Eat, sleep, wake

Despite my best efforts over the years, I’ve never managed to train my body to become an early riser. I’m a stubbornly sleepy person by nature—as a fifth grader, I generally refused to get out of bed in the mornings until my mother threatened to dump ice water on my head—and no amount of pre-bedtime planning or morning yoga in my adult life has been enough to get me hopping out of bed early of my own free will.

When I can get up for them, though, there are few things I love more than a good foggy morning.

I like to walk into work when I can, a practice which quickly became one of my favorite activities when I first moved to Squirrel Hill in 2017. The forty-five minutes it takes to get from my apartment to Oakland wakes me up, clears my head, gives me time to catch up on some podcasts or listen to new albums. And on a morning like today, it provides a great opportunity to take photos along the way.

Traversing fog is like walking through a dream. It might be my favorite way to interact with the world—where everything is quiet and vaguely mysterious, where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, where it’s possible to be alone but not lonely.

Days are noticeably shorter now, and the trees around Oakland and Squirrel Hill are starting to show the slightest tint of orange. The changing seasons doesn’t bode well for my efforts to get up earlier… but maybe it’ll make for more foggy mornings, which could be a worthwhile trade-off. We’ll see.