LOSING SLEEP

All of the Blogathoners seem to be coming out of their post ’thon Sleep Deprivation-Induced Funk. Laurence is up to his normal frantic posting pace, and the Bakerina is busy talking about - what was that? Shagging like crazed weasels? Ahh, something that isn’t, ahh, foody, anyway. A reminiscence about the days when our bodies tolerated allnighters better, that’s it!

Well, I will agree that I don’t indulge in allnighters like I used to - although I am often guilty of staying up way past my bedtime to do Random Useless Shit - like this. Let’s face it: even if the spirit is willing, the flesh is, more often than not these days, in Fuck This Shit mode and will not tolerate the abuse. But then, is that so surprising? My ass hit the half-century mark a couple of years ago, and it still has not looked back. Meanwhile, I look at Elder Daughter and the Mistress, both in their mid-twenties, and while I may be awestruck at their ability to stay up ridiculously late, even they are past their Insomniac Prime.

Because it’s those College Years that are the Golden Years of Allnighters. The combination of youthful stamina, the youthful tendency to procrastinate, and a hellish academic workload, all add up to Frequent Nights Without Benefit of Sleep.

As a college student, I hit the Allnighter Wall beginning in my junior year. Up until then, I had been able to balance a prodigious course load with a stupendous intake of controlled substances...but then came Thermodynamics and Fluid Mechanics to blow my complacent little world to smithereens. Fluid Mechanics, in particular, was scary - the first time I had taken a course and had No Fucking Clue as to what was going on. Plainly, if I were not going to shame myself by flunking out of my Chemical Engineering major - a brutal discipline that had already claimed fully half of the people who had entered it as sophomores - I was going to have to make a few changes.

I had, what we call down South, a “Come to Jesus” meeting with myself. It was time to turn aside from Sin and Wayward Behavior and experience the Revival of the Holy Spirit o’ Academic Frenzy!

That’s when I started living in the Engineering Library. Not full time, maybe, but it sure seemed like it. And one allnighter a week was not all that uncommon. I was driven. Driven, I tell ya!

At one extreme point, I did two back-to-back allnighters. Yes, 48 hours without sleep. This became downright comic, because I eventually got to the point where I had no control over any of my higher cognitive functions, yet at some reptilian midbrain level I knew that if I fell asleep, I would miss my class and the two allnighters would have been for naught.

Somehow, I survived.

That was the high-water mark. Even writing my thesis - a requirement of the school, even for undergraduates - did not require such a heinous schedule as did the spring of our junior year.

Was it worth it? Well, I did manage to score a degree as one of the “Dirty Dozen” in our Chemical Engineering Class of 1974. Twenty-four of us had entered the department as sophomores; only twelve survived.

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.