I have a challenge for you.
Take a walk along the University of Dallas Mall next Saturday morning. Before the Cap Bar has opened or the sausages are available in the cafeteria. Before most of us have thought about throwing off our blankets, but after the sun has been throwing out its rays for
a couple hours.
Take a walk. I dare you. In all likelihood, unless you meet the one other awake person on campus besides yourself, you will think you are in a ghost town.
The bells ring the hours but no one hears them; pieces of trash fly in the wind, like the relics of a lost civilization. Worst of all, down the whole length of the Mall, there is no one to be seen. You will begin to feel lost and alone in the big state of the Texas morning.
Now it is 10 p.m. the night before. Suddenly, the masses emerge, movies are playing, parties beginning, doors are broken and life is in full swing. Need a study buddy? You can find 20 in Braniff. Feel hungry? Walk to the Cap Bar. Or crawl. It will be open for another two hours, anyway.
The contrast of night and day on campus is apparent, and it means one thing: Nighttime is when UD comes alive.
And here arises our problem. Because the night is not when everyone comes alive.
In fact, for a small fraction of us, it is when we go to sleep.
Allow me to introduce to you the Morning People Club, the most anonymous and secret of all organizations on campus, and also one of the most underrepresented. But, first, what are morning people? Do they even exist?
Although our numbers may be approximated to the grains of sand upon a sandless beach, we are in fact real and may be spotted in our natural habitat under the sun between the hours of 4 a.m. and 7 p.m.
But even if you never meet us, try to imagine our weird and bizarre lives.
If you were a morning person, you would wake and propel yourself from your bed with a great burst of energy. This burst sends you running and skipping down the halls, greeting everyone with a cheery “good morning.”
A “good morning” that bounces back quicker than the checks you write from your checking account. You are met with snarls from underneath every sheet. Your roommate growls back at you from inside her wrinkled pajamas, like the grizzly bear does when awakened early from its winter hibernation.
This doesn’t deter you, so you skip outside, ready for breakfast which, as a morning
person, is your favorite meal and eighth sacrament.
Small problem if you happen to live at UD: There is no food within a ten-mile radius
of where you stand.
The Rat and Cap Bar both cater to the schedules of night owls.
You wait for manna to fall from the sky.
When that does not happen, you walk over to the cafeteria. At this haven for the famished, you hope to find food, but the staff look at your weird morning person face for a long time before announcing there is no food ready.
That’s not quite true. There is peanut butter, ice cream cones and an orange – the ingredients you always thought made the perfect breakfast. Licking a cold knife smothered
in peanut butter, you walk aimlessly down that deserted Mall and kick rocks in an attempt to justify your lonely morning person life.
Most of us aren’t morning people. That’s because it requires more willpower to get
up early than to stay up late. But we live in an age of diversity, and morning people should be recognized.
If we can remember that not all amongst us begin studying at 9 p.m., and if we can remember that life stirs on the Mall even before the Cap Bar begins serving lattes, and if we can remember the morning people, then maybe we can help form a more well-rounded community.
Because if we are recognized today, perhaps tomorrow we will find more activities planned in the morning. We would find more parties starting at 4 p.m. and fewer ending at 4 a.m. We would find our manna in the wilderness in the form of early breakfast.
Why should you care? Because morning people who have had breakfast are happy ambassadors of sunshine who will brighten your morning, even if you wish you didn’t have to wake up to one.
But it is now almost 5 p.m. and, as a morning person, I feel my energy setting with the
sun. Time for bed.
But don’t forget: Breakfast for the Morning Birds!
Yours ‘til 6 p.m.,
The Hungry UD Morning Squad.
