Two Notes

Two notes and thoughts from tonight -

Even though Clemson lost by 3 points tonight, the rush of that comeback reminded me why I love football and why I spend months pining away for it to begin again. The incredible high of watching one of your guy come down with the ball when height, weight, and physics say he'll be overmatched, the thrill of an inconceivable comeback. Even in defeat, the highs were pretty darn high. And I didn't even have to get off the couch (well, technically I did go over and watch with a bunch of friends, but I didn't personally have to face multiple 300+ pound linebackers trying to crush me for more than 3 hours).

I keep reading random stuff about sleep patterns, night owls and early birds, etc. because I seem to have the weirdest sleep schedule ever. I used to be able to nap and be a normal person and now I end up with weird insomnia at times and then occasionally survive quite happily for 2 weeks with an average of 3 hours a night. So, anyways, I saw this Scientific American article that claims that night owls actually get a nice performance/alertness boost 10ish hours after waking up, while early birds do NOT get a boost! Ha! Awesomeness. Obviously this doesn't explain my sleep patterns and who knows how much to trust it, but it's exciting, if only for the placebo effect it provides.

Insomnia

From Jorge Cham's Ph.D. Comics (one of the BEST things ever if you're a grad student.)

I just wrote a long, private post of a conversation/letter that I've been planning in my head for the past hour. I continue to get through books at lightning speed too because I literally read for hours at night while trying to fall asleep. I'm working out and working overtime, but seriously, I just can't get my brain to shut off and fall asleep.

Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions? Recommendations for hypnosis or non-traumatic head injury that can help?

Seriously, it's getting exhausting and making everything more difficult. I'm not napping because I keep thinking I'm so tired during the day that if I make myself stay up until a decent time to go to sleep for the night, I'll actually go to sleep. But by then, my body seems to think it's the start of second shift and time to wake-up, not rest up...

The End of Another Semester

As I type this, we near closer to the end of another semester. It's funny how my life has ceased to be measured in blocks of time used by the normal world (you know, months, years, seasons) and instead, these blocks of 15 weeks are almost like separate chapters in my own autobiography or acts in the play that is my life. But right now, I wish I could spend more time describing the ways in which my life as a student has ceased to mirror that of "normal" people who don't pursue such masochistic ends, but I'm working on finishing up one of the hardest semesters I'll have in grad school (if I believe what I'm told anyways).

My program is known for its rigorous statistics program and curriculum, for a very tough and very brilliant professor who piles on work and impossible exams, who dreams of tricks to play on us... on our exams, he'll have us analyze data that's been run in SPSS incorrectly (and so the answer to a big section might be about how it should have been analyzed instead, but you have blanks and space to answer impossible questions) or questions that are supposed to be true or false, but you're supposed to write in for one of them that it's "almost always true" and other items that you should circle two answers for and printouts from SPSS that have values or whole boxes deleted or placed out of order and you have to figure it out. They are these terrible stress-power things that are a right of passage for us. You warm up with one of this man's classes your first year and then finish off your second year with the BIG one. The one with a project due and a big final exam on the same day, where you analyze more data than you'll have in your thesis and even some dissertations. Where people finish and immediately start drinking. Where people say that nothing you do after this is as hard. Seriously, I xeroxed an old project someone did a few years ago (where less was required... they get harder each year, seriously) and it was over 200 pages. Needless to say, I've been putting in a bare minimum of 8 hours a day on statistics for more than a week now and I'm so unbelievably exhausted. I did stuff like this as an undergrad, but somehow, it's harder for me now... maybe I'm more out of practice, maybe my performance is just so much more public, who knows, but it's just much more difficult and exhausting.

I'm honestly not even that stressed, I just want to fast forward to Wednesday night when this is over. But it will be over soon and I won't have to do it again and that's a pretty awesome reward. I just have to remember that....