As If I Could Seem Any Dorkier At All

Long-time readers will not be unaware of my peculiar obsession with punctuality; I know I've admitted in the past that I'd rather be an hour early for something (anything) than fifteen minutes late. Often this comes in handy - I've never missed a flight or train for anything short of a hurricane, for example. Sometimes it gets a little ridiculous - during exams, my regular earliness is exaggerated to the point at which I'm leaving the house while the streetlights are still on. This allows for last-minute (or last-hour) studying once I reach campus, but it doesn't allow for much sleep. But that aside, the point is that I am perpetually on time. Last semester I didn't miss a single lecture at NYU, and I have never been less than ten minutes early for work at my current job.

However, I think I may have found the cure for at least my early-morning earliness in the form of another guilty secret: I like Digimon. Yes, the goofy Japanese import that sounds like it couldn't be anything other than a poor man's Pokémon. I'm not going to defend my fondness for children's cartoons in general in Digimon in particular - at least, not right now - because it's not really defensible at all. But here's the best part: I first started watching Digimon in its old after-school timeslot after I got laid off from my last web job a couple years ago. Then my faithful viewing was relegated to the new episodes on Saturday mornings once my return to school and work had me showering and leaving the house on a regular basis once more. Since then, the show has reasonably declined in popularity, and I haven't found it listed in the Saturday lineup any longer.

But then one morning a few weeks ago as I was getting ready to leave for the office, I flipped on the TV to listen to the news on NPR (my TV is also a radio), and it was still tuned to the station on which I had been watching something the night before. I was thumbing the RADIO button when I realized that the show playing was in fact the never-before-seen (by me) fourth season of Digimon, scheduled on a glorious weekday morning at 7:30 am. I'm usually out the door by 7:30, but that morning and each one since then I've stayed at home until a shocking 8:00 am. I've still never been late for work, but now I'm a mere ten minutes early instead of forty. I don't think outrageously cute monster cartoons will cure me of my chronic earliness entirely, but I think it's probably good for me to be less early, anyway.