the best imitation of myself

It occurs to me that I must have walked around chronically sleep-deprived in my last two years or so of high school. I remember getting three or four hours of sleep regularly (up late—on the internets—and then up early for the school); I remember sleeping on the bus, morning and afternoon; I remember once catching a nap in the middle of a European history test. Who knew I'd get to college and actually develop better sleeping habits? In the end, it's all a function of how long I can sleep in.

The LAH paper got sent out at like, four-thirty yesterday; Jules was home at the time, so she drove me over to slip a hard copy under his door (in the instructions for turning in our take-home final next week, he explicitly warns us not to slip any papers under any doors; oops?), and then we stood in line for a few minutes across the street because it was FREE CONE DAY at Ben & Jerry's. Ice cream was, of course, just what I needed on an empty stomach and three hours of sleep. Then Jules went off to work and I trailed around campus: to Broward for real food, to the CSE lab to poke around online for a while, to the Hub for a newspaper, and back home. I suddenly remembered tomorrow was pot-luck day in Anthro and I'd been tapped for cookies again. The 34 bus took forty-five minutes to come by (a lovely forty-five minutes they were, breezy and cool, but a bit boring and I kinda had things to do), running up and down the aisles with a basket took fifteen minutes and yielded fruit, deodorant, peanut butter, whole-wheat ravioli (!), etc. Plus the cookies. It all cost about thirty-five bucks, but I spent eighty-five, because with cash-back one can now buy money.

I worked on the site for hours after I got home and reconstituted some soup. I mean, I also compulsively refreshed the flist and read odd bits of fic, but I worked a lot. I was very, very tired and my legs ached; it could have been because of all the walking around I'd done after the atrophying my muscles have started to do during this, my unfortunate gym hiatus, but it wasn't. It was more like the growing pains I'd had as a kid, a pounding ache where my quads are but that isn't muscular; it's just sleep-deprivation and stress. At three-thirty I felt bad enough to take two tylenol and a long, hot shower, and that worked some.

I got some sleep between six and eight or eight-thirty, then scraped together the last bits to present as much of a completed product as I could in class today. I was twenty minutes late because of some technical difficulties (I found the cap on my UF server space! and had to purge), but they loved the site and I am AWESOME. Of course, they loved the site last week when it was crap, but they seemed suitably more impressed today. They had good minor suggestions which I will incorporate for the screening tomorrow night. The other groups' videos were great to watch (the ones that were done; there's one group still struggling mightily), and between their technical difficulties and our pot-luck break, we managed to turn one hour worth of class into our usual three. I came home after an aborted attempt at errand-running, stared at an update window for a few minutes, and then napped for an hour before African history. I bought a bus ticked for this Friday at the Union after class (after the last class! there is no more class now) and had good ideas about doing laundry, but got distracted by fic and had only gotten to the sorted-piles-of-dirty-clothes-on-the-floor stage before Jules called and said she and the guys were going for dinner, did I want to come? And I shouldn't have gone, and I shouldn't have gotten a massive hamburger and fries at Friday's, but I did and I did. I had a good time, and I feel a lot less wretched after eating; I haven't been doing too well for myself lately. This morning I didn't even manage breakfast while I was coding and resizing pictures; I remember that from high school too, being so tired in the morning I couldn't eat, wanting to gag on whatever was in my chest.

It's too late to bother starting laundry now; what I should do, if I'm not going to write the paper now, is go to sleep now; I'll be up all night tomorrow. I need to finish the linguistics paper before I leave town on Friday (I finally asked who was expected for seder this year, and it turns out everybody is; at least I'm getting my money's worth) and when I come back on Monday, I'll have to write on three questions for LAH (one of which is on a book I haven't read and don't own) and study (or pretend to) for the AFH final, both on Tuesday. The anthro paper is due some time in there too, Monday or Thursday, or maybe I'll get it done tomorrow while I'm busy kicking myself for not actually putting the work into the linguistics paper that I was—and am—actually interested in. It just would have been too easy.