Sleep is for the Weak

I didn’t get up before noon one day all summer. It was great. And due to circumstances beyond my control, I was unable to acquire a job for those three blissful months. So I would go to sleep to the peaceful humming of the off-air patterns of the television and wake up to the pleasant sound of my mother telling me quite rationally that if I didn’t get up of my own volition, she would be more than happy to assist me with a Supersoaker.

Apparently, this sleep pattern was acceptable only to me and maybe a few nomadic polar bears on the southern-most tip of Greenland. But not, however, to my mother. She’s one of those up-and-at-‘em, let’s-get-stuff-done-before-noon type. I assume, anyway. I’ve never been up early enough to see it. But anyway, she’s the antithesis of me and everything I stand for, at least in regards to sleep habits. So she got a real kick out of the fact that I have two 8:00 am classes. Great, right? Get my classes done early in the day so I have time later on for my… homework. Or something.

But I digress. So I figured I’d do the cold turkey approach to getting on a so-called “normal” sleep pattern: get up early one morning, no matter how painful, survive the day, and then go to sleep at a “normal” hour. Right. Because that works. Turns out I had been saving up sleep like a camel and I wasn’t tired at a normal time. I tried this for a couple days, then gave up. I decided that if I just waited until I got to school and let my classes whip me into normal hours. Sounds reasonable. In theory, anyway.

Unfortunately, it backfired, and I have turned into a bedtime pansy. I’m tired around eleven and any homework I try to do after then just sits on the table. And the mornings are no better. Ever wake up before your brain starts fully functioning? I do. It’s really fun when I wake up for some reason or another (perhaps my alarm is going off, perhaps outside the garbage truck sounds like it is mutilating large mammals) and I look at my clock. And I can’t figure out what the numbers mean to save my life. I don’t know what those funny shaped glowing figures are or what they mean in relation to my having to stumble to class. Eventually I can deduce that I either have to get up (i.e., it’s 15 minutes before my class) or I can sleep for a while longer (i.e., it’s 20 minutes before my class).

After living both ends of the spectrum, I’ve got to side with my old sleep pattern. No confusing clocks and no classes looming in the distant morning. Maybe I can change my major to wildlife of Greenland and study abroad there. Polar Bear Sleep Habits 101 at 2:00 p.m. Now that’s my kind of class.