I'm a morning party pooper. I loathe getting up with the chickens and it's fine with me if the early bird gets that nasty old worm – I never
liked worms anyway. I just want my coffee – and a couple more hours in bed.But there are other, more aesthetic reasons why I'm not a top of the morning kind of gal. For one thing, I tend to scare myself to death if I
look in the mirror before my caffeine.
You know how in the movies the heroine always looks as though she's going to the prom when she steps out of bed? Well, I look like I'm going somewhere, too, but it's not the
prom. It's more like the grand opening of a Dempsy Dumpster .
Instead of glamorously mussed hair, mine separates into mutinous tufts that stick up in all directions, affording me that attractive porcupine sort of
ambience that many of today's clueless young people pay hundreds of dollars to copy. And no matter how many times I've tried to master the art of wearing full make-up to bed, when I wake up my eyelashes are stuck
together, I have raccoon circles around my eyes and my lipstick is on my pillowcase – not my mouth. Movie stars never look like bag ladies in the morning. I figure they must sleep standing up.
Add a few sleep
wrinkles, a serious need to brush my teeth and go potty and an attitude worthy of a small (OK, large) carnivorous dinosaur, and you have something akin to Frankenstein's woman, only without the cool hairdo and charm.
I'm certain I'm allergic to the pre-noon hours. Never have I bounded out of bed cheerful and ready to meet the day. Dawn cracks at nine or 10 in my life. I'd rather be sleeping than crawling out of bed when only
long-haul truck drivers and those women who bake the Hardees biscuits are up. Face it: I am not a morning person.
Lest you think this is a family thing, it's not. I'm the only real oddball. My sister, who is
starting to resemble our maternal grandmother in her morning habits, thinks sleeping past 4:30 in the morning is a mortal sin and going to bed after 7:30 at night is risky because that's when vampires roam. During
Daylight Savings Time she does things backwards: Goes to bed when it's light and gets up when it's dark. Then she insinuates there's something wrong with me because I don't like being up to wave at the little guy in the
mosquito spraying truck when he goes by.
Our maternal grandmother was the same way, which made visits by the normal, late-sleeping branch of the family quite a challenge. If you slept past six, you were a slug.
If you desired conversation in the evening, you had to sandwich it in between the local news and the Perry Mason rerun. By prime time viewing she was snoring.
Now my once sane sister – who could always be
counted upon to make me feel good about the bad things I do ("Go ahead and eat the whole box of Little Debbie Zebra Squares, Carole, you deserve it.") – is no longer available when I need her the most. And my mom's just
as bad. In fact, I was visiting with her just the other day and I mentioned how much I like sleeping the morning away.
"Oh, I get up at six every morning and some day you will, too," she said. That would
certainly make sense: As I've aged, everything I really like either makes me fat or ruins my health. Or, in the case of sleeping late, becomes impossible. So, what's a girl to do?
I think I'll start eating a
half dozen donuts for breakfast on the weekends, even if I have to get up before noon to buy them
