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 8: Delighted With Turkish Delight [groan]

A very good friend of mine has a blog in which he reports on a new thing he does each day. It’s a fantastic idea, seeing as we get stuck in our ruts and routines so quickly and, before we know it, wake up ten years later realising we haven’t changed much at all or moved in the direction we once dreamed of. Gotta keep things fresh.

I have a ‘New’ to report today. I try to do new things every day, but this one is especially meaningful, because it’s laid a long-term low-intensity wondering to rest.

Books have always been a huge chunk of who I am. Before I could read my parents were reading to me, and it’s these books that played such a significant role in my formation as a mental human being (haha – gotta love the cultural connotative gap), for better or for worse, though I’d venture that all the good aspects came from reading and most of the bad from not reading enough.

Anyway one such book, or series of books rather, was C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. Oh, here, let me give you some BGM for this post.

I’m not so into the films, they played perfectly fine on the big-screen of my imagination. I should go back and re-read those Chronicles, actually. Along with the Harry Potter books, though those weigh in far below.

Despite books like these being so relatable there are the inevitable bits of different culture. I never knew, and always wondered, what Turkish Delight was. Edmund, when being naughty and self-indulgent, asks for it of the White Witch, and she grants it – for a time. In this context I always thought of it as some guiltily rich chocolate concoction, like a thick pudding or brownie kind of thing.

Because I read a lot of British books growing up (which indubitably has something to do with me being here now, despite one of my lecturers denying that Britain still holds any cultural power in the world – I take issue with that; if I’m the only sailor in that boat, so be it) this year has been a series of discoveries of long-heard-of but unconceived-of treats, like crumpets and Christmas pudding. Tonight, Turkish Delight was added to that list.

A crumpet, but watch my YouTube video for the full explication.

Turkish Delight and Christmas Pudding.

I saw it in a store a few days ago and the people I was with explained that it actually wasn’t chocolatey; rather, it was more like fruity gummy things, only HC (High Class, remember that one, I’ll be using it frequently, especially in London I hope). So today when I saw it on a shopping trip I couldn’t resist. I don’t know if it comes in a wide variety of flavours, but this box happens to be lemon and rose – I think you can guess which is which.

The lemon is very nice, though standard with an imaginable taste. The rose is…different. It’s the kind of taste that you might instinctively (I almost said extinctively, which isn’t a word but could be) dislike but persuade your brain to like because it’s ever so HC. Or is it just me that thinks that way about certain things? C’mon, you can’t tell me that all girls naturally enjoy wearing heels. They lose them halfway through the night, after all.

The rose taste reminds me of Thailand, for some reason. Can’t put my finger on it. Might be that dried fruit we bought and consumed, and had diarrhea, repeat cycle. Two words to describe that dried fruit: worth it.

And my smart Mac has just taught me that the British spelling is ‘diarrhoea’. Man. Makes it seem even painful. Which it wasn’t. It was just…quick.

Okay, okay, enough about that. Thailand was great, I’ll not turn down any opportunity to be reminded of it, whatever the correlation, and the dried fruit was good as well, good enough to unintentionally smuggle back to Japan and bring in all sorts of virulent bacteria that are no doubt wiping out millions as you read this.

And Turkish Delight is great, both its lemon and rose varieties. Oh, Christmas pudding? It is most soi-tenly scwumptious and up in dat dere HC realm. And apparently matured over six months? Kudos.

In closing, to those who told me English food is unspectacular: what the heck, man.

Midnight Victory, A Welcome And Nostalgic Feeling

I write a helluva n’essay. Just putting that out there.

Imagine what might be produced if I actually managed my time wisely?

 

[I’m only letting this unforgivable indulgence in arrogance slip out there because it’s late and I just finished my two essays due tomorrow. Upon coming to my senses at waking I may even delete this. Or it may drift on out there into the nebulous online annals of struggles won and lost and life lived unnoticed but not unthought-upon, until an anonymous soul stumbles onto it and ventures a comment, a tentative or sauntering interaction. Except that my struggles are always won, because I’m the good guy.

Some good things do happen past midnight.]