My sleep schedule is severely fucked up. It's five-thirty in the AM and I've yet to hit the hay. It would be great if this was due to leading a wondrous and exciting life but in all actuality, it's just cause I've nothing better to do and well...sleep just seems dumb.
See, when I was a freshman in college, I would stay up for days on end. I was used to burning the candles at both ends, working 90 hours a week and spending the rest of my time traveling around the NorthEast, following bands, probably all of whom, no longer exist. When I moved to MN to go to college, it was my first time away from home and although I pretty much had all the freedom I needed under my parents roof, I was still under my parents roof and in college, there were women around.
This whole women around thing would have been great, had I taken advantage, but I was still in my, “angry young man” phase of my life, not to mention, I hated my new surroundings and school as well. However, there usually was someone around to shoot the breeze with or at least stay up and watch a movie or Simpson's reruns. I remember toward the tail end of my freshman year, just spontaneously falling asleep, like to the point I thought I was narcoleptic. Luckily for me, I was just just succumbing to outrageously high blood sugars, and about a month later, be diagnosed with type two diabetes.
Sophomore year rolled around and even though my attitude about school and the one horse town in which I was living changed, my sleep habits had not. I had roommates who also reveled in procrastination and the small hours of the evening. Many times my roommate would just becoming home as I was giving up and going to bed, somewhere around the 2AM mark. He was an athlete, a fraternity brother and a bunch of other shit which required a great deal of time. Plus he was trying to enjoy the freedoms of college just like the rest of us. Sophomore year I started to actually take classes within the theater department. Classes which not only required a shit load of reading and processing time, but also time doing manual labor and other shit in the scene or costume shops. Plus, if you wanted to be involved in a production, well your evening homework hours, just went out the fucking window.
I can remember many nights, leaving the theater after rehearsal close to midnight, starving and picking up whatever was left under the heat lamps at the campus grill, having three loads of laundry to do, with at least 2-3 hours of homework in front of me if I was lucky. Often, the nightime quiet that allowed me to do my homework was interrupted by some fucking tool business major, drunk and fucking, drunk and loud, drunk and loudly fucking but always drunk and annoying. My favorite was when I would be doing homework when they went out to walk their “girlfriends” home and then when they came back hours later, I was still at the same table, with the same books, slaving away. “Holy Jeez, you're still studying huh?” “What do they teach you over there in that theater department, how to be gay?” sigh... yeah that's exactly what they teach us over there in that building, how to be gay and how not to take hostages when you assholes can't stay awake for an hour and a half performance for artscore class. That's what they teach us.
Oddly enough I had my highest GPA during my sophomore year.
Junior year started with me living in London, England. Sleep forget that, I'm in a different country. A place with stuff that stays open all night, has great public transit and everyone speaks English. Screw going to bed. Thursday night were the biggest jokes ever. Most Friday mornings, the entire class would get on a bus, ride for three to four hours, go look at some cathedral and then go home. So, it's not like we needed to be bright eyed and bushy tailed. Thursday my mates and I would get out of class round three or four, pop in to the “Victory Pub” for a pint or 9 and then go home and either cook or grab a bite to eat and then nap it up. A couple hours later, showered and smartly dressed, we were on the blue line headed for Leicester Square and The Equinox. We'd arrive right at ten, before people started pouring in and while there was room to breathe we could dance freely. We went so frequently, we became friendly with some of the locals and doormen. Feni, who was either Pakistani or Afghani and lived in London, was a great guy with a better sense of humor and enough patience to teach me some dance moves. Feni, myself, Supersonic, Reetah, Holyshit and rml would often dance until the lights came on somewhere around 4AM or when one or more of us said “enough...we've class in a few hours.” This usually prefaced a huge slice of pizza from street vendors, a minicab home and about two hours of sleep before having to be up, showered and ready for dance class in Zone 4, when we were living in Zone 1. To say there were some miserable faces at dance classes was an understatement. If our teacher wasn't such a fun-loving and energetic fairy, I'm sure the our hang-overs and her intolerable bad breath would have kept more people back at the flat under the comfort of their double-thick eiderdowns.
My return to the states and more specifically to the planet of Winona, had me just as sleepless, but 100 million times more disenchanted. This is not to say I hated Winona, I didn't but my options for the night time were severely limited. Enter the era of story time with Brown Guy, video hockey, CHW and the red-head across the hall.
I hope you all are well.
Cheers,
JJ
No comments:
Post a Comment