Sometimes a blog post happens without me really intending it to. This morning my friend Cliff posted a relatively harmless poll on the Fediverse about whether or not we are a morning person. I have to admit that yes… I am one of the foul accursed beings… but it is not like I ever intended to be. Essentially if there was an “It’s Complicated” choice I would have gone with that. Effectively I am a nightowl that through a series of unfortunate events… has become a daywalker. I was enough of a “not-a-morning-person” growing up, that it was a subject of humor among my parents. I was essentially non-verbal before 9 am… and would stare at whatever morning cartoons happened to be on the television while failing miserably at remembering to eat my breakfast. In High School it got worse, and I suffered some pretty epic bouts of insomnia where I just could not sleep at all. Taking a nap… would effectively reset my biological clock and make it think that it had a full nights sleep causing all sorts of problems that have only just finally as an almost 50 year old adult… resided to the point where I can actually nap again.
This not-a-morning-person nature was pretty freaking fatal when it came to standardized college admission testing. Living in a small town like I grew up in… it meant I had limited options for taking the ACT and SAT and in all cases… it was at eight in the morning. It was specifically my mathematical reasoning that took a hit, and I floundered massively on the first few that I took. It was only through a complicated ruse that I managed to score the 30 that I eventually called “good enough”. Essentially I completely screwed up my sleep schedule and got up super early in the morning so that my brain would think it was closer to noon by the time that 8 am exam happened. It mostly worked, and I did significantly better on the exam than I had up to that point… which was more than enough to basically get admissions to any university at the time.
I was living on a pretty steady dose or IRC and late night gaming for the first bit of college, with most of my coursing being in the evening… or at worst case around One or Two in the afternoon. I kept vampire hours and I like it… up until the point when I moved from my two year college… to a four year university. In my infinite wisdom I decided that I was going to be an art major, and there was one instructor that you could not get out without taking his lab classes. Every single one of them was at 8 am. So I had to not only become functional… but creative… five days a week at eight in the morning. This is truly the beginning of the end for me, and what started the pattern of leaving the comforting darkness behind.
It was not an overnight thing however. I had the misfortune of marrying a teacher… who has a pretty strict timetable that they have to report for work. They were on first shower duty and I was on second shower… and for the most part… it worked. Though my wife reports that she had to jog me from a stupor many times. Apparently I would get up, sit on the side of the bed… and then just sort of stare off into the distance without really knowing what steps came next. Even AFTER taking a shower… I would occasionally just blankly look at my socks, not quite comprehending the step that happened next. All this time I was trying to keep the hours of playing MMORPGs until 1 or 2 in the morning and then getting up at 6 am… and just deciding that it was fine to sacrifice my sleep in order to make this happen.
At the same time however I was noticing the benefits of starting my day early… because it would allow me to leave work early. I was destined for remote work, because the less time I am around other human beings the better… so getting into the office at 7 am let me accomplish a bunch of things before anyone showed up at the door of my office to ask me questions. Additionally tagging out at 4 pm felt great… because it allowed me to avoid that last hour of small talk with the extroverts that always happens in a physical work environment. This of course also got me in the habit of eating lunch at 11 am instead of noon… which has its own benefits of being able to get in and out of restaurants before the massive rush happens. Similarly driving into the office at 7 am and leaving at 4 pm… allowed me to skip the worst of the traffic, so shifting your time frame just outside of the norm had massive benefits.
I am not sure which came first… my poor sleeping habits catching up with me due to age… or the fact that I stopped actively raiding removing the excuse for staying up so late. Whichever the case I eventually got used to keeping more reasonable sleeping hours. Now I tend to go to bed around 9:30-10:30 each night… and am usually soundly asleep by 11. Which then causes me to wake up somewhere between 4 and 5… with me not actually rolling out of bed until 5:30 most days. Long ago I became the “first shower” and on the weekends I can no longer manage to sleep in any later than 6 am… with that last hour generally being me fitfully trying to get back to sleep and failing.
I am still not happy about my lot in life… and I still do not really feel like a morning person. I just feel like a series of coincidences occurred to shift me into the position that I find myself. There are people who welcome in the morning with great joy and gusto… and they make me sick. Some thirty plus years later… I am still not a fan of the Daystar… and I wish it would quit being so damned incandescent. Given my druthers I would still be a Night Owl… but sometimes shit happens and you just have to deal with the consequences of your actions. Maybe someday… when I have left the working world behind… if that ever actually happens… I can be an old grumpy fucker that wakes up at 5pm and curses the sun. We can all dream I guess.
So yeah… I guess I am a morning person. It happens to be the best of us. Getting old and conditioned to doing a thing sucks.
I get this entirely. I have zero desire to be a morning person, and would love nothing more than to stay up all night and sleep all day. College, and working a job that had me clocking in at 5am, then having the job I do now, where I was having to get up at 5:30 every morning to drive two hours to work (until the world ended), all made me have to be a morning person against my will. So, I feel every word of this piece.
I feel your pain. I used to boggle at my grandfather who was always up and about by 6am and who went to bed by 9pm in the evening while I could barely drag myself out of bed before 9am. I needed an alarm clock to get to work.
Now I set my alarm for 7am but it never goes off unless I forget to turn it off because I am awake by 6am every morning. I have become my grandfather.