I am NOT a morning person. I do love mornings—the light, the smell, the stillness—but there is something in me physiologically opposed to being alive before 10am. I like to think that if I could sit on my porch wrapped up in a heavy cotton quilt, drinking my coffee, holding but not reading a book, and not having to speak to anyone for several hours, that I’d enjoy waking up in the morning more. But as it is, despite all the pleasantness of dawn, I fucking hate it.

It’s not just an issue of continually drifting back off to sleep; I’m not a heavy sleeper, so typically once I’m up, I’m up. Granted, my alarm usually first goes off 45 minutes to an hour before I actually get out of bed, but after hitting the snooze button 10 or 12 times (4 minute snooze… what a terrible idea), I’m usually able to extricate myself from my nest of pillows and begin the day. It doesn’t really matter how tired I might be, despite my best efforts, regardless of the amount of rest I had the night before, I’m incredibly unpleasant to be around for the first 2 or 3 hours after I wake up.

I’m also a committed coffee drinker. I, like many of my Highlands-area compatriots, forced myself to enjoy coffee at an early age so that I could hang out at Heine Bros and drink things other than tea. I drank copious amounts of coffee all throughout middle and high school, but kind of let it go in college. I let a lot of things go in college, incidentally—coffee and writing most significantly. In the mornings, however, any kind of coffee connoisseur-ship I might claim is abandoned for the nearest available dregs. The coffee at work is total shit, but I drink it anyway. I haven’t had to resort to popping Exedrin yet, but I can’t be that far off. I’d probably take my caffeine intravenously if that was the only option available to me, not so much because of my dangerous caffeine addiction, but more because my reasoning skills aren’t too sharp in these hours of the morning. I drink it because it’s there, and because of the promise it makes: give me 20 minutes and a few more cups and I’ll make you feel human again.

A lot of my favorite people are early birds, and—truly—I admire them. Even aside from my hatred of running, I tend to look upon morning joggers (dawn treaders? heh…) with respectful awe. (In the evening, anyway. When I’m in the car, trying to make it to work by 8am, I tend to look upon morning joggers from behind narrowed eyes and clenched teeth, with conscious effort to keep from mowing them down.) But try as I might, I’m just not one of them. I’d love to be able to enjoy those first few precious hours of the morning. 6am is really, truly beautiful… I just wish we could move it forward a little later in the day.