I admit it: I'm a morning person
Kate Rowland
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They are your siblings, parents, and cousins. They are your friends and your neighbors. They are your professors, your classmates, and, if you're unlucky, your roommates. They are a startling minority on ca.m.pus. You may even be afraid of them and their "different" lifestyle.
They are morning people, and chances are, you already know one.
I'm a morning person. By morning person, I mean someone who does his or her best work early, who would rather get up early and go to bed early than get up and go down late. They are the people who can utter the expression "Good morning!" and mean it, even before 9 o'clock. Morning people are not always delighted to hear the alarm go off at 7 a.m., but they usually get used to the idea of being awake within 10 or 15 minutes. And then they enjoy it.
There is a special bond a.m.ong morning people. For one thing, we spend more time together. We run into each other at the dining hall at breakfast or at Rolf's at 6 a.m. We can say to each other, "Wasn't the sunrise awesome this morning?" We tend to have early classes together. We work together. I work at 8 a.m. with two other equally insufferable morning people. I think we get along better for it. We certainly do spend much time sniping at each other in a way that only morning people can. We chat like civilized people, whereas non-morning people would sit in dazed, I-can't-believe-I'm-awake silence.
As a morning person, I have also taken a lot of 8:30 classes; in fact, last semester was the first semester I did not have one. Classes at 8:30 a.m. are great; they are ludicrously easy to get into, even the ones that are really good classes. I once took a five-person Spanish current events class that met at 8:30. We all sat there with our cups of coffee (and yes, morning people do drink coffee — we're just like anyone else) chatting about what we'd read in the newspaper that morning or about whatever other gossip ca.m.e to mind. This class also had the best final I've ever had to take. Professor Rojas-Anadón invited us all over for dinner and we voluntarily stayed there for hours, eating and talking. The final was worth 40 percent of our grade. I got an A.
People who just moan and roll their eyes at the thought of mornings are really missing out on a lot of neat stuff, like breakfast. I personally love breakfast. I eat it everyday, including Fridays before my 9:30 a.m., even when I have been at Heartland until 3. Breakfast is by far the most under-appreciated meal of the day. On the Center for Social Concerns seminar that I attended during Christmas break, we were served breakfast every morning, even the crazy morning we went searching for the El Paso, Texas, active passenger depot. The only other early-to-rise Domers breakfasting with me were the two insulin-dependent diabetics on the trip who had the choice between breakfast and life-threatening hypoglycemia.
Speaking of hypoglycemia, March is National Nutrition Month. Anyone who went to kindergarten knows that breakfast is the most nutritious way to start any day. People who eat breakfast do better on tests, are more productive during the day and eat more nutritiously than people who don't. To quote the American Dietetic Association, "Hunger, even short-term hunger you may experience if you miss breakfast, decreases attention span and ability to concentrate. [People] who eat breakfast are more alert... They are also more creative and energetic. Children who skip breakfast are more often tardy and absent from school than children who eat breakfast." Also, the dining hall serves great stuff at breakfast, although I see disaster brewing the way they keep the biscuit gravy and the oatmeal right next to each other. Even if you're just a cereal person, like me, and even if you're really not a morning person, breakfast is worth the five-minute time investment.
Being up early let me in on a great experience last week. On Wednesday morning, South Dining Hall served strawberries, nice ripe ones, not the little wormy ones they sometimes have. I grabbed a handful to take with me on the walk to the library to start my shift at the computer cluster. Wednesday was the first of those beautiful 65-degree days, and it was a delight to eat strawberries while watching the sun rise over the stadium and feeling the first hints of a balmy breeze. Things like that cure any early-morning crankiness.
Kate Rowland is a senior American studies and international studies major with minors in Irish studies and Latin American studies. She speaks fluent German, and she does more before noon than most people do all day. Well, except the days she gets lazy and spends the morning watching "Bob Ross's The Joy of Painting." The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Tuesday, February 29, 2000
