and, well, a gong.

And that’s the sound I’ve awoken to every day since January 27.

And tonight is the night—my first good night with this newfangled thing.

It has to be, now that I’m through the Night One and Night Two jitters. What are alarm clock jitters, you ask? They include: