Exhaustion Sets In

A flush of rose pink warms the window in front of me. The machine gun rat-tat-tat of my fingers on the keyboard has stopped. I stare at them, useless sausages now. They seem detached from me somehow, the way a zombie must feel. I can't make sense of why they aren't typing. Staring at the screen, I can see there is plainly more typing to do, but nothing happens. Slowly, the warm rose light dies and the harsh concrete gray of daytime takes over.

I remember being younger and pulling all-nighters. It always seemed like such an accomplishment, pounding away on the coffee and the keyboard, blazing through the work. Feeling like I won a prize at the end of it all. Gloating the next day as my mind tried to make sense of things.

May be I got old the last few years because right now, there is no victory bugle in my ears. Only the day coming to life, shrieking onward into the light. Its not pleasing. Having gotten older, shouldn't I have learned not to do this to myself?

I worked for more than nine years at night. The last night job I had was the best shift of all. My shift began at 7:00 pm and ended at 7:00 am. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off; four days on, three days off. Routine.

It's been a few years since I worked like that. It's probably been that long since I saw the sun come up before I went to bed. It's been at least a decade since I sat before my computer, knowing that in an hour, I will have to go to class on no sleep and take a midterm. What in the world am I thinking?

Normally, I am one of the most relaxed people when it comes to midterm exams. I go to class, I do my reading, I ask questions. I do all the things to be prepared. So, how did things get like they are this semester?

I decided that I need to finish my degree, and that I need to do it as quickly as humanly possible. This means taking a large class load, nearly double full-time. It's a lot of work.

For anyone who has not taken more than 19 units in college, imagine working two full time jobs and a part time job. Now imagine that at each of those three jobs, you have a different boss. Further, you have a different boss each day and often several times each day. All of these bosses have specific jobs they want you to do, but they are only going to give you the tools to do the job slowly over a period of weeks.

Once the tools have been given, your bosses expect the job to be done promptly. And then you get paid. Except, unlike a real job where you have a fixed amount of money you receive, in school your payment is a grade. Do a good job, get a good grade. Do a lousy job, and you get a lousy grade.

Now, it happens to work out that each of the three jobs overlaps, and most of the tasks that are given for each job need to be done roughly at the same time as all other jobs. Call it a bottleneck of progress. Long periods of doing little followed by short bursts of frantic energy.

Midterms happen to be one of those glorious times when all the bosses want all the best work at the same time. My bottleneck this week began last Thursday when instructors distributed the prompts for the take-home written portion of the exams. Being prepared didn't save me from the all nighter this time.

Now, 36 pages later, I think about all those long nights at work, slaving for the man, getting paid in real American dollars. I think about seeing the sun coming up and wanting to go back to school so that I wouldn't have to see it happen again. Now I wonder how I fooled myself.

At least it won't happen again until finals week.