Sunday, May 24, 2009

How polyphasic sleep is preserving my life and sanity

This week has been absolutely insane in terms of workload. I won't bother to enumerate all the various items on my to-do list; they would interest no one but myself, and barely that, at times. The relevant consequence, of course, is that I have taken to cutting core sleep.
I have never before been so thankful I went polyphasic; without it, I would not have survived the week, methinks. (And I'm definitely not adapted to Uberman anymore, I've found.) I've seen four sunrises for work-related reasons this week (I usually take core sleep right around sunrise.) and breakfast has replaced dinner as the one meal I eat consistently (from the "wrong" end of the night, so to speak); it used to be Late Nite (a little after midnight), and before that, dinner.
And then, after an absolutely crazy work week, I decided to play the Game. No, you did not just lose the Game. At my school, the Game is a scavenger hunt type of thing, where teams of three to five students drive around campus and the city in the middle of the night solving puzzles (clues to the next location). It runs from Friday evening to Saturday afternoon -- about a continuous eighteen to twenty hours (though I did snatch a twenty minute nap along the way). I'd played the Game organized by my dorm complex two weekends ago, and I'd been asked to join a team playing a different dorm's Game. It was probably a monumentally bad idea, but I'd caught the Game bug -- I was hooked. I crashed afterwards, of course.
I'm going paintballing in a few hours.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Dvorak, Day 59

40 wpm, 4 mistakes.

Today's passage was from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four. It brought back a small piece of my childhood. I grew up on Sherlock Holmes, so that canon in particular makes me happy. I actually recently acquired a Complete Sherlock Holmes for Kindle, for all of sixty cents (It's wonderful how the e-book versions of classics cost so little -- the miracles of public domain!). I could have gotten it for free off of Project Gutenberg (which is a miracle in itself), but the smooth formatting and table of contents are worth sixty cents in my book (no pun intended).