Life's a Mitch: A morning brew
“One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has is just after he awakes in the morning.”
Why can I quote only that sentence from Melville’s Bartleby (besides “I would prefer not to.”). Did its rhythm entrance me? Did its imagery crystallize in my mind? Or did it articulate an observation about the morning infinitely better than Ben Franklin?
Let’s go with the last guess because it is true. The morning rocks. It feels lucid. It is wide open. The long shadows remix the environment. Can the rising sun depress you?
My observations are not time-worn. I sampled the early-rise schedule in late September. Now sleeping through the first light hours saddens me.
The early-rise schedule is psychologically practical. Work from 7 to 10 a.m. and you still have the day ahead. You may also monitor productivity against sunlight, a measure better than numbers. If you work little and the shadows lengthen, you might sharpen your focus.
No metric exists at night. The night is a room, constant black walls lit with constant glaring screens and lights. There exists no intuitive sign that one should work harder, stop work or sleep. Time seems to stop but it does not.
The early-rise attitude belongs in the college campus as much as a penguin in the prairie. For your sleep schedule I encourage not a permanent shift but an experimental dabble. Watch the morning Skyspace show once, or access the servery right when it opens once a week.
A final incentive: A few weeks ago, my father woke my brother quite early for a doctor’s appointment. As the car turned east my brother said, “Look at all the colors!” and my father replied, “That’s the sunrise.”
More from The Rice Thresher
Do more to make campus bird-friendly
April is the month of many things: Beer Bike, a solar eclipse, the last day of classes and, perhaps lesser known, Earth Month. As Rice launches a series of Earth Month events, I would like to address our potential as a campus community to be more environmentally conscious, particularly in an effort to make this campus more friendly to birds.
Take time for yourself during the summer
The academic year’s close means this issue will be our last until the fall semester, which gave us some time to reflect on what our editorial for our last issue should look like.
Student activism is working – and fear-mongering cannot hold us back
S.RES 02, titled “Student Association Boycott and Divestment from Corporations Complicit in the Ongoing Genocide in Gaza,” was presented to the Student Association on March 25. This resolution proposes the creation of an Ethical Spending Advisory Board designed to ensure that Blanket Tax funds are not dedicated to corporations that are complicit in Israeli colonial violence and apartheid based on guidelines created by the BDS movement.
Please note All comments are eligible for publication by The Rice Thresher.