Nights and Owls by Rachel

Nights and Owls by Rachel - January 2019 Scholarship Essay

Night Owl. The combination of common words used to describe the period of darkness in a twenty-four hour rotation of the third planet from the sun and a typically nocturnal bird often used in relation to high intelligence. The night is arguably the most peaceful period of time on an average day. However, such peace can easily be disrupted by, for instance, German bombs, a Stephen King novel, the Continental Army’s journey across the Delaware River, the Midwest’s tornado season, the assassination of a Nazi inspector in your front yard (as seen in The Assault), or an infant begging for a midnight snack... again. The owl has been featured in many forms for Purdue, the Tootsie Pop, Rice University, Hooters, Winnie the Pooh… the list goes on and on from tutoring sites to whiskey to special interest groups. Two small words with such a wide range of stories behind them.
Night. Such an odd time to be awake; when most of your side of the world is fast asleep, dreaming of a new Mustang or fighting pirates aside Blackbeard. When everything is quieter, shadows multiply by the minute, and exhaustion steadily creeps into the bags under your eyes. An almost unreal time of day. You could pretend to be anyone you want, there’s no one around to see. You could dance in your underwear to “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls, attempt to become the next Picasso while deriving inspiration from a wrinkled banana, or reenact the entire plot of Shrek using your pet lizard as a stand-in sidekick. The night is open to millions of possibilities to those risky enough to wait for it.
Owl. A member of the order Strigiformes, mostly solitary birds of prey with binocular vision and ninja-like flight adaptations. Around 250 known species around the world all with impossible neck rotation and multidimensional hearing. A very strange creature indeed that almost seems otherworldly at times. Some hiss, some whinny, some make an awful noise resembling that of Macnair sharpening his obnoxiously large axe before the execution of Buckbeak the hippogriff. Owls really only possess the average intelligence of a bird, though, like many things we measly mortals have overplayed in this day and age, they inherit their high praise from Greek mythology. Birds as a whole could almost certainly take over the world one day, given the right opportunity.
And so, one could argue that the awkward fusion of two such wildly varying terms does indeed accurately promote the indication of untimely productivity. Night owls are inherently chaotic, imaginative, resourceful mischief-makers and thus live up to their namesakes. Perhaps there is something in the absence of vitamin D or the presence of the twisted creatures of the night that foster creativity and action. Or perhaps the night is simply a veil of which to mask one’s true aspirations and pastimes.
As for me, the night is a time to escape to far off worlds without the distractions of reality. No longer bound by norms and laws and therefore free to dream up whatever my heart desires. I only wish the night could last forever. Maybe then I could actually bring back the dinosaurs.