So you stayed up super late playing Doom III, crawled under the covers at 5 a.m., and half an hour later the alarm goes off. Your partner bounds out of bed with the speed of Stupendous Man and the alacrity of Hobbes greeting Calvin when he comes home from school.
“Yay!” your partner says. “Morning is here! We can seize the day!”
And then you shoot her and go back to sleep.
*
That’s the perspective I don’t share. Here’s my side:
I crawl into bed at 10:30 p.m. and read until I fall asleep. H doesn’t come in until more like, well, 2 – 5 a.m., and then he complains that I’m hogging the middle of our bed. It’s hard to learn how to sleep on one side of the bed when there’s no one on the other side for most of the night.
At six, the alarm goes off. Our east-facing window cheerily lightens up the room and I get up and make a cappuccino. I read the news. The birds start chirping, but not so loudly as to disturb the silence. There are few cars on the busy road outside our house. I look out our windows to see what the day will be like—sunlight in the morning isn’t tired yet, like it is at night.
Bottom line: It’s great to be awake when so few of the local time zone are up mowing lawns, blaring speakers, polluting, littering, and doing other stupid human tricks. I feel very superior in the morning.