Why I Won’t Bloody Let You Say “Good Morning” at 2am.

I’m coming to rant about something that’s actually important for a change, so you better pay attention. This is a very important discussion you need to be having with your deluded friends and family members.

I’ve said it several times and I’ll say it again: 2am is not morning. Do not say good morning to me at 2am. On the night of December 31^st, I went to church and predictably came back in the early am’s of 1^st January 2017. Around 2am, a radio show was happening on Joy FM, and its host greeted its callers with a “good morning”. Sitting in my dining room with my parents, I objected, “But it’s not morning!” My parents wasted no time with their rebuttals. Of course it’s morning. Couldn’t I see that it was past 12am? Now, if my very own parents who raised me have been sucked into the lies, what hope is there for you random people on the internet? Allow me to lead you to the truth. In my opinion, it’s very logical and easy to follow. And now that I’ve wasted enough time on an unnecessary introduction, let’s get into it.

There are 24 hours in a day. Ideally, for example in the case of a solstice, there are 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night. Bear in mind that the word “day” means something different in the 1^st sentence than in the 2^nd sentence of this paragraph. The first consists of all the hours that a timeframe such as “today” can hold before it turns into “tomorrow” – 24 hours. The second simply means the portion of that 24 hours that isn’t night. Daytime. Have we got that? Good.

So, if ideally there is equal time of day (in the 2^nd sense) and night, then it only makes sense to use, with the help of the celestial bodies, the hour of 6 as a marker. In other words, 6am to 6pm would be day and 6pm to 6am would be night. And this is just the major 2 divisions I’m talking about so far; we haven’t even gone into breaking down the sections within day and night et cetera.

We have a whole lot of words. Morning, afternoon, noon, evening, dusk, twilight, dawn, midnight, daybreak, sunset, sunrise etc. Let’s not even get into which meals are eaten when. The ones I want to focus on here, however, are “dawn” and “midnight”. Because the way I see it, you simply cannot get away with saying that 2am is morning, from whichever angle you look at it, as long as the angle is logical. But first, back to “day”.

Of course, when we have gone past 00:00am, we have officially entered a new “day” in the first sense of the word. This does not necessarily mean that all immediate times after 00:00am constitute daytime. No. We are still in the night. Because remember the 2^nd meaning of “day”? Once we have established that half-split 12 hour system, I think we can then agree that it makes sense why 00:00am should be called midnight. It is obviously the middle of the 12-hour night period that begins at 6pm and ends at 6am. In which universe does it make sense to go from “midnight” to morning? Sweetie, where did the other half of the night go? Common sense should tell you that if half the night came before the middle of the night, then there’s another half remaining.

Now, to this issue of dawn. Dawn, as far as I know, is the rising of the sun, or the intermediary period between loosely defined night and day that precedes morning. Precedes. Which clearly means that morning cannot come before dawn. Dawn, I would say, is averagely between 5:30am and 6:00am where I live. But imagine the inconsistency in your thinking if you go straight from literally midnight to morning, to dawn, to morning.

I’ve finished explaining. If by now, you don’t get it dier, I don’t even know. Please don’t say “good morning” to me at 2am. I’m nearly guaranteed to go off on an unnecessarily long series of explanations as I have just done. Let’s just save each other’s time. Thanks.

-Akotowaa