Morning People roll call

I was always the kid at the slumber party who kept a book in her pillowcase bcz of waking up 4 hours earlier than all the other kids (also bcz READER). Being an early waker as a kid meant I knew all these shitty Saturday morning cartoons that no one else saw bcz LATE SLEEPERS. There was this seriously weird show on PBS called PAINT POT ALLEY that I Google periodically to make sure it was not the product of the pre-sunrise crazies [Google so far suggests that it was; I can't find a damn thing about this show]. This malady was not so cool on the weekdays when it meant I saw agricultural weather report while I waited for my mom to get up and make me oatmeal.

Until my adulthood the morning person phenomenon was not really caused by a desire to productively greet the dawn with alacrity (as you can tell from all these TV crazies stories) but being a sensitive pansy whose sleep was easily bruised by the faintest glimmer of light. This went away when I moved out on my own and discovered playing too hard/generally fucking around all of the time. NOW the light thing came back + ecstatic embrace of the clouds parting over my third (and first and second) eye due to coffee.

I realize now the current Morning People thing I am doing is a way of palliating some anxieties about the day's workload. More anxieties = earlier alarm = why I am waking up at 5 a.m. tomorrow. I genuinely do find the morning hours to be productive as hell, granted a limitless supply of coffee.

PLEASE FEEL FREE to deteail your morning person ways

Other things I like about the morning:
– no one around but fitness folks and desert style conscientious dog walkers
– the fucking sunrise
– no one at 24 hour grocery store
– quiet apartment complex

I get up most weekdays at 5:30 and often on the weekend by 6:30. Sunrises = hell yeah.

i'm not a morning person but i have to be right now, cuz i've been waking up at 5 for a 7 am class.

I'm not a particularly early riser (usually 7:30) but the other slackasses in the house get up so late that I get the benefit of quiet time. Also, I work with/for people two hours west of me, so 8-10 is as quiet as I want it to be.

I don't mind the mornings, I like the quiet, and the smell, and the light, and the anticipation. But seeing it requires having had a very early night beforehand.

i was told that as i aged i would see the light, as it were, and become a morning person. this has not happened.

^^^

i get up around 7:15 or so for work every day. i'm not usually very productive in the morning, generally, but i do love morning light/stillness. i increasingly get irritated with myself if i sleep past 10 on weekends.

well, my 'productivity' extends to like, reading a bunch of internet news (since the east coast blogs i read will usually have posted a bunch of things by the time i'm awake)

For the past 5 school years I've been waking up too damned early (well before 6am). I always considered this the one worst aspect of my job. My father, bless his soul, was a morning person. I take after my mom in this resepct.

i wake up around 5-5:30 on weekdays. read & do the internets for an hour before waking the family. most mornings i grocery shop while they're getting ready to leave, stores are close by and not crowded at 7:00.

always been a morning person (and insomniac), even as a kid i would lay in bed reading & listening to radio before school. in my teens did swimming practice in the early am which cemented early rising habit. even in my twenties when i went to music shows 2-3 nights a week i'd go to bed at 3 or 4 and wake in time for work.

acceptance *shrugs*

Oh, I'm a morning person too. Goes with the job, I guess? Except my early rising comes in phases... I'll get up at 5 for weeks, and then slip into a routine of waking at 6:45 for a job that requires me to be at work at 7:30, then feel ashamed and go back to 5:00. Also, I am never, ever, late for anything. Mornings are great, especially in summer when you get an hour of extra sun that nobody else gets.

I wish I could get up at 4:30 every morning. That would give me plenty of time for running/gym and getting a little work done before I go into work.

I get up for work at 1.00am 5 days a week, which seems to have led to my getting up no later than 6.00am on my days off.

even in my twenties when i went to music shows 2-3 nights a week i'd go to bed at 3 or 4 and wake in time for work.

I really wish I could do this, but I struggle to get out of bed at 8am when I go to bed at midnight. Envious of you morning people!

i struggle to go to bed & struggle to get up
you guys are a good advertisement for mornings; when i've had to get up, a job i had that started early i had to walk to, i liked it. but it is part of a deal that my mind made with my body that it wouldn't trick it out of sleep. to get up & be productive is a great thing.

the only reason wish I was one is, as you've pointed out, other fucking people aren't around.

Morning is an exceptional time for uninterrupted writing. Unfortunately, when my livelihood depended on it, I codified + ritualized my morning writing routine so effectively that I can't replicate it now – 6 years later – or deal with variation. So much of the time I wake up, run through the first little bit of my proscribed schedule, and get hung up on the fact that some X is different. Then, I open ILX.

I like getting up early, in that I like being up and doing things early and getting that extra time, etc. etc. (especially on weekends) but actually waking up and getting out of bed in the morning is excruciating. If I have any more than a three-day weekend, without even realizing I'll start shifting my schedule so that I stay up until 1 or 2 and sleep in commensurately later.

My wife makes fun of me for saying that I've slept in when I wake up at 6:30 on a weekend. I get up at 4:20 on weekdays (for the commute, no stono), which has been taxing on me only because I have to squeeze in so much preparation for work. When I was in high school I used to get up this early all the time.

Even in my twenties when I worked a series of jobs that kept me out til 1 in the morning and awake until 3 or 4, I'd still be up by 9. My body is just best at doing things fresh out of the gate.

I enjoy getting up early when I can make it a routine, but getting up early only once in awhile is pure torture. Right now I get up at about 6:15 on weekdays, getting to work around 7:30, which usually means I'm one of the first ones in the office and I love that first really quiet hour to get shit done.

On the weekends, I used to sleep in until 10 or 11, but since our son was born I pretty much get up with him and nap later when he does. I do like getting up early, but I think design studio in college fucked up my sleep so much that I'm only finally now, 15+ years later, arriving somewhere back to normal.

i got up before 6:30 this morning because maria LIED and said that if i made coffee she would get up and get the kids ready, but she didn't and just stayed in bed and i had to take the damn dog out and get the damn kids ready and then some other damn kid came to the door and apparently i had to take HIM to school too and i never got to go back to bed. now i'm at work. dirty trick if you ask me.

I hope you unplugged the coffee maker so it'll be cold when she does wake up.

and put her jeans in the Fridge!

when we were going out to the car, our neighbor ran out of the house to show us a nice picture of the kids in the paper though. so, that was nice.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/400334_10150531065117137_686202136_8908515_315288801_n.jpg

Brothers Rufus, 9, and Cyrus, 6, enjoy treats at the Shelburne Falls Coffee Roasters in Greenfield recently while downtown with their mother.

Thats a great picture! Would totally make my morning.

i've managed to wake up at 5 most days for the past 2 weeks, with a few exceptions. considering my normal routine consists of sleeping through alarms and dragging myself out of bed at 8, 8:30, this is a huge accomplishment. quite happy with it and hope I manage to keep this up for long enough to reprogram my brain...

that is a great great pic & also yr tumultuous morning is making me lol

it was the other kid and his mom showing up at the door when i'm running around like an idiot and trying to find gloves and hats and trying to keep the dog from getting out that kinda upped the ante. didn't even know the kid was coming. the kid came in the door and i said see ya later! to the mom and shut the door. no time for mom!

Haha oh man. Also - that is a great picture.

One more datapoint re: me not being a morning person: if I have to get up before 6 am, I get sick to my stomach and remain that way until about mid-morning.

brother rufus, 9, is posing for the camera the way i imagine nas would, if he were supping shakes at Shelburne Falls, fwiw

Ideally, I'd like to get up earlier than I do, but I really hate the idea of waking up while it's still dark.

Great photo Scott. I would basically have to have my two boys taxidermied to get them to pose nicely like that.

i'm a morning person, it's tied into my general anxiety/issues related to time (the earlier i get up, the more time i have). also i have a daughter who doesn't sleep past 6 a.m. ever.

My daughter sleeps in for the most part, but my son usually wakes up and jumps into our bed at some point between say 4 and 6.

rufus was in bed with us most of the night cuz of nightmares. he's been having nightmares. he bacame a big fan of this british guy who does animations on the internet and he watched one that freaked him out on the guy's website. so, my fault i guess. i should have looked at the guy's website before letting rufus look. i thought the guy's stuff was pretty innocuous. and i don't think it was anything too adult or anything, just an image that freaked him. a lesson learned. all british computer animators should be locked up.

actually i blame the kid who was at the house this morning. he turned rufus on to the animation guy. there, i knew i could blame someone else.

who is the animation guy?

We had the same kind of problem with our son, who was showing a tendency toward "spooky kid" sometimes so we were like "fuck it, let's all snuggle down watch some horror movies". somewhere along the line he saw something that freaked him out pretty bad and he's had more frequent nightmares and isn't as brave on halloween as he used to be. he still plays zombies and vampires with his best friend though, so it'll probably all sort itself out.

who is the animation guy?

ha awesome ilx mindset "oh huh it gave yr kid nightmares what's the url?"

uhhhh i forget his name. its just one name. he has a ton of stuff on youtube with like 4 zillion views. he is famous for posting on some famous internet board for computer gifs and animations. and he has done adult swim bumpers and stuff. i liked the stuff i saw on youtube. trippy vids of cats rolling down the street and turning into more cats and psychedelic stuff like that.

there is one with sheep i think that is good too. i think it was sheep.

Oh wait, was it the sheep that's jumping around and then like, three sheep heads pop out and fly around and do loop-de-loops around each other and stuff?

oh i've seen the cat city one, it's nuts...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX3iLfcMDCw

rufus has never really had nightmares until now. so, i guess that's good to make it to 9 without getting freaked out like that. cyrus has been a pretty frequent visitor to our bed over the years. i really did hope and pray that they didn't turn out like me when i was a kid. i had intense night terrors from infancy into my teens. my brain is weird. also intense and crippling headaches from babyhood until i was 19. don't know if the two are connected. i was still sleep-walking in my teens cuzza nightmares.

Ha! That's the guy! Probably the best thing I've seen since I stopped eating acid.

http://www.youtube.com/user/cyriak?feature=watch#p/u/7/WQO-aOdJLiw

yeah, that's the guy. very clever guy. don't know what it was on the website though. i didn't ask rufus for specifics.

I get up around 5:30 on weekdays but I'm not a natural morning person. I prep a lot of my morning activities the night before and it takes me a while to feel like I'm at 100%.

hey you early risers!

do you find yourself two breakfasts? since i've been waking up early, i've started eating breakfast at home and then by the time I get to the office at 9, I am hungry all over again.

Yeah, unfortunately I do that. I try to keep the office breakfast to fruits and vegetables though.

I miss the days of waking up at 7am. I use to be so quick to get out of bed and start my day, happy that I had an entire day ahead of me and tons of time to waste/spend. 7am was sleeping in, work days started at 5:45am. Now I never see the morning or 7am unless I stay up all night. It has never felt right or healthy seeing it from the other end of the day. My sleeping patterns have been a wreck.

i don't always do it but the difference between getting into work at 8am, when there's nobody there, and letting the world catch up to your pace, rather than the reverse at 9am, is truly giant.