Christopher Saint's Humor Column

Getting Up in the Morning: Why Bother?


In the early morning, when you are waking up to begin the daily ritual of eating, working, playing, and scratching, do you ever find yourself repeating some simple phrases? If so, are the phrases any of these:

"Why am I getting out of bed?"

"UGH, I feel like crap!"

"I really don't want to get up."

"Why in God's name is there a bird on my face?!"

If you do find yourself saying these phrases in the morning, then perhaps you suffer from a malady very similar to my own. I call it "Morning Deficiency" because in the morning, I am deficient...of pretty much everything.

Because I am part bat, I am always up late at night. In fact, I don't even sleep at night anymore. I go to sleep around 6 AM and sleep until about 3 PM. So, the very idea of "getting up" in the morning is sick to me. When morning rolls around, I'm finally "laying down", and I will have no truck with any of this "getting up" crap.

Needless to say (but I'm saying it anyway, because that's the kind of needless sayer I am), this creates certain difficulties when I get a morning shift at work because I don't even get around to laying down until it's nearly time for me to get up. So I usually get, at the most, three hours of sleep.

Waking up in the morning is like a form of torture for me. The alarm clock goes off--oh what a hated sound--and I jerk awake, bleary and angry. I beat the alarm clock into submission, maybe hitting it a couple more times than necessary and hoping against hope that it breaks. Then I lay back down, rub my eyes, and try to work up the will to actually leave the bed.

Finally, I do. I rise like some kind of waking dead and stumble about my room a bit, wondering what I should be doing. Usually I trip over shoes, or books, or something else, which doesn't make my mood any more decent or long-suffering. I am not at my most humanitarian in the morning.

Soon, however, I regain some presence of mind, and I realize that I am supposed to be getting ready for work. Still tripping, I go about the task of finding the clothes I'm going to wear today. This is generally pretty easy, as my clothes are placed according to a very scientific system, rivaling the Dewy Decimal system for complexity. My system, worked out over years of experimentation, consists of the "clean pile," the "dirty pile," and the "stuff that I can't find and therefore don't need."

I hit up the clean pile for my pants and shirt, and usually find my socks in a drawer (next to the clean pile) or in my hamper (which is allocated to clean stuff, but is next to the dirty pile). If necessary, I will forage in the dirty pile for a shirt or pants that are only "semi-dirty" as in, dirty enough to be declared dirty, but not dirty enough to actually wash yet.

After I have acquired the correct assortment of clothing, I then asses my own state of cleanliness, and, based on that assessment, take a shower or not. Usually I have taken a shower the night before, in which case I then put on the clothing, comb my hair, brush my teeth, and declare myself "ready". By "ready" I mean that I am in a state of hating my life, and hating the world, and hating morning in a very personal way, but I'll survive. Then I head off to work. On the way there, I usually am able to wake up more, and I begin to feel better. Also, shouting at the traffic helps to release some of my baser emotions.

It's always better after I actually start doing things. Once work begins, things get much better, at least for a while.

So, I much prefer waking up at a decent hour, like 3 pm. If you have the same problem that I do, then perhaps you will benefit from a solution a good doctor friend of mine recommended: "Go through your usual routine of being awake all night, but instead of going to sleep in the morning, throw yourself off a bridge into oncoming highway traffic. It will be a lot less painful than actually trying to get up in the morning."