I Need it, for my LIFE

The following was written at about 9am from the top of the observation deck at Hitchcock Nature Center.

"What the fuck are you doing up?" Clark mumbled half asleep and half clothed as he shambled towards the laundry room.

"Iuhnuh." I shrugged, "It's a lot easier to wake up when you know you don't have to go to work".

There was in fact a very good reason I was up, showered, dressed and eating breakfast at 7:10am on a Tuesday, 4 things that are never happening at that time normally. "I'm already going to miss the sunrise" I thought, "I should have gotten up earlier so I could have made eggs". Part of the reason I was up was because my lingering cough kept me up more of the night than I wanted and part was because I was too excited for the things I was going to do today.

What started yesterday as an idea in the back of my mind to ditch work and play video games all day quickly blossomed into so much more. With school and other obligations Friday has become the only day of the week I don't have something to do, and of course I work all day and then usually cook. Because of this there was a plethora of things I wanted to do during the day that I just didn't have time for.

I need to take my monitor to get fixed. I need new wiper blades. I need to take back that shirt. I need to write a paper. I need to finish some homework. I need to make green curry. These normal things had become a sort of Holy Grail to me, things that a normal person would just shrug off as daily minutia but at this point in my life they were things I longed to do and was incredibly excited at the prospect of actually doing them. As I made the list of things I would do with my day another one popped into my head; I need to go to Hitchcock and see it before all the leaves fall off the trees and hopefully take some good pictures.

This was the real reason I had awoke at 6am, well before either of my work alarms went off, I wanted to get over to Hitchcock for the sunrise. I got here more or less as the sun was coming up over the Loess Hills and it looked beautiful. It was colder than I expected, but no colder than it should be at 7:30 on October 27th. I grabbed my camera and headed out on a trail.

I ended up walking the same trail Laurel and I walked on my birthday in 2008. It was a strange case of deja vu because that day I remember so vividly when all the others seem to blur together. Eventually I came to the end of the trail to the spot where we stood and stared into each others eyes for a good long while, both of us too afraid to say "I love you". It would have been much more romantic than drunkenly in Heathers parents bathroom later that night, after finishing up Edward 40-Hands, but no where near as funny. She is the only other thing that this day needs. I can only hope that however many thousands of miles away she is she had as beautiful of a start to her morning as I did.

It is clear and crisp and it looks disconcertingly smoggy around Omaha. I feel like I can see 50 miles in all directions from the top of the observation tower and I could stay here all day.

But my day is only just beginning.