Let the sun shine in

Chris Farah Farah's Faucet

It's four o'clock in the morning.

The sky is pitch black, and you'd probably be able to see the stars if the lights of Ann Arbor weren't drowning them out.

Maybe the night is cold, and you're pulling your jacket as tightly around you as possible to keep out the chilly winter air. Maybe the night is warm, and you unbutton your shirt a little so you can feel the warm breeze on your skin.

Maybe you've just spent a long evening studying for a history or chemistry midterm, trying to catch up on two months of reading you just never really got around to doing. Maybe you're drunk and coming back from a party on a Saturday night. Maybe you're with a friend, returning from a long conversation at Rendezvous that lasted until they kicked you out to sweep the floors and mopped up the table.

Whatever you're doing, whatever the weather is like, you know one thing: It's late, you're in college, on your own and you've never felt more alive in your entire life.

You think back to when you were in high school, and every once in a while, you'd go to bed at one or two in the morning on a "school night." Back then, staying up until one or two in the morning was quite an event. You'd only get about five or six hours of sleep, and how insane was that?

Your mom would shake her head in disappointment and crease her brow in worry. "You've got to get more sleep," she would say. "You're going to get sick."

But that was then, and now you're in college. You can do whatever you want. Sick? You're young - you don't get sick. Or if you do, you get over it. Sleep? You're young - you don't need sleep. There are too many fun or important things to waste a lot of time sleeping.

Now you stay up almost every night until at least 3:30. Maybe even four or five. You don't have class until noon, anyway. You can still get some rest, you just have to sleep through most of the day. If you have class in the morning, you skip it. Or maybe you take a nap during the afternoon.

However you manage it, you find some way to stay up late almost every single night. College is about nights. That's when all the real living happens. That's when everyone has fun - when everyone dances, or drinks, or talks, or hangs out. Staying up late is as fundamental a part of school as expensive books or eccentric professors.

Late nights are just as large a part of my college experience as anyone else. My average bedtime is probably about three, at best.

I love to stay up late talking with friends in the library (come on - like anyone really studies in the library). I love having all that untapped time in front of me, being able to lounge in good company on the edge of being asleep and awake, when bits and pieces of dreams swirl together with reality. I love to reminisce, to share the great stories of the past, or talk about the uncertainty of the future.

But as much as nights are an essential part of life, I realized a little while ago that I was missing out on something. I'm not talking about missing out on sleep, or better study habits, or anything like that.

I'm talking about mornings.

Unfortunately, with late nights came late wake-up times. Often, I wouldn't even see daylight until early afternoon. It wasn't like there was much I could do about it, of course. If I was staying up late, there was no way I was going to wake up early to see the dawn. It just wasn't going to happen.

Then I took a job that changed all that. In one of the more foolish decisions of my college career, I decided to start working on the Michigan Daily Online staff. I've always been a busy person, and I'm pretty good at juggling a lot of different activities at one time. So why not? I asked myself. I soon realized why not - the hard way.

Starting to work at midnight or one in the morning to put The Michigan Daily on the Internet is no treat. Unless you really enjoy talking to yourself, or you have some very interesting and loyal imaginary friends, working by yourself for upwards of three hours is far from pleasant.

Then, of course, comes the part about working with computers. Has anyone figured out why computers never seem to work when you need them to? Somehow, they just know how to screw you over in the best way possible, at the most critical time.

Yet we put up with it. We shrug our shoulders or breathe a sigh of exasperation. "The computer crashed," we say. And then we start over. Nobody ever seems to say, "Why the hell don't these things work?!" If you buy a car, and it just stops for no good reason in the middle of the highway during rush hour, you don't just shrug your shoulders and say, "Whoops, there goes the car. Better reboot."

You buy a new damn car! One that doesn't just stop working randomly. One that actually does what it's supposed to do.

Not so with computers - one of the only products in which periodic failure and malfunction are accepted wholeheartedly and without question.

Now, working Daily Online by myself with the aid of a few scatterbrained computers, my nights became even later than they ever had been. No more three or even four in the morning for me. I'm in the big leagues - and I can get home at anytime from five to even seven in the morning.

But ironically, that's one of the only things I enjoy about putting the Daily online. Now, instead of getting home late at night, I get home early in the morning. And I can finally see what I was missing out on all those times I slept until noon or one in the afternoon.

Mornings have even become my favorite part of the day. The air is different early in the morning. It's cleaner somehow - a little colder, but not icy or frigid. Maybe the grass is wet with dew, and the atmosphere is just a little easier to breathe.

As the sun comes up, light creeps over all the buildings, and every part of the earth seems to wake up and become new again. Aside from the chirping of the birds, an occasional truck dropping off newspapers or a random person walking down the street (who knows, maybe a Daily Online employee), everything is silent.

You have the world to yourself. There are no distractions of honking horns or pollution spewing out of cars' exhaust pipes. Life just seems to be how it should be.

Nights can be about hanging out with friends, going to parties or having long talks over coffee. Mornings are about learning to be by yourself.

Wake up early every now and then. Appreciate the morning. Take a walk if it's nice outside, or if it isn't nice, watch the rain fall from indoors.

Just one thing: If someone asks you to put a college newspaper online every night, give it a second thought before you take the plunge.

Mornings are one thing, online is another.

- E-mail Chris Farah at cjfarah@umich.edu.

04-09-98