Early morning rituals

I woke up at 3:45 in the morning today. I don't usually get out of bed during the wee hours of the morning, but when the situation calls for such action, I can give a satisfactory response--I'm capable of that. And so, after a word of prayer, I jumped out of my bed, which is above my brother's (it's a double-deck furniture we have for the dorm's boy's wing), and rushed to my study table to study the remaining chapters in Math that I hadn't studied last night--calculating volumes and areas using slicing and cylindrical shell methods. Oh, my favorites in Math 53.

It's almost always like that, you know. Every night, I'd begin studying a subject for tomorrow's long exam and when the urge to sleep would knock at my consciousness, I'd postpone the remaining two or three pages of my notes for tomorrow. What usually happens is that my roommates would have a hard time--and I mean, BLOODY hard time--nudging me to get out of bed, especially when my dream gets exciting (again, a usual phenomenon during the night before exams).

Studying in the early morning has its share of advantages, which is why, as much as possible, I try to finish all assignments and review the day's notes in the evening and review them again an hour before I bask into the frigid coolness of morning water. I shall skeletonize the points I'd like to make so that you, my dear readers (if you DO exist), won't assume that I am making a novel out of a blog entry:

1. It's cooler in the morning, but the temperature isn't sufficient to brain-freeze your neurons.Not to worry. This is the Philippines--what might be the coolest recorded temperature in history is merely the room temperature in Vladivostok.
2. Everything feels fresh, especially your mindset. You'd be surprised that the topics you had found hard to understand the night before enter your brain like bombarded gamma particles.
3. It's quieter. The stillness makes the environment conducive for quality studying especially when you live in dorms or in houses where people hardly turn off their radios.

Tomorrow, I shall ask my brother Ralph to wake me up very early, "Manong (that's Kuya in the vernacular), if I don't wake up, pinch my nose or do something to it." My big, fat olfactory organ, after all, is one of the most sensitive parts of the body, albeit it’s lack of support in the nosebridge area.