Fiftieth Post

Halfway to 100!
I totally wish that I had something cool to put up. Instead, I will just reveal to you that I managed to shift my sleep cycle by 12 hours.
That's right, I made myself nocturnal.
How, you ask?
(Note: I will be using military time for the most part to keep these times in order without using AM and PM all the time. 13:00 = 1 PM, 20:00 = 8 PM, 08:00 = 8 AM)
While recovering from illness, I took a nap at 13:00 on a Thursday afternoon, intending to only sleep for a few hours.
I woke up at 17:00 and fell right back asleep after a glance at the clock.
Then I woke up at 20:00. Having achieved seven hours of sleep, I was feeling pretty good. I mean, I don't really get the whole "falling asleep before midnight" thing, so I usually end up getting six hours of sleep and swearing that I'll go to sleep earlier the next night, then playing on the internet and losing track of time and repeating the cycle all over again.
Every day this happens.
So my body is pretty cool with six hours of sleep and generally considers seven hours to be a treat.
I decided that I would just stay up all night and go to my 08:00 class as if it happened at 20:00. After all, I have a night class two days a week, and I get through those just fine...
What I didn't consider was that I would have to actually go to class and function at my usual late night hours. Those are the hours at which I eat junk food and play on the internet and lose any and all vestiges of coherent thought.
I discussed Mass Spectrometry and identified two molecules using Mass Spec, Infrared Spectroscopy, Proton Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, and Carbon Nuclear Magnetic Resonance at my body's 20:00.
I took a quiz and discussed the German educational system at my body's 21:00.
I discussed rhetorical strategies and made plans for a community-improving project at my body's 22:30.
And I ate lunch with lots of random people at my body's midnight.
Unfortunately, this nocturnal thing can't work. First: Tuesdays.
Tuesdays are my hell days every other week. I have an 08:00 lit class, then a noon lab that lasts until about 14:30 (officially). On every other Tuesday, I have a two-hour live lab for German class that lasts until 16:30. The problem: Organic lab never gets out early, which would be required for me to get to live lab on time. No, Organic gets out closer to fifteen minutes late on a weekly basis.
I'll be twenty five minutes late to every freaking live lab, and I am not happy.
Anyway, being nocturnal would mean being awake and functioning until my body's 04:45 every other Tuesday, and being able to do complex labs wherein one has to multitask like a madwoman (yes, even the men have to multitask like madwomen, which elicited a few groans of terror from the pre-meds) just to finish on time over multiple weeks with multiple labs going at once and all this at my body's midnight?
No.
Even if it weren't for Hell Tuesdays, my roommate would hate me if I was nocturnal.
I would make it impossible for her to be doing awake things as is natural for an awake person to do in the middle of the afternoon. She would be unable to bring friends over in the afternoons, when no one has class. There is nowhere to go on campus at night, so I would be leaving my light on all night all the time. The poor girl can't sleep well with the light on, and she was really restless last night.
No, being nocturnal would not be in my best interests.
So now I have to fix this thing.
My efforts to return to a diurnal sleeping cycle so far include staying awake far past my natural bedtime. As of this post, I've been awake for 17.4 hours. I'll have to make it at least 22 if I want to get enough sleep to get up early on Saturday so that I can be on a normal schedule for Monday, when I have a German test.
Moral of the story, kids, is don't be nocturnal if you're sharing a room.