Sun It Rises

["Go" - Jonsi. Oh my gosh I love this album.]

It's 7:03 a.m. on the tail-end of an all-nighter. I'm shivering a bit under a blanket, still cold from the walk I took at 6:00 into the sunrise. But the sun that I welcomed to Today is now peeking into the bay window at the front of Crick and pretending to warm things up. Jonsi is singing in my earbuds the most gloriously sublime music of morning-ness (and northerness). Nick and Christine are in here still writing papers.

OK, so in case anyone gets the wrong impression: I am not an all-nighter kind of person. I don't think I've pulled one all-nighter while in college. I just don't see the point. This is NOT to say I don't procrastinate. It's just that the way I see it, if I'm running that late on getting the assignment in, there's not a whole lot I can do at 4:30 in the morning that will up my grade enough to make it worth staying awake. I might as well not lose both a perfect grade and sleep, right?

But now I'm in Oxford living in a house of people who pull all-nighters (or about four or five of them do). And I'm leaving Oxford in less than (AGHDON'TSAYIT) eight days. So I figure, why not go all-out and do whatever the heck I want? I technically could've finished this paper by 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., but I had waaaaaaay more fun making multiple cups of coffee and tea, rolling around on the ground saying ridiculous, sugar-induced things to distract people, bouncing up and down on the living-room chairs, making paper airplanes, etc. In short, I decided to be super ADD and totally inefficient. For some reason, I never got sleepy enough to make me change my mind and go to bed like a normal person. And so I finished my paper rather leisurely around 5:00 this morning. I downed some cereal, sent my paper in, and then grabbed the blanket (that's still wrapped around my shoulders) and headed off to find a spot to watch the sun rise.

It took me a while, but I found a wooden gate to sit on overlooking a football (soccer) field and trees and fields behind it. I sat myself down for the next half hour and thought about my life and talked to God and was quiet and listened to the birds and got Fleet Foxes stuck in my head.

Y'all. The sun. It's a giant ball of liquid orange paint that's on fire. Betcha didn't know that.

(One of my favorite parts about finishing a paper I've been working on is closing all of the web browser tabs that have been open on my computer for days of research. *click* Gone. *click* Gone. *click* Gone forever.)

In approximately ten minutes, I plan on being snuggled in my bed and not getting up until it's a good solid 2:00 in the afternoon.