Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [70]
There aren’t a lot of beggars in New York but there are all kinds, and every passerby has a decision to make. The black kids stand at the clogged entrance to the bridges and tunnels and slop soapy water on your windshield with a dirty sponge. If you give them a quarter, they clean it off. If you don’t, they don’t. I’m torn between compassion and anger at times like this. It’s blackmail but it’s better than stealing and I laugh and give.
The ordinary street beggar will not be helped by what anyone gives him, though. And, anyway, I have the feeling the saddest cases and the ones who need money most desperately don’t beg for it.
Morning People and Night People 149
Everyone in New York is approached at least once a month. You have to have a policy. Mine is simple! To beggars on the street, I give nothing. I wish I was certain I’m right, I keep thinking of the young woman in Grand Central and the two fried eggs.
Morning People and Night People
A re you consistently dumber during some hours of the day than others? I certainly am. I’m smartest in the morning. You might not think so if you met me in the morning, but that’s the fact. After about 11:30 a.m., my brain begins getting progressively duller, until by late afternoon I can’t remember my middle name. It is morning as I write. My middle name is Aitken.
Each of us has his best hours. The people who have to have a cup of coffee to activate their brain in the morning are the slow starters. I have a cup of coffee to get my body going, but my brain starts up without it.
It’s always best if what we are coincides with the way we wish we were. It doesn’t happen often to most of us, but both morning people and night people seem to be pleased with themselves the way they are.
I know I’m pleased to be a morning person. I think it’s best. I associate it with virtue. It works out best for me, too. Not perfect, but best. I get to work very early, taper off around noon and have a very unproductive period between about 1:30 and 4:30. Unproductive periods are important too, you know.
Somewhere around 4:30, my brain begins to stage a mild comeback, but by then it’s time to quit and go home.
I feel sorry for the people who think best in the evening and I’d like to tell you why. Night people awaken grudgingly. They dread getting up but eventually drag themselves out of bed, put themselves through their morning ablutions and stumble to work hating every minute of it. By noon their metabolism is finally moving at the same speed as the current of activity that surrounds them and they begin to blend in. It is now lunchtime.
In the early evening, after the sun has gone down and the rest of the world is settling in, they’re ready to go. They waste some of their smartest hours, when they should be most productive, watching some of the dumbest shows on television.
Prime-time television was designed for those of us who are smartest in the morning. By 8 p.m., we’ve lost most of our critical faculties, and “Dallas” and “Laverne and Shirley” are just perfect for our level of intellectual activity. Even if we don’t like them, they don’t bother us enough to make it worth our while getting up to turn them off.
The night people sit there doing the crossword puzzle or reading the paper and grumbling because there’s nothing on the tube worth watching.
It seems apparent to me that we ought to rethink the whole pattern of our daily lives. We’ve got to make some changes.
If each of us really does need seven hours’ sleep, it would probably be better if we took it in shorter periods. I often get more sleep than I need or want all in one piece during the night. Even when I go to bed at 11:30 and get up at 5:45, which is my habit, there’s something wrong with just lying there in one place for six hours and fifteen minutes.
I’ll bet it would be better for both our brains and our bodies if we took our seven hours in sections instead of all at once. Say we slept for three hours between