Almost an All-Nighter

There is this love-hate relationship I have with pulling all-nighters. Not that I have actually, the furthest I have gone was to finally shut down my laptop at 5:30am this morning after stringing together a bunch of words and quotations from The Island of Doctor Moreau and pepper them with punctuation, and call it an essay. I submitted that chunk of writing some 11.5 hours later, at 5pm, after a quick, but necessarily fervent prayer for the Good Lord's mercy.

I do not like to turn in late. In fact, I often wish, and try to hit the sack by midnight. Yet, logging off msn while the majority of my friends are still online is somehow unsettling. I cannot help but formulate some equation which goes like: sleeping early = not working as hard :-S Furthermore, hearing the choruses of 'I didn't sleep at all last night' ringing everywhere after one of those '3 essays and presentation and text' week after waking up from the comparatively long 6 hours or so I had only serves to send trains of 'omg what if I could have spent those extra hours editing' through my head.

So, why the exception this morning? I'd like to think that it was a genuine case of writer's block. I remember reading sections of the novel over and over again, writing out various ideas, typing sentence after sentence which had no relation together, and it was only at 1am that I managed to force some sense of cohesion to my thoughts. I droned out word by word, my typing frequently interrupted by rearranging paragraphs and editing my thesis statement, till I hit the 3:30am mark. Jie went off to sleep first. Amazingly, it felt as if I was writing the essay at 3:30pm. I was wide awake, typing and hitting backspace, editing, doing whatever I could for an essay which was due that very same day. I was never in such a situation before, and beneath the panic that was gripping me as the minute hand ticked by, I felt this sense of excitement. As I hit 4am, I stopped for a moment to wonder if I should actually sleep at all. But I had to shelve that thought as quickly as it appeared when I realized I was only at the 600 word mark. 5am beckoned and the sleepiness kicked in. It was way too late to turn back then, I had to soldier on. There was this strange allure to pulling an all-nighter for my essay. I had finally experienced this quintessentially university phenomenon.

Amazingly, the earlier experienced onset of tiredness dissipated when I actually hit the sack. I had trouble going to sleep, and no trouble getting up on time for school. But, it was in school that I was reduced to a 'zombie' state. I finally understood what it meant, to feel that sense of mild dizziness and reduced senses despite normal functioning of the limbs. That was scary enough. It was a state of mind paralysis I never want to experience again.

So, no more all nighters for me!