On Mornings

I suppose the short story is that I hate them. A line I acquired from my father when I was younger sums it up rather nicely--if God had intended me to see the sunrise, He would have scheduled it for noon. This isn't really quite as cut-and-dried as it might seem. Most of my problem with mornings comes from an unfortunate pairing of facts about me. First, I am so much a night person that I could happily be nocturnal, but for the civilized world. Second, I do not do terribly well on a lack of sleep. Going to bed before midnight is not only difficult but disappointing. Therefore getting up before seven is somewhere between a chore and intolerable.

As far as I know, I've always been rather like this. My mother, an aggressive morning person (it seemed like it was not enough, growing up, that she be up at some ungodly pre-sun hour--all of the rest of us had to be up sometime shortly thereafter), has stories about waking me up for school. She would shout, I would protest that I was up--flagrantly lying, flat on my back--and so it would go for several iterations. She eventually settled into three methods of prying me out of bed. Yelling, tickling, cats. The first was the easiest, and probably the least effective. The second was the most effort intensive, but also the most effective. The third was the best for stories: she would lob a cat at me, on the assumption that its landing--all claws extended--would startle me into permanent wakefulness. The problem was that I learned to catch the cat, cradle it as an actual athlete might a football, and then pacify it by petting. And so I would roll over and return to vague sleep. I only have vague memories of this, but I'd kill for evidence of it.

Boarding school came, and college, and somewhere along the way my mother either relented or gave up (probably a bit of both, is my guess), and therefore just let me sleep unless it was absolutely necessary that I be up and awake and functional. It was a lovely compromise. Since graduating into the real world (a trial run after college and the real thing now that law school's spit me out), my mother is no longer my alarm clock. I suspect this is a good thing for everyone. Instead, my cell phone serves--noisily, insistently, inevitably--in her stead. Oh god the beeping.

Now, when I wake up in the mornings--for the first time I'm conscious of doing so, anyway, which may not strictly be the first time (although it often is when alarms are involved)--I am awake. That sort of awake that crystalizes everything you were thinking about just before you went to sleep. The sort of awake that scrolls your to-do list before your eyes as they open in budding horror at how late it is, even though it's painfully early. The sort of awake that causes you to vault out of bed in defiance of gravity and several other laws purely through force of adrenaline and terror. It's rather unpleasant, and I'd much rather ease gently into wakefulness sometime in the early afternoon.

After the energy of waking up is spent--often my the sheer drudgery of getting myself from my bed to the shower, often by way of the computer (those web comics won't read themselves)--I lapse back into a groggy state that seems zombie-like only because my brain and my body aren't in synch. The brain's working fine--often a bit too fast--but the connection's a bit wonky until I've showered, shaved, and generally clawed my way toward humanity. This may be why people think I'm bad at mornings. And it's a fiction I'll maintain for as long as it's useful to do so--largely because, as I said, I dislike mornings.

It being 10AM, I still would rather be asleep.

Next time, I will talk either about roommates or night time.