Anybody Would Be Sleepy

Someone asked me why I'm a sleepy professor.

On first blush, that would officially fall into the “dumb question” category. Professors are well known to be a bunch of arrogant, droning, boring twits. They put everybody else to sleep; why is it surprising that they do the same to themselves?

Of course, that's not the only issue. In fact, it's more my daughter's fault. Well, really we should blame it on my wife. (Anybody but me!) You see, my wife decided my daughter was old enough that she could stay up until 10 PM. This was based on some mysterious reasoning understandable only to mothers who work on the theory that kids learn responsibility by being treated like adults. Huh? My parents thought we should learn responsibility by being whipped. With chains. That's how we used to do it in my day.

So the kid goes to bed at 10. Except that “goes to bed” is defined as “starts moseying in the general direction of the bedroom.” And it's my job to brush her hair, which is about fourteen feet long and which, on a daily basis, turns into a tangle that makes a mangrove swamp look orderly. On a good day, I get done by midnight. And then I usually have some work to get done. And after that, there's the necessary channel surfing personal development. So even if my first class starts at 10 AM, I have a good excuse for being sleepy, right? Especially when your subject is as tedious as mine. I could put a meth freak to sleep.

That's why what happened last week is so shocking. I think I must have eaten something weird, because I suddenly decided to get up before dawn to take pictures of the sunrise. And I did. I dragged myself out of bed, bundled up against the freezing cold, and drove to the top of the mountain in the dark, feeling mighty proud of myself. That is, until I saw the guy walking his dog—in shorts. And then there was the old geezer out for a run, heading uphill. What's with these people? Why do they put so much effort into making me look bad?

To top it off, there were the two bicyclists who appeared at the summit just as the sun rose, wearing helmet lamps bright enough to light a runway and coming from a direction that meant they must have already been out in those temperatures for a couple of hours. Showoffs.

But I had the last laugh. I got a pretty nice picture of the rising sun hitting the mountains, which (almost) made it all worth it (click for a bigger version):

And on the way back, I ran over the geezer.