Day 8

WOW it's 47 degrees (F) outside! It's starting to get chilly in Durham in the mornings! This is the first time I've majorly noticed this for 2 reasons: 1) I don't have air-conditioning this year in the dorm I'm in, so I've been using the window-open, fan on trick to pull in cold air from the commons room across the hall. 2) I'm up at 6am on schedule!!!!

I think that sleeping up in the loft and having to climb my ass out to turn off the alarm was a perfect pro wake-up procedure. I made one other key change. Instead of making my initial alarm a blaring beeping, I turned on the radio alarm feature of my clock for the first time ever. With NPR talking about the Blackwater controversy right now, I certainly realized that something was going on and I woke up. BUT there was no voice inside my head saying, "YEEEARRRGH GHGHHGASDLASDKLA FFHDAKJFJL AKF"PAW:LS THAT NEEDS TO BE TURNED OFF NOW!" Instead I listened for a second (long enough to realize what I had just done to myself) and then figured since it did hurt my ears a bit I should turn it off. Maybe a slightly lower volume will make me get up and will allow me to listen to the BBC world news and get smart in the mornings too!

Ok, so this could be the first semi-correct Everyman day for me. Last night I had 4 hours of core sleep and I'm a bit groggy for it. Maybe I should chop down quickly to 3 hours to correspond to REM cycles? Since I'm up I think I'll do some research on it ;)

Not Quite There, or More Excuses

I was planning on a 6am wake-up in order to get a shit-tonne done this morning. That didn't QUITE happen. But the good news is that I cut my core sleep from 5.5 to 5 hours! the 1.5 hour jump wasn't there, but this is a good indicator that consistency is a much better path to take.

Off to finish up a draft of my BME magazine article (engineers should NOT have to write like this... 2000 words coherently on a topic is more than I'm really capable of - in a week no less!) then maybe a bit of the photonics conference if there's time. Oh that thing on the left? That's a precancerous cell image as seen from the adjacent cell's perspective! Doesn't it look warm and friendly and inviting? Beware, it'll attack at any moment now...

Life is too busy all the time to be short! I really just need a weekend where I can clear my head and enjoy the everyman cycle while catching up on the things I want to do. Too bad I didn't stick with the last blog I had -- it had the very apt title of "overworked and underpaid".

Maybe I'll sneak in a nap in place of yoga this afternoon, I've got a couple absences I can burn in there.

Night 3

I woke up feeling like I've been in a time warp. Nap from 23:20-00:00. It was much needed, although I think it was a bit long for a polyphasic nap. Once I got over about half an hour, my body was expecting at least a couple hours' hibernation. Core sleep comes at 2am tonight though, and I will be attempting to shake things up even more -- after announcing a plan to start at 5.5 hours per night and every couple days decrease that amount in half-hour increments, the uber-college schedule has forced me to modify. I'll attempt (rather desperately) to sleep 2-6 tonight with the intention of finishing edits on an article due friday before attending a conference starting at 8am. Talk about productivity. Or maybe just a bunch of talk about nothing...

I'm really trying to avoid looking like this guy in the future! But who knows, maybe one day when I'm 64 and no one still needs or feeds me, I'll doze off in a chair and someone will snap a picture like this one. I actually kinda dig the beard & eyebrow combo.

Back to work for a bit -- it seems like the couple of days right after fall break are non-stop work. Don't know why, but this design course has some ridiculous expectations and not much consistent organization. I bet we get to lab tomorrow (having prepared last-minute for our presentations) only to find no projector. Actually I now recall that we have a conference room reserved, but I don't understand how since the school has a Massive photonics conference starting up tomorrow. The guy who's famous for the cloaking device (Dave Smith) will be a celebrity at this thing, and rumour has it that Sir John Pendry will be here! Don't worry, if you don't get as excited as me, it's because you're normal. All this sleep deprivation is going to my head...

maybe I'll call it:
polysomosis - a condition resulting from abnormal sleep patterns. Most commonly characterized by red eyes, disheveled hair, and a general inability to make sense of the world.