Morning Person

Understatement: Queenie is not a morning person. Ever. While I get up fairly early on a regular basis, I don't enjoy it, and I'll hazard a guess that the poor sods who get up with me don't enjoy it, either. I'm mean in the a.m., grouchy and testy and invariably pissed off at the universe for dragging me out of the sack, for setting up this whole agrarian "early milking" shit that now, thousands of years later, dictates that as a professional woman I must get up and going at the got-damn crack every day. I don't hold with this "best part of the day" happy crappy, either - it's too bright, birds tend to be impertinently loud, and there's dew all over everything. No, the best part of the day is late, when the children are all asleep and Adults, like pre-catastrophic dinosaurs, rule the Earth. Mornings are a hassle, and a hurry; mornings are traffic and gobs of dried-on toothpaste and too-hot oatmeal, hastily gulped. I don't care for it. Give me cocktail hour, any time.

While being out of a job bites the big one, one major fringe benefit of my temporary unemployment is the chance, for a week or so, to sleep later in the mornings. I was abed until eight-thirty this morning - luxury beyond reckoning! I feel like the fucking Queenie of Sheba. I had time to sit and make myself a delicious latte, to glance over the paper, to take a hot bath before starting my day. Wonderful. So much more civilized than leaping out of the sack and racing through the shower and out the door like a whipped carthorse.

I look better with more sleep, too. You can laugh at the old "beauty sleep" saw all you want, but I swear it's valid. My face in the mirror this morning is unlined, the skin beneath my eyes as smooth as a creme brulee. Tell me that isn't worth something.

The first person to tell me I should go to bed earlier gets popped upside the head.