I guess normal is "being reluctant to get out of bed, but still doing it". In that context, abnormal can take a few different forms - waking up before your alarm goes off; waking up two hours late after hitting the snooze button [note: calculate 120/9 and stick it here] times; bouncing out of bed at the first buzz of the alarm, fully awake and wide-eyed with a steady stream rainbows and chickadees and flute music flowing from your anus. Until recently I would've said that "earthquake" would be an abnormal way to wake up, but the way things are going, that might be the norm for the next couple of years.
Too soon? My apologies, I can be an insensitive prick in the mornings. It's not that I'm not a morning person - far from it, I love being awake early in the morning. That's the whole point of this mission - I wanted to stop sleeping through one of my favourite times of day (the other being 4:20, when I silently mock all the potheads who think they're cool because they're sparking up at the same time as everyone else in their time zone, which is like totally whoa).
You know how when you start your car in the winter, it takes a few minutes of driving around to warm it up so that it's not making all those crunchy sounds? My brain is opposite of that. When I wake up, I shake off the cobwebs of sleep and almost immediately my brain is firing on all cylinders with a fresh oil change and a full tank of some other automotive analogy.
I've done some of my best song-writing early in the morning, and I have an easier time writing this damn blog in the morning. My mind is clear, distractions don't rile me up into a burning rage, I'm snappy and quick with my thoughts and decisions. Unfortunately this effect dies off by noon, at which point I become a zombie until I get my weird-o second wind around 8pm, then it's go-go-go 'til midnight.
There's a downfall to this hyperactive morning mindset - I'm an insufferable prick to anyone around me, because there's one portion of my brain that's still fast asleep: the filter that keeps me from saying what I'm really thinking. This is the same filter that allows me to be happily married to a non-deaf person, and that allows me to function in a society where I pretty much instantly hate everyone and everything.
I have a near-constant stream of uppity snark and meanie-pants sarcasm running through my head, which is really odd because by most accounts, I'm a pretty nice guy. It's like my mind has a knee-jerk reaction to verbally destroy souls, and I'm in a constant state of trying to shut it up, because my Droopy Dog angel says that's not very nice.
For the first hour that I'm awake, that filter is M.I.A. If it's awake at all, it's verrry slow to respond to my hyperactive mind and trigger-happy tongue, making it more of a hindsight filter. Instead of "Shutupshutupshutupsaysomethingnice", it becomes "Hoooboy, I can't believe you just said that, she is gonna WRECK you". This, of course, is totally useless to me.
Think about the conundrum I'm in - my bad-thoughts filter is off, I say something mean, upset the wife, she confronts me about being a big meanie, and I just start digging my own grave because the filter is still off, so EVERY DAMN WORD out of my mouth is meaner than the last. If the argument lasts an hour, the filter might finally kick in and make things right, but by then I've spewed so much vitriol that I've given her heart a chemical burn.
This is one of the reasons I like being alone in the morning - it's easier to keep my loved ones in a state of loving me back. And if I'm ever in a debate with you and I ask you to postpone it 'til the next morning... well now you know why, and your soul better be wearing a cup.
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