Morning

I’ve never been a morning person. Every day of elementary, middle, and high school I’ve dragged myself out of bed and gone about my morning business trapped within a fog of exhaustion. My parents can vouch that I never get up easily, nor do I get up cheerfully. And yet here I am in college waking up at 8am. I know that doesn’t seem early to you, but it’s FAR earlier than I need to get up. I have class at 10:20, and as I’m sure you can see via some simple math, I’m cutting out a good bit of sleep.

Why do I get up then? Because I’ve been trying to adopt the same sleep schedule as my roommate. He goes to bed at 10 and gets up between 6 and 7. While I admire his efforts to be stealthy, I’m a light sleeper, and I normally wake up during this period as well, although I also normally go back to sleep. This interruption serves to begin the Christopher Gradual Wakeup Sequence such that by 8am I can no longer hope to sleep with the light pouring in through the window and the birds obnoxiously singing their hearts out.

Here I am, at 9:30, and my brain still feels like there’s a veil between it and reality, that it can’t quite connect to the world that it perceives. In the early morning I actually often have trouble distinguishing reality from fiction. For years now, during the first few minutes after I wake up, my brain will interpret my dreams as memories of yesterday, rather than dreams. This morning I woke up believing that Dreamworks had produced a crappy sequel to “How to Train Your Dragon”, one of the more horrifying dreams I’ve had this month.

Trying to get back into the habit of writing every day is difficult. I mastered it so easily during winter break when this blog started, but now it’s proving difficult to get up the gumption to sit down and write, even if I am essentially freewriting most of these posts. I suppose I should thank those of you who have been reading my blog for your dedication, as it is normally just me rambling via prose about whatever topic strikes my fancy at the time. I keep hoping to do some more serious writing, but my English class is really draining all of my energies in that department away for use on essays. <Shudder> I don’t much care for writing academically if I can avoid it. Narrative is my forte, and when that tool is taken from me I feel lost.

I’m going to go lift the fog with morning coffee, so I’ll talk to later, dearest Internet. In the meantime, here’s a first sentence for you:

The office was drenched by the fire suppressants in the ceiling when a cup of receipts on the managers desk caught fire.

The Dirge of the Dead Lizard (To be extended)

My white tail flashes in the sun

Whilst over boulders I do run

Through coolest shade and scorching heat

To where the many rivers meet

We hide, we climb, we scamper

We dance, we run, we canter

Away from hawks soaring high

And arrows, arrows, from the sky.

I’ve spent most of the last two days hunting down lizards in Shadow of the Colossus. Why, you might ask? I have NOTHING to do. I’m really looking forward to classes starting tomorrow, because this is just agonizing. I know the homework will be rather unpleasant, but I can deal with that. Having a sense of purpose will be nice.

As for the above attempt at poetry, I have grown to hate these lizards with a burning passion. They’re a pain to find, a pain to kill, and the benefit for each one is negligible. It’s maddening.

I need to go to bed early tonight, so I’ll just end this here. Farewell Internet.

Today’s First Sentence: It was that fateful day on which I would develop my lifelong phobia of reptiles.

False Alarm

First Sentence: A dropped stitch is always a problem when knitting, but Jared wan’t dealing with “A” dropped stitch in the singular: it was far worse, and entirely the weather’s fault.

I’ve been on a really strange sleep schedule lately so I tried to correct it tonight by going to bed early (at 8 pm, to be exact). I woke up the next morning and took a long shower, savoring the fact that only I was awake so early on such a morning. There was a slight problem with this exhilaration though. It wasn’t morning. It was 11:30 pm. So here I am, painfully well rested yet slowly approaching even the time that I go to bed whilst at college. I don’t quite know what to do with myself right now.

Obviously the best thing to do when you’re suffering from insomnia is get on the internet, so that the bright screen can forever destroy the delicate mechanisms of your internal clock. Here am I, on the internet. The above first sentence came to me while I was in that shower this “morning.” I still haven’t decided whether I like it or not, perhaps time will tell. Because it’s partially about knitting, a subject outside of the range of many people’s experience, I wonder whether it’s accessible to most readers.

My writer friend, mentioned in the last post, also showed me a book about the use of punctuation in creative writing, and I suddenly am thinking about EVERY SINGLE NON-ALPHA-NUMERIC CHARACTER that I put on this page, wondering whether it needs to be there. I’m torn between publishing this now and saving it as a draft so that I can later go over it with a fine-toothed grammatical comb.

There’s an idea: A grammatical comb. This wondrous device need only be run along the lines of any written piece of work and it will snag on every mistake. To fix the problem you simply apply pressure to the comb and – like pulling a knot out of long hair – your sentences’ tangled meanings will come free. I could really use one of those, and I can see enormous short-story potential around that premise.