The cats. The dog. The boyfriend. The bad coffee I made this morning. I ruin all of their mornings, too, so I suppose it's fair. How about you?

-- Anonymous, July 25, 1999

Answers

Mornings don't need to be "ruined." That is their default state. The question is whether anything can be done to make mornings a tolerable experience. Me, I prefer to sleep through them when I can. And write cranky messages on web-based bulletin boards otherwise.

-- Anonymous, July 25, 1999

What ruins my mornings? Not much, these days, although 'morning sickness' used to be my middle name. I suppose it helped when I started living alone. But there is the guy on the early morning train, of course. Thankfully, he isn't there day in day out, but when he is, he's annoying the pants off of everyone else.

Allow me to elaborate - the man is in his fifties and actually looks quite a bit like Hermann Goering, save for the uniform. When he enters the compartment, the first thing you notice is the smell, suggesting he did not have a shower before leaving the house that morning. Or maybe he just never takes showers, period. Then the lunchbox comes out, and he starts eating a sandwich, munching on it very loudly for everyone else to hear. When he's finished his sandwich - get ready for this - he TAKES OUT HIS FALSE TEETH and starts cleaning them there and then, using a paper handkerchief. And to top it all off, he then lights a pipe - using tobacco which has such a pungent odor it's positively sickening. And everytime he inhales, he starts coughing so loud that you'd believe there's an earthquake in progress. By that time, everyone else has turned a dark shade of green, as you can probably imagine.

Now does that sound like a ruined morning or does it? I mean, I'm not a religious person, but these days I find myself praying every morning that ol' Hermann won't be there.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 1999

What ruins most of my mornings is waking up to realize that it was all just a dream *sigh*...

-- Anonymous, July 26, 1999

At 12:30 a.m. some of my ceiling fell into my bedroom. Fortunately I was awake at the time, and in the living room, otherwise the shock might have killed me. However, after I cleaned up the plaster, I spent the rest of the night in a barely contained state of chicken-little hysteria. I eventually drank several shots of scotch to force myself to sleep, and am now reading the tips for hangovers in Pamie's forum with renewed interest. I woke up my landlord at 8:30 to give him the news, so his morning is probably even worse than mine right now. I pointed out the decaying plaster to him a month ago.

Oddly enough, the cat was entirely unfazed.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 1999

Mornings ruin my mornings. What the hell is the purpose of a morning? Aren't there at least 30 other ways to ruin a perfectly good day?

Monday mornings are the worst. I wake up and the morning (which I guess is the sun, it's hard to tell while I'm busy cursing) slaps me in the face, laughs, and says "Remember that really crappy week you had last week? Remember how you just wished it would end already? Well, wake up, dorko! You get to do it all over again from the beginning. Have a great day!"

I'm sooo not a morning person. Maybe I should have waited until the evening to answer this question. Oh well.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 1999

I am not a morning person, therefore I don't usually have mornings to ruin. However, when Tiger, the cat with _issues_ decides to make a meal out of my feet at 5am, that generally ruins my sleep, and hence my morning, since I'm not well-known for being up much before 9am. Yard workers with buzz-saws and lawnmowers in the condo complex also ruin my morning sleep, as do school busses honking and silly people who park under my window and then get into their cars in the morning and forget that last night they woke me up violently from sweet dreams by blasting their stereo on a top 40 station and they never turned the radio off, so said hip hop station also wakes me up violently between 6 and 8am.

Other things that ruin my morning sleep: Sabs making the bed jounce as he puts on his socks. Get a CHAIR man.

Mephisto jumping off the top of the armoire (a 4-5 foot leap) that is at the foot of the bed, ONTO the bed and hence smack into the center of my stomach.

13 pounds of male, well-muscled cat in the gut at 6am is NOT my favorite way to wake up.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 1999

Yeah, well, that's all well and good -- presumably all of you non-morning people are NIGHT people, right? Imagine if you were a morning person and mornings STILL sucked! I'm grumpy at ten p.m., and lately I'm not even cheery at the crack of dawn! It sucks. I never get a time to be happy and awake and all that crap. I'm just a grouch morning, noon, and night.

Maybe cutting back on caffeine was a bad idea.

-- Anonymous, July 26, 1999

what ruins my mornings? waking uo to find that the milk has gone bad, or that i'm out of my favorite espresso and that i have to drink the shitty, stale espresso that's been in the cabinet for months or have none at all.

-- Anonymous, July 27, 1999

No milk for my breakfast cereal. I *hate* that.

Newspaper hasn't arrived in time for me to read the comics over breakfast.

Discovering that my hubby has been lax doing the laundry and that I thus have no decent clothes to wear to work. (And before anyone envies me too much, our chore treaty states that he does the laundry and I do the cooking and dishwashing. What was I thinking?!)

-- Anonymous, July 27, 1999

Criffin (12 pounds) landing on my stomach is a very bad way to wake up, but then so is 8 pounds of Cinsand or Geoffrey. Or 15 pounds of Hampton. Or many cats deciding they are unhappy with each other and my legs are the best place to resolve this conflict.

Waking up from a dream where my life is going great and realizing it's not true.

Waking up from heart-rendingly bad dreams and realizing there is a nugget of truth behind them.

Telemarketers.

Waking up to the doorbell leaves my heart pounding for about a quarter of an hour.

Waking up before 11 in general.

Leah having to stand in my doorway and talk to me because I'm vaguely awake.

Most of all, I think, would be Geoffrey WALKING on my NECK. and after pacing back and forth for a while, settling down to lie down on it.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 1999

I am cat-free and I don't drink coffee. Judging by all of your responses, these two factors have improved my morning life greatly.

I recently started working food delivery, though, and for several hours this morning I was assailed by bizarre delivery anxiety dreams.

Half-awake, I was somehow convinced that I'd completed only half of a delivery the night before, and that I was scheduled to deliver the second half early in the morning.

I have trouble with logic when I'm half awake. I've actually turned off the alarm clock with the conviction that if I went back to sleep, I would be able to wake up 15 minutes ago.

Currently, though, my least favorite way to be woken up is by unexpected and unnatural medical noises and sensations. These are disturbing and startling.

-- Anonymous, August 03, 1999