Morning Thunderstorms

 I was awoken on Friday morning to the sound of what I thought was someone knocking on the backdoor of Samuelson to be let in. As the first floor RA of the building I am often privy to the happenings in the lobby and the alley behind the residence hall (whether I like it or not), but I don't usually hear the knocking on the backdoor. Confused, I turned to look at my phone in my three-quarters-still-asleep state and saw that my phone read 7:05AM. "Dang," I thought. "That is a REALLY late Thursday night." But as my mind was waking up with these thoughts my ears also finally started waking up. It was then I realized that it wasn't knocking I heard at the backdoor that stirred me out of my slumber; it was the crash of thunder outside of my window. Once my brain made the connection that it was thundering outside, my eyes also began to register the flashes of lightning coming through my blinds. 

Morning thunderstorms always throw me off. I don't really know how to explain it, but there's some type of cognitive dissonance in my brain that happens whenever I hear the crash of thunder and see the flash of lightning before the sun rises. I think it stems from my own personal experiences. In the Georgia summertime everyday starts with the sun and clear skies; the temperature and humidity soar to above ninety-five degrees/percent by ten o'clock in the morning. As the day cools off when the sun starts to set, the combination of the high humidity and sudden cooling of the temperature results in some type of weather phenomenon in which the storm clouds roll in and the rain starts to fall. I'm not a meteorologist, but I know that humidity + a drop in temperature = daily thunderstorms. These always happen in the evening, so in my head I reasoned that thunderstorms are a strictly evening-time occurrence. The storms will last anywhere from five minutes to a few hours, and they often leave steam rolling off the roads when wet asphalt is met by high humidity. 

Because of my association with thunderstorms in the evening, my whole equilibrium feels thrown off when there's a thunderstorm in the morning. I get confused about what time of day it is, and I'm worried the whole day about whether I'm in the right place at the right time. Morning thunderstorms also make me want to lay in bed the whole day and sleep. My reasoning behind that is that if the sun decided not to get up today, why should I? Adjusting to a new climate pattern has been one of the unexpected learning curves about living in a new place, but it's also one of the things I've enjoyed the most. I can't say that I'd ever want to live in a place where morning thunderstorms are the norm, but the occasional one isn't too bad.