Morning routine a must have

I think it all started in high school, when getting ready required a routine because I was… I think it all started in high school, when getting ready required a routine because I was basically a walking zombie until the first-period bell rang at 7:30 a.m. It went something like this: hit the alarm, shower, dress, eat and drive to school. Everything had its time and place in the sequence. I liked to listen to the local country music station while I dressed and read the headlines of the local paper while I had breakfast.

In college, my schedule has remained pretty much the same. Only now, I have substituted the morning paper for CNN. After I’m clean, I pour a big cup of coffee and settle down with my cereal to see what the folks of “American Morning” can tell me about world events. Lately, there are usually some new — but not particularly shocking — developments in Iraq, something relating to the White House and interesting news from abroad. With the volume up so that I can hear over my own chewing, I catch whatever tidbits I can before it’s time to head off to class.

So the reason I hold my mornings sacred is because I know exactly what I want to do with my morning — maybe some idle chitchat with roommates, but the main focus is a quiet morning with Bill Hemmer, Soledad O’Brien and Jack Cafferty. And if that is challenged, it completely upsets my mood for the first half of my day.

Call me anal retentive, I don’t care. It seems to me that, being the creatures of habit that we are, mornings are the time of day in which most people create nearly automatic routines. For women, having a routine in the morning — waking at a certain time, then showering, then dressing, then having breakfast — helps make sure their days get off to a stable start and ensures that they aren’t late, because if you know what time you should be completing each task, you know if your morning is running on or behind schedule.

But I realize that I take it to the extreme. Yes, my morning routine makes me feel good, like I’ve had a successful and productive morning, but when living with other people it can become irritating and uncompromising.

In my case, rather selfishly, I have forced a roommate to adapt to my self-made schedule. Before this year, she never watched the news. To me, that was rather shocking — after the age of 17, it became a top priority for me to have at least some knowledge of what was going on in the world. Not only did it help me feel connected and informed, but it also helped me learn things about politics and global societies that I would not have been exposed to in my everyday life.

My roommate used to watch talk shows in the morning, or whatever mindless garbage was filtering in from MTV between the hours of 8 and 10 At first, I just tried to beat her to the remote, quietly suffering through Montel Williams if she happened to make it there first.

Then I took control — a little sermon on how it’s important to know what’s going on in the world while grabbing the remote and punching in the numbers for CNN (32) was all it took for me to dominate the living room with my morning routine. I guess I justified it by saying it would do her some good, but in reality I really wanted to make sure it did me some good — meaning, that my routine wasn’t broken.

And then, beating her home for lunch, I would submit her to Wolf Blitzer. It’s not that I was trying to be mean, I just thought that my routine was doing what was best for her, too. After all, “American Morning” may have hit the headlines of the day, but we only saw a portion of it, not nearly enough to make us feel really informed. Wolf would tell us some more in-depth news, and switching to “Headline News” (one channel up) during commercials would ensure that we had a fairly firm grasp on the day.

This went on until just a few weeks ago, when I found out why one of my other roommates always took her food to her room: She didn’t always want to watch the news. Roommate No. 1, the girl I was trying to train into my routine, was quietly submitting to my TV domination, but Roommate No. 2 was sick of my crap and had retreated.

Not that it’s a major epiphany, but I’ve since changed my routine. I realized that if I am so adamant about how and when I do things, then perhaps other people have similar feelings about their day-to-day routines but are too nice to disrupt mine because I’m so neurotic about it. I decided if my routine is important and comforting to me, my roommate’s must be important to her, too.

So yesterday, coming in from her morning class while I was eating lunch, my roommate started to make herself a sandwich before she noticed what was on TV: “The Ashlee Simpson Show.” She casually made a joke, saying I was getting hooked on MTV.

I laughed (trying to hide my cringe) and told her that I knew she hated watching the news all day, so I figured I’d meet her half way: news in the morning, fluffy TV at lunch.

Yes, there’s a moral at the end of the story.

Morning routines are great. But it’s not good for anyone, like me, to be blind about the best ways to get along with people in a close living situation. Compromise can feel disruptive to your comfort zone, but it’s important in order to maintain healthy relationships. In my case, I need Ashlee Simpson in order to live in a harmonious world.