Published Apr 22, 2005
I will never publicly admit that I like having 8am classes four days in a row. But I am now officially a convert to the whole morning person things. A flurry of e-mails at 6:05am? Makes me feel hardcore.
Like my mother, also a Cancer, I used to heart sleeping in. I think I made it in at 8:45am — official starting time — about 5% of the time at my last job. Earlier, when I owned my own business, I’d regularly keep going ‘til 11 or midnight and then sleep ‘til 8am (thank goodness I worked from home and a quick trip downstairs in my jammies had me answering e-mails by the time clients got into work). I vowed I would never, ever, work for someone who made me come in before 9:30am. Ahh, youth.
When I started school in August I saw all the first-term 8am classes I was, to put it lightly, I was ready to plotz. And the first couple of weeks were awful; I never drank a lot of coffee before, but suddenly I was up to a venti soy latte every morning. Then I started getting headaches when I skipped coffee, so I downshifted to tea (and baked goods!), and got my mornings going.
Today I woke up at 5:30 — even before the alarm went off — and sat down and did some research. Forty pages of analyst Spanish- and Portuguese-language analyst reports and business press articles later, I discovered I was done with my research for the day, even before my first class.
The downside of all of this is that I keep waking up at unreasonable hours like 5:15am. This is even worse thanks to daylight savings time, since the light by which I might have gotten my work done has been transferred, by government fiat, to midwestern industrial agriculture. Soon I may have to switch my alarm from 6am to 5:30am — and, if Dean Voigt lets me, I might actually try to get to sleep before one. Because, let’s face it, that hour between midnight and one is just all about the recently-TiVoed Family Guy and Futurama. I need less cartoon in my life and more hardcore 6am e-mailing.