Day 15: Party All Night

I’m not actually writing this at 23:57 on Wednesday the 15th of December. I’m writing this on Sunday the 19th. The past five days have been crazy.

I have a friend who says, “I do procrastinate, and yes, I do regret it” and I think that sums up most people on the planet fairly well, me included. But I think I can say reasonably that I’m also fairly diligent and hard-working, because I take my work seriously and hate being rushed. I’m inefficient, though. I get an image at the beginning of a project of what I want it to look like, and no matter how unrealistic or difficult that image I go for it until time shortage forces me to compromise.

Unfortunately I also suffer from an unreasonable lack of urgency, which probably stems from chronically underestimating how much more time a task will take. This means that by the time I realise there’s no way I can do something the way I want to, it’s often too late to make any choice about how I want to do it.

All that to say that I usually do alright.

When I was a freshman in high school (grade 9) I heard a senior (or had he graduated?) say, “Save the all-nighters for college.” I thought that was good advice at the time, and when I became a senior myself and failed to follow it, I thought it was even better advice. I also discovered how much better three hours is than none. However my first year of college was actually easier than my last year of high school so I was able to gratify my newfound appreciation for sleep without much challenge.

This year I’ve gotten into sleep cycles, meaning that rather than try to get as many hours of sleep as possible, I measure by 1.5 hours. 7.5 is optimum, 6 is manageable, 4.5 is unfortunate, 3 is unpleasant, and 1.5 is a nap. With my low number of lecture hours per week and high number of hours I choose what to do with, I’ve been able to do most of my study during the day (well, day-ish, the sun goes down around four here) and keep my sleep sacred.

We’ve had four deadlines this semester, the last two being two essays apiece. The November 25th one was a bit tight but I pulled together and put out what I thought were two fairly decent papers (which, due to my forgetfulness, I will have to wait until next semester to find out my grades for). I swore to start earlier for the December 16th deadline, get them finished with time to spare, and enjoy the many events taking place during this last week.

I thought I started earlier. I thought I was being diligent. If it had only been the international relations essay, it would’ve been smashing. But there was the politics one, too.

I chose the topic of citizenship (in Britain and in theory) because I’ve never felt much like a citizen of any country, and wanted to find out more about becoming a British citizen. I even thought that maybe I could put a bit of a personal perspective, and if I did it in a tactful and scholarly manner, even cash in on it (meaning get a better grade than without it, if you can’t follow the vernacular).

But, like I said, I was inefficient. I didn’t start reading soon enough, and when I did, I made the mistake of starting with the feminist perspective.

Hehe.

Don’t get me wrong, I think feminists make a lot of good points. The world’s been stuck in a few ruts for far too long, and they propose ways out of them. But they write so complicatedly! My experience these past few months (backed up by those of a few of my classmates) has been that if you don’t already have a firm grasp of the issue the feminists are critiquing, you won’t get their point either.

So I started with Lister’s book when I should’ve started with Faulks’, because when I, exasperated, switched to the latter, things started coming together in my mind, and when I went back to Lister’s later it too made sense. But I also didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to talk about or what point I wanted to make, and I was trying to marry the very different topics of my own experience and considerable influence of liberalism on British thought surrounding citizenship in theory and practice.

All that to say, this time I didn’t do so alright.

I went for about a week feeling like my every spare minute was devoted to these two essays, but apparently I wasn’t making enough spare minutes, because I got to this last 24 hours and still hadn’t finished either essay. The IR one was in significantly better shape, and I was able to polish it up and submit it to Turnitin only a little past midnight. But politics…

My productivity hovers around zero in the wee hours of the night, and I suspect that nearly everyone’s does, though they refuse to admit it. Some claim that they work much better when pressed up against deadlines, and that they feel better doing it all at once instead of spaced out over several days or weeks. Excuses for laziness, I say. In theory, if one were productive in other things when deadlines weren’t looming and then threw oneself into papers when they were, one would get more done in life than the average person, but this world isn’t primarily theoretical. One can’t go at full speed all the time.

And how much would you actually learn from a paper written like that? This is the problem I have with people who measure the amount of work they have left to do by the required word count minus the number of words they’ve already written. This implies that every word you write is final-draft quality and flows exactly the way you want from intro to conc the first time around. Maybe you can do that, I can’t. I have to get a knowledge base, set up an outline to know what the points are, and only then write the paper. If I don’t do that it’s just shaky regurgitation.

Again, theories and ideals that get discarded when deadlines come calling. I’m happy to be able to say I learned a ton from the essay on citizenship, but in the end I wasn’t to able to do much with it at that time. Wasn’t able to put in my personal perspective either. Had to settle for throwing in 1500 words worth of what I’d discovered, and tie it together into something that would hopefully pass for halfway cohesive. I don’t know about other people, but one of my biggest pet peeves is knowing that I could do something better but not being able to for whatever reason, usually reality.

That said, I do like to think that when I know something needs to be done, I push through it until it is. Finished about 8:30 (‘finished’ here being a word used to mean ‘wrote a bunch and shifted it around to formulate some sort of message and get within the acceptable word count range and disliked the content but realised I had to go with it’). Was hoping to finish before sunrise and, seeing as I’d been up all night, make it at least a little worth it by taking in one of the most magnificent and inspiring sights nature has to offer (and to think it puts on the show every morning, regardless of whether anyone’s watching!), but alas, by the time I headed for the library to print 32 pages (two copies of each essay) it was already light. Fortunately the final-day frantic printing crowd I’d heard so much about was yet to be seen and I obtained the fruits of my labours without hassle.

It’s an interesting feeling going into a day on zero sleep. For one thing, the previous day feels like morning, and this day the afternoon of one massive, druggy day. With the morning light, shower, and breakfast, tiredness is chased away, but it’s always lurking, waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting. But I had a fairly busy day planned. In a season like this with brisk, refreshing air, it’s not too hard to forget how non-existent the previous night was. And if I don’t sleep in the morning it becomes a running count, bragging rights for some future, worthless conversation.

Funny thing to brag about, how little we sleep. Really the person who wins is the one who gets the most sleep and still gets a lot done. But it’s not the fact that people brag about not sleeping that annoys me the most, it’s when people act like they didn’t sleep when they really did. Saying things like,

“I just pulled an all-nighter!”

“I didn’t sleep at all last night!”

“I was up all night working on this.”

etc., when really they slept as much as three or four hours, and most likely were not working even most of the time they were awake; they were watching YouTube videos. Or people say they only slept three hours when it was more like five. If you’re going to brag, fine, but get the facts straight.

Here are some facts for ya:

• The record for the longest period without sleep is 18 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes during a rocking chair marathon. The record holder reported hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech and memory and concentration lapses.
• REM dreams are characterised by bizarre plots, but non-REM dreams are repetitive and thought-like, with little imagery – obsessively returning to a suspicion you left your mobile phone somewhere, for example.
• Elephants sleep standing up during non-REM sleep, but lie down for REM sleep.
• Some scientists believe we dream to fix experiences in long-term memory, that is, we dream about things worth remembering. Others reckon we dream about things worth forgetting – to eliminate overlapping memories that would otherwise clog up our brains. (Another one of those instances where it’s all belief and reckoning, but for some reason we think it holds more weight because they’re ‘scientists’. If it were more than a belief, they would’ve used a different word, though sometimes they use stronger words when they really mean just ‘believe’.)
• Scientists have not been able to explain a 1998 study showing a bright light shone on the backs of human knees can reset the brain’s sleep-wake clock.
• British Ministry of Defence researchers have been able to reset soldiers’ body clocks so they can go without sleep for up to 36 hrs. Tiny optical fibres embedded in special spectacles project a ring of bright white light (with a spectrum identical to a sunrise) around the edge of soldiers’ retinas, fooling them into thinking they have just woken up. The system was first used on US pilots during the bombing of Kosovo.
• Feeling tired can feel normal after a short time. Those deliberately deprived of sleep for research initially noticed greatly the effects on their alertness, mood and physical performance, but the awareness dropped off after the first few days.
• Experts say one of the most alluring sleep distractions is the 24-hour accessibility of the internet. (Didn’t need them to be experts, but did need it to be said.)

Good stuff, eh? More to come with tomorrow’s tales.

Back on this topic of bragging, I submit that it’s not really an all-nighter unless you stay up the following day as well, otherwise it’s just staying up really late. Anyone can do that.

But I don’t see why so many people want to, and want to repeatedly. I did what I had to, I’m not proud of the result other than that I finished, and if I can I intend to never stay up all night writing a paper again unless I’m really interested in it, although I know it will inevitably become necessary again. Uni life: there’s what you want, and what you do. Wait…Life: there’s what you want, and what you do.

So save the all-nighters for forever, kids, but do what you have to and take pride in it and suffer silently.

And this was only the beginning of the craziness which I’m hurriedly trying to catch up to in my journaling.

Day 10: Towards Comprehensive Commitment

[Tonight I began pounding out some percolating thoughts and as I pounded they just kept pouring, so though I did my best to avoid any awfully unrelated tangents, the flow is rather haphazard, for which I apologise in advance and promise to clean up at a later date.]

“Things always get worse before they get better.”

This is one of those quotes that has been being said for so long that it’s difficult to know who to quote as having said it. Tonight I’ll pin it on Batman’s Alfred, because I just finished watching Dark Knight for the second time. It’s a dark movie, yes, though not nearly as dark as I’d remembered it, probably because I was more awake this time. A lot of people no doubt find it distasteful for its darkness and violence, and I have no problem with people avoiding films for these reasons and more.

When in doubt on whether to watch something or not, choosing not to is the more prudent choice. How many movies can you really say changed your life or even the way you think about life? If the value of a film extends no further than its duration, can it be said to be worthwhile use of that time? I suppose there is something to be said for activities in which we can shut off and ‘relax’, but a) we already have something called sleep for precisely that purpose (and our mind even keeps working then without us), and b) there’s no reason we can’t better ourselves and be entertained at the same time, through active rather than passive entertainment; oddly enough, they used to have something for this…I believe they called them “books”.

I happen to like Dark Knight, and think that the story justifies the way in which it’s told. It contains themes, motifs, and messages, and brings out these fundamentals with very compelling devices. It blackens the darkness to whiten the light, to sharpen the contrast, though I’m not saying any of the characters are perfect or even completely right in their thinking. The message of a movie doesn’t necessarily have to be correct for it to be thought-provoking and worthwhile – as long as we don’t swallow these messages wholesale. Sadly, so often viewers opt for something that is easily swallowable, not realising that it’s whispering poison sliding softly down their throats. Compelling takes chewing – rubbish, clear or covert, deserves to be spit out.

A lot of people take issue with me for being so critical of screenplay. Just enjoy it for what it is, they say. To them I would first respond that nothing is ever merely ‘what it is’; a film downloaded free from the Internet is still paid for with two irretrievable hours of your time. And such people seem not to understand just how much influence content that goes straight through our eyes or ears to our minds really has. One can’t watch influence happening.

Secondly, can I really be blamed for expecting that, where resources go in, proportionate results should come out? Do you ever think about the enormous amounts of money that go into a single feature production? Or what that money could’ve been used for elsewhere. Now, I am peace studies student, and I could easily go into how much it’s estimated it would cost to end world hunger, various types of disease, or provide education, and how those costs are far within our reach, but I won’t because I don’t like doing that and I don’t want to insult your intelligence – you know these things. As for movies I simply want to make the point that we settle, we settle so far below full potential, but we let ourselves get away with it because we’ve never seen anything even close to what we’re truly capable of – we haven’t worked that hard, ever.

And that brings me to what I really wanted to say tonight. The media industry isn’t the only area in which we’re settling, and failing, and accepting that failure. I haven’t produced any movies or sold any records yet; I can only manage my intake, but even if I were consistently wise in my entertainment choices, I’d still be wasting the resources afforded me.

I believe that of the resources granted to us, time is the most valuable one, though it’s often the one we treat the most carelessly. I waste a lot of time, and I think that herein is where the value of deadlines really lies: not only do they get us being productive, as they approach ever faster they make us conscious of just how much time we’re wasting.

Yes, I do still have those two essays hanging over me, and no, I didn’t get as much done on them today as I’d meant to. Thankfully I did do some. But as long as those unfulfilled deadlines loom large on my horizon, I can’t feel good about focusing on other things. I start to want to finish them as quickly as possible so I can enjoy life once again?

Is this a good solution? I think not. It’s rather like only enjoying a movie while you’re watching it, and never thinking about it once it’s finished: surely there’s more to be gotten out of all the hours I’ve devoted than merely a hopefully decent grade. It’s also like living for the weekend, in which you’re really only living two-sevenths of your life, if even that. I’m always going to have deadlines, and according to what I said above (which I still agree with) I will always need them. So what a shame it would be if I only enjoyed the few short periods in my life when I was actually free of deadlines. I don’t want such an un-enjoyed, un-lived life.

This means that I need to find a way to enjoy both what I want to do and what I have to do. As much as I intend to pursue a career that I naturally find enjoyable and fulfilling, there will inevitably be things I initially shy away from. At this stage that includes essays. While I love the reading and the learning, and I learn more from researching for the purpose of writing than just reading, I hate the pressure of deadlines and the difficulty of cramming these huge topics into 1500 words. But I think I’ve found a way to make the doing as meaningful as the completion, and the experience count for more in my life than a number on a semester score card (or whatever you call them).

I’ve tried to pick not the easy topics but the ones I know nothing about, like Latin American history and the sharing of power in the various institutions of the British state, so that I’d learn the most in the process. I won’t deny that I question my decisions and feel a fool when I put in far more time than a measly first-year essay would warrant. But it always turns out.

Prime consideration is not only learning but connection. One of the essays I’m working on now is about obtaining British citizenship and the debates surrounding the issue, which I chose because I had no idea what those debates were. I joked on Facebook about the irony of me researching that topic when I’ve never felt like a citizen of any state, and I took the joke a bit further within myself by musing that I’d chosen the topic so I could figure out how best I myself could become a British citizen. But that personal connection is now, in part, transferring from an ironic mental smile to affecting the actual essay content, as I’ve decided to interpret the prompt a little more creatively and let my own sentiments weigh in a little more (with proper citational support, of course!). It’s a risk, and to be honest I was planning to hold in my wild streak (it’s okay, you can laugh, and you can probably keep laughing for the next few years until something happens that cuts you off or makes you laugh harder) a bit longer, but then there’s no time like the present. We’ll see how it goes.

Regardless of the grade I’ve made it into something I care about, can learn from, and will most probably use in the future. It may take more time than if I were simply doing it to finish it (that’s one thing that sort of connects to the quote at the beginning, but astute observers will see that I clearly have not said all that I intended to when I started writing this long-winded entry), but in the long run it will be worth it. I want to be able to say all of these things about everything I do – to be able to say that about the way I spend each minute of each day.

We haven’t seen what we could accomplish if we were all in, if we were serious about fully exploiting our available resources, if we let the long-term factor into our smallest decisions. What would it look like if we were completely committed?

I want to find the answer to that for myself, and I think this Christmas season is a great time to start (again).

 

Thanks for reading this far, and I’m terribly sorry if this sounded preachy at all – I write these for myself primarily, and like I said at the start, I’ll clean this up in time. For now it’s just a collection of what my actions lead me to think about me.

And to all a good night.