20131028.0617

I have commented about being a morning person before (referenced here), about the joys of being awake and aware in the early quiet and cool.  I enjoy the feeling of the first cup of coffee taking effect on me (and I think there may be a poem in there somewhere).  I do my best work in the mornings, really, while I can focus intently upon the tasks facing me and have the pressure of a deadline to motivate me.  The blog happens as it does because I have to go to work, and so I cannot spend quite so much time on it as I might otherwise do; I am obliged to develop ideas quickly and efficiently if I am going to get my words out into the world.  Preparation for my classes happens similarly; I only have so much time at the office before I must head down to my assigned room to greet the students, so I must act quickly to put together ideas for them.

Even so, I confess that I do not snap awake of my own accord (often, anymore).  Usually, I set an alarm, and it is the alarm that wakes me.  Or it tries to do so; like most alarm clocks, mine has a snooze button, and there are days I avail myself of it.  I do so most days, in fact, including this morning.  (I am fortunate that the snooze timer is a scant five minutes and that I do not know how to adjust it.  It prevents me from falling all the way back to sleep, so the repeated alarm is less jarring.  Did I know how to reset the thing, I might still be abed.)

That I have already begun using my snooze button this week--and I have yet to have gone to work--can bespeak several things.  It could suggest that I am in anticipation of fatherhood (as I am) and am in practice for not getting enough sleep; I remember many nights in my youth that my father was awake after I went to bed and was already dressed by the time I rolled out of it (usually because he came and woke me up), and I have heard the words of other fathers (I work and have worked with many), so I expect that full nights of sleep will become rare and precious.  It could suggest that I am still in some form of recovery from the exertions of The City, with its frenetic pace and affectedly arrogant attitudes; it is a commonplace that New York City grinds people down, and while I think I may have been more of gristle than grist, I was not unaffected by the millstones of Manhattan avenues.  And it could suggest that I am lazy, an indolent intellectual (like most of that breed, else why would we prefer scholarship to "real, honest" work?), loafing at my ease (as the poet has it) rather than actually getting going and doing something useful for something other than mimetic Onanism.

That I think the second most accurate does not mean that it is.