Catch-22

I am not a morning person (and more than a dozen people have told me that is the understatement of the century.) I hate mornings; I despise them, I loathe them. There are no words strong enough for how I feel about mornings.

Now that I think about it, it’s not mornings that I hate, it’s being awake to see them. If mornings happened off in some little area all their own and let me continue sleeping, I would be just fine with mornings. The problem is that the morning people got up early and made all of the rules and now the rest of us have to get out of bed at 6:30 in the freaking morning to make it to work on time. That’s just wrong. Is there any reason that we couldn’t have work start at a more civilized hour? Even “workin’ 9 to 5” like the song would be better, ten to six or eleven to seven would be ideal.

I used to work a job where I started at 4 pm and got off work at 4 am. It was awesome. I would get home from work, eat my dinner and read the paper (and feel like I was getting the jump on things) then go to bed and sleep until 2, get up, have breakfast and go to work. It was a nice rhythm even though it meant that I never saw the light of day and didn’t really do anything except work, sleep and eat. I got as many night shifts as I wanted though; everyone else wanted the day shift, including the shift that started at 5 am. They kept me on the 5 am shift for less than a week; I was utterly useless until 10 and they figured it out pretty quickly.

On a similar note, I hate the bus. Or rather, don’t hate the existence of busses, that would be ridiculous, but I hate having to take the bus. I have a genetic bus curse inherited from my mother’s side of the family. My dad walks down the alley to the bus stop, arrives there, waits 2.5 seconds and the bus arrives and stops directly in front of him. In my case (or my mom’s) we run frantically down the alley in the hopes of catching the bus and it either:
a) Tears past without slowing.
b) Stops, but only because it has hit us.
c) Doesn’t come. Ever.

You think I’m exaggerating but I’m not, really. I have fallen underneath a bus and been nearly run over and the bus driver still didn’t stop. I have waited for more than two hours in the snow for a bus that “runs every 15 minutes”. I have seen the backside of more busses than a proctologist sees rears in his career.

If I manage to actually catch a bus, the bus curse doesn’t stop there. If there is anyone on the bus who is drunk, high, deathly ill, crazy, or all of the above they will, without fail, sit with me and talk to me for the entire bus trip. I have multiple examples of all of the above. Sometimes the people are harmless, like the woman who wanted to talk about my bandana for the entire trip while I was trying to study for a parasitology exam. It went something like this, “Hey bandana girl. You’re wearing a bandana. That’s a bandana and it’s on your head. Hey bandana. Cool bandana. Black bandana. Bandana bandana bandana banana. No, wait….” I’ve had men tell me all about how they’re screwing over their ex-wives by drinking the child support money, and hey will you go out with me? I’m awesome, I promise! I’ve had people hack up a lung on the back of my head for the entire ride and then make the bus driver stop at the emergency entrance to the hospital. And to top it all off, I’ve had the bus driver close the door with my backpack inside the door and my body outside it and try to drive away. Nothing causes extreme panic quite like that.

This morning I had the dubious pleasure of choosing between getting up at 6 am and taking the bus to work (since Stanley is at the Doctor’s). Making me choose between getting up before the crack of dawn and taking the bus is like asking me whether I’d prefer to die by pineapple or by being stabbed repeatedly in the eye with a shrimp fork (I’m allergic to, and hate pineapple and eye touching of any kind freaks me out. Don’t ask.) The conversation with Paul, which was further enhanced by taking place at 6 am, went like this:

Paul: (shaking me gently) “You have to get up, Muffinpants; it’s 6 o’clock.”
Me: (squeaks)
Paul: (still shaking) “Time to wake up, we have to go soon.”
Me: (squeak, mutter)
Paul: (5 minutes later) “You have to get up. We leave in 15 minutes.”
Me: (Squeaky) “But I hate the morning.”
Paul: “I know you hate the morning.”
Me: (gentle snoring)
Paul: (shaking me again) “It’s time to get up.”
Me: (Squeaky) “But I hate the morning.”
Paul: “We covered this. I know you hate the morning.”
Me: (Squeaks) “I do.”
Paul: “If you don’t get up you have to take the bus.”
Me: (groans) “But I hate the bus.”
Paul: (stifling laugher) “I know you hate the bus.”

Eventually I decided that taking the bus in the cold was worse than getting out of bed when I was already 5% awake. I’m regretting it already.