early bird catches the worm

I wake up early - twilight hour early, birds not even twittering early: 4-5 am.

My compulsive nature compels me to trudge out of bed at 4am and drink coffee, study french and have a minuscule bowl of cereal. I am not a person with an eating disorder, but an eating disorder personified. What is that? Nerves? My fear of having no solitude? But even with that awareness, I am an automaton and ritualistic at 4am: roll out of warm bed, turn coffee pot on, take adderall + xanax, go to the bathroom, blearily walk downstairs to pour my 1/2 cup ration of cereal with sliced banana, grab coffeemate and mug, and then hurry up stairs and scarf down my food like a dying person guzzling their last sumptuous meal. Halfway through I comprehend this is not normal, eating a bowl of cereal and 3 full mugs of coffee in 10 minutes but I can't discipline myself. It's a strange experience, realizing that when you wake up at 4am for the solitude and peace, you don't earn any of it because you're too busy stuffing food down your gullet to notice.

A night ago, my mother purchased more correspondence classes for me, to occupy my interminable time, and so no binge lists intrude my thinking. I appreciate the expediency she applied, and surely what it took to lobby the credit card from my father's hand. He wants me to complete high school as exhaustively as possible, covering any and every subject no matter the cost. It's a vicarious exposure to High School he never had, being shipped of to military school at 14, and then getting GED and masquerading as a hippie for a decade - give or take a few years. He's assigning all his ramshackle aspirations onto me: a doctor, an archaeologist, a scientist. I would be happy simply editing manuscripts. That was my dream. To sit, and smell, and immerse my soul into the words of fresh copy paper and polish the story into a gleaming book or article or an anthropology of short stories. An Editor.

But with all this newfangled technology running about, is that even a logical option anymore? I want to be affiliated with a quaint,  idyllic publishing house. Will Piedmont Community College help me discover that? The kindle, the nook; what happened to the magical thrill of turning a page, of tangibly clutching a book rapturously for the next sentence? I feel cradled in a swath of library smells, of old books and new books. The phenomenon of words transforming into otherworldly adventures is something to live for, and console you in times of need. They have the revolutionary power to refine our thoughts, give a new perspective in our lives, and motivate us to rearrange our perceptions.