Becoming an early-riser

For most of my life I´ve been a notoriously early riser, and the whole thing can be blamed on one incredibly traumatizing incident that occurred when I was around the age of 6. My family had been visiting my aunt and travelled home by train, which took several days. After the first night spent on the train, I woke up rather late, and an absolutely horrifying thing had happened. My family had gone for breakfast without me. Not only that, but my sister had been allowed to keep the flower off the table in the dining car, and had brought it back to the sleeper car with her. When you are a child and you get to keep a real, live (and by that I mean freshly cut and slowly dying) flower from a train dining car, that puts you in the same class as your favourite Disney princess (which is probably Belle since she´s so smart and still gets to wear a ballgown and be emotionally abused by someone who you know deep down would be a nice guy if he wasn´t so hairy and would allow your sweetness to nurture his soul). My sister was a Disney princess who got hot breakfast and flowers and I was the sad anthropomorphic lamp (or tea cup or whatever) who slept until 11 on a train. So I learned at an early age that sleeping in is a sure-fire way to miss out on breakfast, romance, and all the other adventures that occur before noon on a weekday. For the next 15 years I shot out of bed at 7am.
One would think the distinct lack of roses being supplied to me on a regular basis would have deterred me from this routine and that it wouldn´t have taken me 15 years to give up on the idea, but as negative as my conscious self can be, my subconscious is an eternal early-rising Disney princess optimist. Even when I moved to Halifax and became a professional drinker student, I was still usually up at what my colleagues considered to be "an ungodly hour" (as in, any time earlier than half an hour before your class starts).

This theory was also helped along by the fact that I had spent most of my life living in the same house as  a man who can get up at 5 in the morning, disappear into the arctic with an arthritic dog for an hour, and come home with a stolen Christmas tree, thusly supporting the theory that waking up past 7am is for losers and people who don´t steal from ditches (and who wants to be that person?). But then I moved into a bachelor apartment and realized that getting up at 9am or later was a thing that I could actually do, and no one would be around to remind me that early risers get Christmas trees or flowers or breakfast or anything else, and I became content with the idea that I could sleep late.

I spent a full 7 months sleeping past 8am on a regular basis and sort of enjoying it, and probably would have continued on doing it if I hadn´t decided to go to Madrid, where my travelmates unwittingly made me relive my traumatic childhood. By this I mean that yesterday they woke up at 9:57 and hurriedly rushed down to grab muffins from the breakfast cart before it shut down at 10, and even though they very considerately brougth back two muffins, toast, and butter for me (which means they even took my appetite into consideration, which is apparently three times as big as the average Winnipeg female traveller in Madrid), and I woke up at 10:13, surrounded by muffins and convinced that something incredibly exciting must have occured in the15 minutes that elapsed between them stealing muffins and me eating muffins. I had missed it.

Which is why today, while we all agreed we could use several more hours of sleep after breakfast, they are in bed and I have been up for hours, blogging about early rising and laughing unnaturally loudly at the Mindy Kaling book I stole from my travel mate*.

*Not that Mind Kaling´s book isn´t laugh out-loud-funny and something I would giggle uncontrollably at in privacy, but I usually try to keep the insane cackling to a minimum when I´m in a hostel full of people who already think I´m the weird girl who gets up 4 hours earlier than she needs to. Unless I´m trying to prove what a good time I´m having, and I´m reading a joke about how long it takes men to put on a pair of shoes.