In this blog entry, I'm going to focus on my mornings, mainly because I'm a morning person, but also because I have just finished a routine morning on the Warped Tour, and it's still fresh in my mind.

I set my alarm clock for 8:30 every morning. However, I am usually up by 8 since I believe I have developed an internal alarm clock. I can wake up whenever I want on normal tours as well. I don't know how I developed this -- I believe it is because my body understands how important my morning alone time is to me, and to reap the benefits, it must get itself out of bed.

Because my bunk is a bottom bunk, I use the "roll/tumble out of bed" technique. There have been a few noisy annoying alarms going off on peoples cell phones lately, so sometimes I wake up and smack my forehead against the roof of my bunk. Our bunks are about two feet high. They kind of remind me of those cells that some Chinese communities live in. I think I saw one in a sociology textbook once... Oh well. My toiletry items are in the back lounge so I spend my "getting ready" time back there. I usually rush to get ready so my "getting ready" consists of brushing my teeth and a single layer of mascara. No need for a ponytail; my hair usually keeps pretty well through my slumbering. I also just usually wear what I wore to sleep since I almost always need to do my laundry on tour.

I step off the bus and try to orient myself to the new surroundings I am in. Usually, there's a bunch of merch and production people up already heading in the direction of the stages. I fall in line and make it to my stage. Because I'm a girl, Bobby, the stage manager, usually doesn't put me to work as much as the guy stage hands. Yet recently, to my dismay, he's beginning to give me more manual labor jobs. So today, I show up with a purse and a slightly nicer shirt to hint my intentions are to watch the guys with muscles move my equipment instead of turn into a dudette with muscles. No luck. "What are you doin' with a purse? How are you supposed to move stuff," Bobby yelled at me over the commotion in the truck. With a puffy face, I threw my purse in a corner and grabbed onto the next amp being rolled off the truck. Oh well -- helping unload is a small price to pay for them to keep our equipment on it.

-- Meg