Can I Shut Eye?

Leaving home from Thanksgiving was dreadful knowing what lies ahead. My last stretch of the semester is especially short and loaded with deadlines. I have less than two weeks now until I'll be flying home again for winter break, but in that short period of time I have so much to survive.

I got back here on Sunday, and this week is the last week of classes. Unfortunately, classes and regular assignments along with my regular work schedule prevented me from doing much about my major projects, so as this week comes to an end, I'm going to feel the pressure more and more with every passing second.

In my next week and a half here I have four final papers (10-15 pages each) and one final exam to reckon with. That means I'll have written close to 60 pages within the next 10 days. Wow, I wonder if even most writers ever write that much. I'm particularly worried since they're all these heavy-duty research papers, and beyond the tedium of dry, academic writing I still have a large chunk of research to wrestle down.

Needless to say I haven't been sleeping too well since I got back, and I don't expect to sleep much in my remaining days here... Not that that's so different than business-as-usual. Yesterday I had a bit of an ordeal with sleep. I got about six hours the night before, and after being out and about in class and work (where I had to deal with my 7th graders and then some of their parents for conferences afterwards), I got back to my dorm and was exhausted. I couldn't quite afford to feel that way because I had 6-page paper and a 10 minute presentation to give today, both of which I still needed to prepare.

I got back from dinner with my hallmates around 7:45 p.m. and after talking for a few minutes, I told them that I'm going to nap for an hour because I just couldn't be productive feeling this tired. So I got in bed, and was on the edge of sleep, when my neighbors started getting rowdy. We have a tradition of hall-sports on our hall (that I'm not a big fan of), and it's recently escalated from throwing balls to shooting plastic bullets at each other with serious toy guns.

Ten steps back, ready. Draw! And then shoot, shoot, shoot, till someone yells "Ow you got me!" After a few rounds, I shouted out my neighbors' names while still in bed implying that they should be quieter. They made an effort at noise control for maybe one round, and then it was back to the usual rowdiness. It never ceases to amaze me how fickle and short-lived people's memory can be when they're having fun. I put up with a few more rounds, and then seeing as they didn't give a damn about my trying to sleep, I got out of bed and opened my door to find them right beside it. "Can you please go somewhere else? I'm trying to sleep," I reminded them.

They moved, and although I still heard them it was quiet enough for me to doze off for 15 or 20 minutes. I was awoken, though, again by loud shouting as their shooting migrated back towards the vicinity of my room. I shouted for them to be quiet, but I figured that by now it was a lost cause. I lay in bed for the next 20 minutes shifting between trying to zone them out in an effort to fall back asleep, to recalling that interview I heard with Jennifer Aniston where she said Brad Pitt was missing a sensitivity chip.

I know. That's really random, but I couldn't help but thinking: knowing what hell of work I still have ahead of me, and all that I had to do for tonight, and how exhausted I was, were they maybe missing a sensitivity chip of their own when they decided to go ahead and shoot at each other in the hall during the exact time I wanted to take a nap to power myself up for a long night? Hmph.