Day 16: Forty-Two Hours

Like I said, I had a lot planned for Thursday. Didn’t mean for everything to get pushed up against the end like this, but after turning in my two essays to the undergraduate office that morning, I didn’t care, I was free. Normally I try not to put all my self-worth into a single task, but when that single task is part of what’s keeping me in this country, and I’d have to pay supposedly £100 for a late submission, things are a bit different.

I had a one-hour make-up lecture from the week cancelled due to snow, and then three more hours of regular lectures. All four were international relations. I’ve really liked both lecturers we’ve had for this module, and I recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity to study it anywhere. That’s my focus within Peace Studies at the moment, though I get the chance to change it before going in to second year. The extent of the goodness of next semester’s Conflict Resolution will largely determine whether I switch or not. However, I can’t deny that I struggled to keep my head up in it today. I soon slipped into the cycle of nod off, pry eyes open, listen, nod off…tried to break it with gum, but English stuff was just too weak. Used another precious Japanese piece, and that kept me up for a while.

Ultimately, though, the best antidote was walking in the brisk Bradford winter air, as we did when we went shopping between the first two hours and the second two. I was intent to make the most of my first day of weight-off-my-shoulders and managed to assemble the final ingredients for attempting my mum’s eggnog recipe, which I tried my hand at after finishing lectures at 5.

Oh, before I go on, I had a Peace Society meeting between morning and afternoon lectures as well, and though I’m sorry to say  our last meeting of this year was poorly attended and uninspired, through no fault of the members present, I did volunteer to make a “Peace Times” Peace Society Newspaper website. I’m thinking I’ll use WordPress, but do you guys have any ideas for this? I know most of you aren’t Peace Studies, but, you know, what would you wanna see in an online newspaper? I’m hoping to get a start on that this break.

Right. With the last lectures of my first semester finished, and finished with applause, which only our international relations lecturers received this year, I headed back to my flat for some Christmas-itising of my beverage choice.

For those of you who’ve never had eggnog, it’s fantastic, but I wouldn’t have been too quick to offer my concoction as your first sampling. I ran into a few problems, though not what I had originally worried about – getting the correct ingredients. I think it’s safe to say evaporated milk and dried milk are the same thing. But I didn’t have enough of certain ingredients! My vanilla flavouring, which is apparently one of the most expensive liquids in the world, was only 38 ml when I needed 45, and the dried milk was lacking about another cup. Furthermore, I had no electric mixer, so while I could do a decent number on the eggs, beating the milk powder into the water proved challenging. I never did get all the lumps out, and finished with a thick, lumpy, overwhelmingly richly sweet nog of egg.

Yes, the flavour was actually not bad. I devoured it over the weekend, sprinkling my proudly acquired ground nutmeg on it each time, and though I was sick of it by the end (tried to drink it too fast as our date for bussing to London approached) it was ever so worth it. With an electric mixer and proper proportions, I feel I could do a well good job.

After the eggnog I was hungry for supper so I succeeded in making what I’d call my best spaghetti yet. Sure, it was only store-bought bolognese sauce, but I added minced meat (not to be confused with mincemeat, though they are at times used interchangeably), chopped up hot dog wieners (not worthy of the same title ascribed to the varieties of sausage my German friends have allowed me to sample), and onions (nothing worth parenthetically asiding here except ow, my eyes), and it was good. Made enough for two meals, though the second half proved problematic to finish before leaving. I had more food at the end than I’d realised.

Before I knew it it was time to go meet the Christian Union for…ice skating! After several weeks of watching the uni hockey team battle it out on ice, I was eager to get back out there and see if I hadn’t completely lost any ability to stay upright. As it turned out, I had not, and it was immensely fun. Will certainly be going several more times next semester. I guess this winter will be one of ice skating rather than snowboarding, but that’s alright. Ice skating is one of those things that, while perhaps considered less-that-manly by some (there are those gender roles again), I’ve always wanted to be good at. One of the many things, I should say.

It cleared out shortly before the hockey team practice at 11:00 (I don’t envy their practice and game hours) so we basically had the place to ourselves to revel in our antics. The diving stomach-slide, however, did not pan out. That and the matching scratches and blisters from budget skates were the only negatives of that excursion.

Back to the campus! Some of the Union went…somewhere…but I returned to the university for the Peace Studies end-of-semester party (this is what I meant by busy day, two parties in one night, yeehaw, party animal and all that) By this time I’d all but forgotten about the previous night, or lack of it, and aimed to thoroughly enjoy myself. Unfortunately it was mostly master’s students (either they’re much more into socialising with fellow peace studiers or they recover from deadlines much more quickly) but we enjoyed the company and the candy- er, sweets, but that kills my alliteration. Saw some classmates drunk that are usually much more dignified, and some that aren’t, had the distinct pleasure of having grown up in Japan and witnessing two non-Asians discussing anime with more interest and knowledge than I could ever muster, and enjoyed the company of a high-class native Bradfordian. At least he exudes that aura (not to be confused with aurora, not that you ever would). Really just wanted to use the word ‘exude’. Say it.

But I can’t say anything about drunks, seeing as

• seventeen hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood alcohol-level of 0.05%. I was past double this by that point, which, according to Wikipedia, is a level consistent with blunted feelings, disinhibition, extroversion; loss of reasoning, depth perception, peripheral vision, and glare recovery. Me? Surely not!
• After five nights of partial sleep deprivation, three drinks will have the same effect on your body as six would when you’ve slept enough.

There’s some more sleep facts for ya. Clearly lack of sleep and alcohol are not a safe mix. Funny that it’s such a common mix.

Just when I thought the night was winding down, it wasn’t. Ended up having the most enthralling conversation of the semester, not a moment too soon. Talked for hours, and it all started with personality types. And so I’ll end my recount of this day with a brief discussion of labels.

I claim to hate labels. I’ve said that several times on this site. And yet I was challenged on this point today, because I use them on others and I use them on myself. My defence was that while labels describe what a person is, they can never fully grasp who a person is. And that’s true. But I’m guilty of stopping at that shallow label level, and worse, I’m guilty at stopping with the labels of my own judgements, not even the ones they stick on themselves. I don’t need to meet people to think I know all that I need to know about them. I don’t need to meet people to not like them.

I’m terribly judgemental but that doesn’t have to keep being me. I hope to one day outrun this, but know inside that it’ll take much more than running. While I believe I have grown more accepting of people and lifestyles (emphasis on style, not life), I’ve also grown more arrogant in presuming my first impressions of people be accurate and unchangeable, by them or by me. That’s flat out wrong. I guess I want you guys to know that I know it’s wrong, even though it’s how I am, right now.

So I’m guilty of using labels on others, and I’m also guilty of using them on myself. INTJ…MK…TCK…even the fact that they’re all acronyms reveals something. I use labels to distance myself from people, to say both overtly and implicitly that I’m different from you and you won’t be able to bridge that gap because you don’t even know what I am, unless I condescend to walk with mortals. And it’s justification in numbers: I’m different (read: better) and it’s not just me that thinks so, we’ve got a proper group thing going on that you’ll never be a part of.

While the whole what-I-am-not-who-I-am definition of labels still stands, I’m realising that I’m not as free from this as I thought. Labels are distance, and I use them just as much as the next guy, if not more, for my labels are cryptic and exclusive.

This was just a fraction of the mullings that conversation engendered, the conversation that marked forty-two hours of wakefulness. Sheesh. Considering bragging rights to be a poor reason to do anything – well, almost anything; things like roller coasters could be made a case for – I promptly went to bed at half past four.

Slept well into the double digits the following morning, it was glorious, though I usually hate doing that. Such a waste of daylight. Well worth it. Everything.

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.

I Love Learning, I Love Uni

I grit my teeth and call this a blog and yet I don’t actually blog that much. Most of my time is occupied with moving stuff over from Facebook onto here. But a lot does happen in each day and while most of it is probably not worth sharing (which doesn’t seem to stop a lot of people) there is a considerable amount I wish to remember, and perhaps one day formulate into something more prosaic, or, dare I say, poetical. So I’ll try to drop in most evenings and record the day’s memorable events and thoughts. If you know me well you’ll know better than to trust my promises of consistency, but we’ll give it a go.

In my never-nearing and ever-exasperating quest for wise time management I don’t have a lot of time to waste on worthless blog entries about things I won’t care about two weeks from now, and in times such as these when I’m trying to get into full swing on two essays I’m particularly conscious of that truth. But let’s talk about those for a bit.

I’m learning so much these days! I am completely loving being back at uni. Yesterday I basically learned Britain’s entire political structure – I learned more about the UK government yesterday than I knew about those of the UK, US, or Japan combined, previously. Today I learned what the Chilean coup of 1973 was and Chile’s political history leading up to it. I can learn whatever I like with this massive library at my disposal (open 24 hours a weekday, I might add) and a course as interdisciplinary as peace studies. It’s magnificent. So why I waste at least half an hour a day watching The Office – the American one, not helping me with the accent at all – is beyond me.

‘Half an hour’. I say that like that’s all the time I waste in a day. I waste far more than that. I don’t want to be all down on us humans, but imagine if we truly took advantage of the resources afforded us – time being the chief one. Imagine what we could accomplish. I’d be able to speak four or five languages by now instead of a measly two. Let’s not give up, okay? But what language should I study? Like everything else, I want to do too much and end up doing far too little.

But my main point for now is that I love learning; I really don’t subscribe to this ‘learning is uncool’ belief. As I said to a flatmate today, this is why I love university – the possibilities are endless. Actually we were talking about studying abroad, but same idea. I know knowledge isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s a serious tool that I intend to wield robustly. I like that word ‘robust’, I was reminded of it by a textbook a few days ago.

This is getting long for a blog entry, so I’ll stop here. I’m trying to rein myself in on these, the ones that I slap the ‘General Blog’ label on. Once I get started there’s really no stopping, as those old entries painfully show.

I read this morning that people aged over eighteen need seven and a half to nine hours of sleep a night (younger people need more) because one sleep cycle is roughly ninety minutes. The effects of not getting this are significant, though not immediately noticeable. While I certainly won’t be getting that every night, I mean to endeavour to get that most nights. If I can harness this sleep cycle thing I’ll really be in a good position.

That said, good night.