After years of denial I am finally ready to admit that I am not a morning person. As someone who has surfed since they were ten, and spent over five years working as a professional surf photographer, trust me when I say that this is a very serious affliction. That’s not to say that I can’t get up early, it’s more that I really don’t like to. And once I’m up I tend to move rather slowly, gradually building momentum through the course of the day, like an avalanche bearing down on a little Swiss snowboarder named Ernst.
Generally all I need is a little motivation to get me up in the morning, and to most normal surfers that comes in the promise of firing waves the following dawn. In my case that’s enough motivation for me to pack my boards, towel and wetsuit, and set my alarm the night before. But that’s where it ends. Actually getting out of bed the next morning takes an entirely different kind of motivation, and that generally comes in two forms. The first is the handful of friends who have a key to my flat and easy access to a bucket of water. Generally these guys either want surf photos of themselves, or a companion to surf a particularly sketchy spot with them. And that alone should motivate me to go back to sleep. The other motivating factor usually takes the form of a beautiful young girl who might be lucky enough to be sleeping next to me, and eventually kicks me out of bed so she doesn’t have to tolerate the alarm going off every five minutes as I keep hitting the snooze button. That said, I’ve certainly enjoyed my fair share of dawn patrol sessions, and I’ve also just as gladly missed about a hundred times as many. In fact at one stage I was so bad that a mate of mine decided I must have Sleeping Sickness. Whether such a malady exists I don’t know, but that’s what he called it. And I personally think the World Health Organisation is full of crap. The truth is I actually don’t sleep that much, in fact I battle to get to sleep! The problem is once I do eventually nod off, waking up becomes near impossible…
But in my defence I have a theory (as I do about most things trivial) and I reckon this one’s on the money! I postulated this theory a few months ago when I needed to get a copy of my birth certificate for some or other reason, and upon seeing it discovered I was born at 5:14PM. Too give you some perspective, I’d always pondered why it was that some people were morning people, while others were more night people, and suddenly it hit me like a bouncer at a jock jol. Surely someone born in the evening would naturally become a night person, while someone born in the morning would grow into a morning person? I mean think about it like this – I woke up from a nine month slumber at a quarter past five in the evening. When that doctor held me upside down and slapped my butt, I was instantly wide awake and screaming my lungs out, and the last thing I was going to do any time soon was go back to sleep. And so the pattern of my life was instantly shaped. I was destined to stay up late into the night and then struggle to get up early the following morning. By the same token, someone born in the early morning will naturally become a morning person. They would’ve popped out nice and early, enjoyed a full day of activities, and then gone to sleep at a reasonable hour, thus naturally allowing them to wake up fresh and rested early the following day. So the course of their life would be set… I haven’t yet worked out what happens to people born at midday, so I’m just going to pretend this never happens.
I guess it’s a curse that I have to live with, but it is one that I have borne well as I am a rather broad-shouldered young hedonist with copious amounts of positive energy. Always one to look on the bright side, it was with great pleasure that I turned 18 and discovered a world created for people with my affliction. This was the realm of after-dark activities – a world of night-clubs, live music gigs, festivals and Saturday’s late night ETV movies (apparently). And I took to this world like a bodybuilder to baby oil, really beginning to enjoy the benefits of my condition. I found that I had the staying power to see every band at a festival. I had that extra edge to keep me going in long poker tournaments. And I am still often the last person to leave a club.
Of course, some of my friends say that my after dark antics are the cause of my ineffectiveness in the mornings. I say baloney. It’s because I was born at 5:14PM. It’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.
