Last night, when I should have been reading a novel for my Southern lit class which was actually due to be read a week ago, I fell asleep on the futon. Lights on, music playing, I slept through my roommate doing her laundry and my suitemates noisily shuffling in and out of the bathroom. Even when Grey's Anatomy was playing at full blast on the TV three feet away (and my roommate was sitting on the floor to watch it because the futon was obviously already in use), I dreamt on. I missed my favorite TV show and my precious nightly trip to the gym. Only when my roomie started laughing at my open-mouthed, drooling face squished onto the pile of clothes that was taking up half the futon, did I awaken to brush my teeth before climbing into my own bed for a glorious and rare 8 hours of sleep.
And yet, after my 10-hour sleep-a-thon, I still feel like I could pass out on my keyboard at any moment. I was a fool to think that one night of indulgent dreaming could make up for weeks of cruel deprivation.
The clear solution appears to be to just go to bed on time. I mean, if you have an 8:30 class, you really only need to hit the hay around midnight to get a satisfying 7 or 8 hours, right? I guess, but you try turning in when you've still got 50 pages of a novel to read, a poem to write and revise, a German essay to crank out, and a lengthy research paper you should probably get started on, since it's due sometime in the next 48 hours.
And they say the biology majors work the hardest. Psh.
Such is the life of a college student. When it comes down to it, though, if I'm given the choice between watching a movie with my friends and actually making a dent in that mound of homework, I'll probably opt for hanging out. It's okay if my head droops a little during lecture class, and if everytime I close my eyes I fall into a microsleep. After all, you're only in college once.
So I press on, fueled mostly by coffee, gummi bears, and the promise of Friday smiling at me from the pages of my over-booked planner.
