The Unsleeping

It is 1:04 AM.

I tried to go to bed at 10.  It didn't happen.  First, I was stricken with a physical malady which does not lend itself to polite description.  Suffice to say that it prevents sleep pretty effectively.  Once that subsided, my brain just wouldn't shut up.  So many thoughts and feelings racing around - I got a brief respite when a dear friend shared some news, but soon after that, I was back to Really Not Sleeping Ever.


I have much to do this week.  And there have been areas of invidiousness in my life that disgust me and I have been trying to remedy this by just not really ever thinking about them.

Yeah, that doesn't work.  So I think about them at times like this, when I have a body that won't lie comfortably, a brain that won't quiet down and a heart that believes that midnight is a fine time to meet one's unacceptable shortcomings head-on in an hours-long slideshow featuring all the times in recent days when I have strayed from the path of righteousness and how I need to stop that junk right now.

I had a friend back in college who was an expert at staying up.  If I try to pull an all-nighter, I'll be sleeping by 11 AM, regardless of where I am.  Good thing I don't have to be anywhere at 11 AM tomorrow!  But for her, all-nighters were child's play.  She would stay awake for days when there were things that needed doing.  And I'm not referring to "not sleeping" the way most of us use that phrase, in which we might actually snatch little 30-minute naps or take TV breaks.  Not only did she not sleep in any sense of the word, she worked, organized, studied and basically produced whole worlds as the rest of us slackers maintained more typical circadian rhythms.  She wasn't completely superhuman, of course; after too many rounds of staying up for 5 days and sleeping at night for 2, she would crash.  It didn't happen often and she usually tried to space out the sessions of marathon wakefulness as a preventative measure, but I remember at least two occasions when she finally hit the wall and required something close to nursing for about a week before she could function again. 

While it is really not wise for me to push myself into a week-long crash, I can't help but oddly admire her dedication.  The closest I ever came to her obsessive scheduling happened during my senior year.  Those seeking education degrees, even education minors like we music ed. types, have to turn in a portfolio with this and that project and assignment.  We got a list with the required items and the courses in which we could expect to complete those items, so that we would know to be looking for them, to polish them well, and to save them.  Unfortunately, there was a little bit of a disconnect - our group got this list late, and we discovered that many of the assignments and projects on this list were never actually assigned in our coursework.  So in the midst of preparing Senior Recitals, gearing up to student teach, and cramming in those last few classes, we suddenly had semesters of work to do in a few weeks.  Finally, it came down to the week before the deadline and I still had quite a few assignments to invent.  So I stocked up on Rockstars and buckled down, but definitely not to any real extreme - Because I had to get up early to finish observation (the deadline for which fell at the same time) and did not wish to fall asleep at the wheel and crash my car, I determined that no matter what, I would stop working at 3:00 AM so that I could get up at 6:00 AM.  So Monday night through Thursday night, I slept only 3 hours each night.  I remember getting the big check mark on my portfolio assignments and my observation hours and then I remember nothing.

The only time I ever pulled a genuine all-nighter was during a very special week at my college that I can't go into detail about.  But it warranted working all night long, with a break at 4:30 AM for a trip to the Waffle House to eat and coffee up.  We asked our friend who Stays Up Like A Champion how she does it and she gave us the following advice:
"Don't think about it.  The first time you look outside this morning and see light in the sky, tell yourself that you are just waking up.  This is a normal day."

I tried it.  Still fell asleep in Form and Orchestration class.