You know that infographic that’s been floating around the
interwebs for a while now—the sleep/study/social life Venn diagram that
places you at Jedi status if you fall in the overlap? No? Well, maybe these
things only surface on StumbleUpon in the wee hours of the morn, when I’m not
really doing any of those things.
I want
to be a Jedi, I really do (and not just because the blue lightsaber would go
nicely with my eyes), but I just don’t know where the time goes. It shouldn’t
be that hard. Theoretically, college is supposed to offer a cornucopia of
unstructured time in which to get your act together, master the force, all that
important stuff. On paper, the whole sleep-study-social life triumvirate seems
perfectly attainable in and of itself, until you read the fine print and take
into account the on-campus job, all those 5C clubs you innocently signed up for
at Turf Dinner when the year was young and so were you, writing for TSL and the accompanying weekly
existential crisis, all the hours it takes to become a champion Stumbler and the
time it takes to walk to Hoch-Shanahan for Mudd Pasta Night (and don’t even get me started on that line).
Truly, it’s more than a girl can bear, so periodically I find that I have to give
up one of the three Ss to ensure that I get all the necessary peripheral stuff
done (because, really, isn’t it substantially more fun to just kind of dilly-dally around the edges of the essential?). This week, it’s sleep.
I thought
I had it rough in high school, when I’d have to wake up at sunrise… after a solid eight-hour block of sleep. A veritable repository of
youthful energy, my adolescent circadian rhythms cried out in protest against
the self-imposed, for-my-own-good (Such discipline! Such promise!) 10:30 p.m. bedtime. These days, the clock strikes 10:30 and I know it’s time to pick my
poison. Red Bull, NoDoz, the “Powerful Rainforest Experience” promised by the
canned yerba mate (which I’m pretty sure is Spanish for “huge drugs”) they now
sell in the Coop Store, Kava tea in the winning ratio of
three-bags-to-one-cup-of-water—I’m always looking for a cheap lifeline to the
realm of the ambulatory. Naturally, because I am really bad at everything (or
really good at everything, depending upon the angle from which you approach,
well, everything), I consistently overshoot the mark and get too adrenalized to sit still and do
work, and by that time of the night the hallmates are usually conked out or
enviably hard at work, so I can’t sleep, study or socialize and I find myself miles away from earning that Jedi
qualification and all I can really do is lie in bed and think about all the
things I should be doing and how
youth is wasted on the young or some other meaningless platitude that I’ll
decide applies to all the aspects of my life (a “realization” that I will undoubtedly
come to see as completely unfounded in reality once the sun comes up). And this is why you shouldn’t do drugs,
kids.
But see, there’s a reason why a good quarter of my Flex
goes towards keeping me up at night (or the converse; Neuro Sleeps are good for
quiet time, by the by). Around here, sleep is a commodity. Take it at the end
of the day like a normal human being and pay dearly for it in the morning, when
you’ve got a mound of Spanish reading facing you and class in 20 minutes.
Buy yourself a few extra hours with friends and find yourself forced to slip outside
during class the next day for five-minute naps on the ground. (Note: staying up
doesn’t mean the night will last forever. It only means that you’re awake when
the sun comes up, and that is rarely as much as it’s cracked up to be). Also, note: don’t be surprised if you get a lot of weird looks on account of the whole
lying-on-the-ground “thing.” If anybody asks, you’re just testing for the
hollow spaces you know (despite whatever the administration may tell you) mean
secret underground tunnels… testing with your back.
Perhaps, then, sleep’s not so much lawfully bought and sold
as it is stolen. Sometimes—like when my alarm goes off in the morning and
there’s not even any chocolate to rouse me from my slumber and I’m having a really
good dream like the one I had a few weeks ago, wherein everyone from Pomona
randomly decided to transfer to Mizzou but our new dorm was actually a North
Korean army bunker and the only better housing option they could offer me was a
rooftop property called Harwood Sun Patios that consisted of a two room hotel
suite with four TVs, a pool and a full-time personal maintenance staff—it feels
like I’m fighting an all-out war.
I wish I had some interesting philosophical point to make
here, but mostly, I’m just very sleep-deprived. At any rate, next week brings
another S—Spring Break—and that means it’s time to shift my abandonment of
a major category to that of studying.
On second thought, maybe I should take some of this time to reconsider my life
strategy. Track my natural tendencies, reschedule my peripherals, evaluate my
productivity, assess whether or not I really need to be on StumbleUpon at three in the morning…
Oh, who am I kidding with these irrational late-night
ramblings? I’m sure I’ll make more sense in the morning, after I have a
half-pound of chocolate and do my Spanish reading. I’ll have the Force under
control in no time.