Day 2 - Part 1 - 6:00A-6:00P

I woke up at 6:24am and felt great. And by great I mean like I had been run over by a bus full of obese school children.

"CRUSH HIM."

Using the tricks I learned from yesterday, I forced myself to stand up properly and just start locomoting around. I paced around my apartment until the haze in my brain cleared considerably and then hit the fridge. I grabbed an apple (glucose helps restore will power, true story), some peanut butter, and opened the balcony to let some semi-cold air waft into my boxer briefs. What better way than to shock the body awake?

I chilled at the computer and, sensing some sleepiness, decided to use one of the items on my Megalist in the zombie section. Before I go further, I should explain.

My megalist is a list of all the things I can think of possibly wanting to do. People who do the uberman basically require having such a list so that, when you're sleepy, you always have your eye on something to do. But, after doing some research in the problems with adaptation, I broke mine down a bit more. I split it into three sections, getting the activities grouped by their relative amount of cognitive effort and what I would guess would be best for my state of mind.

Zombie Zone

IS THAT BIEBER!?

Moving/Gaming/Automated processes (washing dishes, etc) are done while in the Zombie zone, which is when I'm pretty much dead and trying to make it to the next nap. No reading, movie watching, or laying down is to be done here. If it's really bad I'm going to carry fragile things around the house and put obstacles on my beds (boxes, clothes hangers and such).

Fading Zone

Things that require basic creativity or problem solving, but not too much memory work, go into the Fading zone (such as painting, sketching, blogging, etc.).

Over 9,000 Zone

Lastly, those things that I really want to learn, or require a good deal of systemic thinking (#19, build an information architecture design system, for example) are in the Over 9,000 Zone. For those of you who don't get the reference, check this

Being in zombie mode, I played video games for about 2 hours. At 8:30am I remembered I had a meeting at 10. Now, my schedule is meant to be on a 10-2-6 interval, meaning I nap at those times during both the day and night.To counter the possibility of missing a nap (which is a horrible idea), I decided to get ready early and take a nap in the basement of olin.

After worrying over the bags forming under my eyes and wondering how my hair was going to look after 3 naps, I hopped on my bike and headed to school. I was disturbed to find two other students sleeping in the library basement (WHAT THE EFF). I created my little trailer bed out of two chairs, switched my phone to vibrate-alarm, hid it in my pant leg so that I couldn't mindlessly turn it off, and tried to sleep.

Pre-Nap Hair

Post-Nap Hair

Of course, just as I lay down, two women with a fat stack of books started whooping and hollering upstairs.
Their shoes sounded like horse hooves and made me want to punch babies. So I popped my earbuds in to drown out their debauchery and get some sleep. It was 9:30, and I had exactly 25 minutes to both fall asleep and hit REM before going to my meeting.


Needless to say, I didn't get much of it. I've been having hellaciously vivid imagery flashing around in my brain, but nothing that I could call a dream. I think I may be sleeping slightly too much (I know, right?) as when I wake up I tend to be groggy as hell. When my leg started vibrating I woke up and for a solid 10 seconds could not figure out where I was. After this grogginess had passed, I swore to myself and made for the stairs. I had to grip the railing and focus extra hard on getting up the steps as my motor control system appeared to have been still asleep.


Sankalp then texted me "LAMB IN HOLMES" so I met up with him after getting some snacks in the book store. One of the weird side effects is that I am hungry pretty much all the time. Sankalp tells me its the fact that my leptin (an appetite regulating hormone) is totally out of whack because of my sleep switch. Regardless of whether or not I should've actually been eating, I got a fat lamb wrap and the Sanks and I hit the quad to sit in the sun and enjoy our meaty fortune.


I tried to go to the class I had yesterday (cognitive deficits what?). Once I got to the proper classroom I think I actually managed to pull a solid TA session out of Rapid Prototyping. My brain was quite clear when it came to programmatic issues, and I was able to recall some things that I wouldn't normally think I'd be able to, which was odd.


After TA-ing, and being harassed by my fellow TA's for this experiment of mine, I headed to the DUC to get some foods with a friend and current member of Lock & Chain. After 45 minutes of chatting I told him I needed to nap, as my systems were beginning to shut down. I hit up that quiet room upstairs in the DUC (you know the one, it's sexy and has a fireplace) and laid down to sleep.

COMFY HUMPS, BRO

I had some insane imagery flashing around in my head. An orange box was sitting on top of an ocean and then morphed like a transformer into what looked like an origami jet before diving into the water and turning into a whale. I don't know if this counted as REM, but when I woke up I actually felt pretty good. My eyeballs were tired, but I seemed to be able to actually get up without having severe motor deficits.


The big test came next, as I had to go through 3 hours of class in my 4 hour window (20 minutes of 'free' time on each side of class). I have class with Nacho, who teaches Survey of Latin American culture. The dude is so absurdly engaging that I actually felt better after being in the class, applying my brain to the complexities of visual representations of Andeans in Peru with more force than I thought I'd be able to manage.


I then hit up personality psych. I have a harder time paying attention in this class, as the powerpoints tend to be white slides with bullet points. The material is certainly interesting, but even a slight bit of sleep deprivation would cause me to have to doodle or manage to-do lists or something on my computer. BUT! He let us out thirty minutes early, so no complaints there.


The 2nd sub-day of today is beginning for me in about 20 minutes, and I can't say I'm excited about the night time run. It's always harder during the night, so I may end up zombie-ing really hard or taking an extra nap so as to not get thrown off schedule. As always, if you're awake between the hours of 12 and 6am, feel free to send me a text. I'll be awake to answer it.


(And if you play video games, my LoL and steam accounts are both squamulus. We can slay zombies until the sun comes up.)