Monday, November 09, 2009

Somnus? Quid?

It's 2:30 on Sunday night/Monday morning and I'm wide awake. This is what happens to me when I overcompensate for my lack of sleep during the weekdays by sleeping an inordinate amount on Friday and Saturday nights. I must stop this. Overall, though, I've been very good about going to bed at a reasonable hour this semester. This novel getting-enough-sleep thing has been a significant factor in my being able to keep my sanity and also in helping to maintain my grades. If only I had discovered this five years ago as a constantly sleep-deprived, over-achieving freshman who frequently resorted to No-Doz caffeine pills in place of a good night's sleep, maybe my academic life would have been much easier; I also would have had no caffeine-induced stomach aches from hell. Ugh. Anyway, I will surely be paying for this in four hours when I'll be reluctantly forcing myself out of bed.

Before I type the customary bullets about all the general things in my life that are random and ridiculous, here's a fun fact for everyone: while driving on I75 today, I almost died due to another driver's negligence. Okay, so that actually happens to me about once a week on I75, but today was special. There is a roughly 3-mile or so span of road on 75 North that has been continually "coned" (I'm making my own road construction verb here) in some way or another for about four months (I'm surprised that I haven't started seeing orange road cones in my dreams). This is apparently how long it takes to re-paint two or three bridges on that stretch of road in some sickeningly bright blue color in preparation for the Equestrian Games, which I really couldn't care less about. Today, the farthest left lane was closed off, annoyingly protected by a legion of godawful-orange cones arranged in a line that looked as if it had been formed by an intoxicated blind man. I was driving in the far right lane, so there was one lane in between my car and the uneven "line" of cones. I was almost out of the construction zone when I saw some kind of state vehicle driving in the far left lane. All of a sudden, the idiot driving this same truck swerved to the right, hitting three cones. Where did the cones go? They went all over the damn place, and I had to do some really quick maneuvering to avoiding hitting them. I drive a two-door Saturn, not a F-850 behemoth truck; I really don't think my car would have handled hitting those things very well. Anyway, I ended up having to pull over completely while the cones rolled all over the road like pinballs. The funniest/most ignorant thing about this incident was the fact that it wasn't the expected shitty Lexington or Ohioan driver who did the damage, but one of the very people who was in charge of all this construction/"beautification" nonsense in the first place. Oh my.

Aside from being run off the road by vengeful escapee cones, here's an update:
  • You may not care for this, but I think it's pretty cool: I discovered that I remember verbatim a poem I memorized more than 9 years ago while in 8th grade! Ha! It's not a huge poem--Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken". Everyone had to memorize it, stand up in front of the class and recite it. I also remember a little more than half of the complete list of English prepositions that I had to memorize in alphabetical order in 5th grade (12+ years ago). Aboard, about, above, across, after, against, along, alongside, among, around, as, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, besides, between, beyond, but, by, despite, down, during, except, for, from... etc. I think I have an exceptional long-term memory, although my short-term memory is pathetic. I'm the person who will not be able to find my keys, purse, backpack and other essential things when attempting to walk out the door because I can almost never remember where I put them. But if I can remember things that I memorized ten years ago, does the fact that I lose my car keys on a daily basis really matter all that much? Hmmmm....

  • I had scary panic attack episodes last week. I'm not entirely sure why; I'm fairly certain that the added stress of the dreaded graduate school decision has been weighing down on me lately. It's bad when you have to leave class because the teacher calls on you and you can barely breathe. Crap. It's worse when said teacher proceeds to ask you after class if your love life is the stress culprit. Ha! I still have to take the GRE; I'll do that either in December or January. I'm not too worried about it--I figure that if I can tackle the LSAT twice, I'll survive the GRE. I'm also considering an alternate option for graduate school, which I won't disclose over the internet for fear of angry telephone calls from friends and family members. I think it's best to mostly stay mum about my graduate school matters until I really know for sure what direction I'm taking. I wish that I could say my mind was made up, but it's still not. I'm ambivalent about both of my potential graduate school directions.
This was supposed to be longer, but I absolutely have to sleep now, lest I won't get a chance to dream about road cones.

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