In honor of another day of absolutely feeling like crap and essentially drunk due to lack of sleep, I thought I'd go over some of my sleep-drunkenness highlights.
As you may remember, I have a habit of screwing up my sleep cycle. It feels terrible throughout the day each and is always accompanied by a yearning for it to be nighttime so I can go back to sleep. Unfortunately, there's always something in the way and I try to do function -- that has not always gone well.
Nothing much happened today. My brain is foggy, but I think I still managed 5 hours of sleep after being awoken at 4:10am in the morning due to a night owl doing "cooking". To add insult to injury, I slept late after a long weekend.
The Car and the Girl
Not every sleep deprived day lacks as much excitement as today. The few and best highlights I can remember from my sleep drunken episodes involve a car and a girl. Let's start with the less exciting one: the car.
The Car
It was the second, winter semester of my third year of college. There was a very long and detailed group project involving concrete design. At the time, I still had this weird obsession with doing a draft copy and a final copy when doing written out assignments. There was a lot of math equations and written calculations, so, no, it couldn't be typed up. After staying in a computer lab with my project partner, and most of the class, until 8pm, I had to go home and rewrite about 20 pages of calculations. You'd think that copying and pasting by hand would be quick.
Well, after dinner, I started copying and before long, it was 1:00 am. A few half-hour naps later, it was 5:00 am and I had to start rushing it to hand the assignment in by 9:00 am. Yep, an all-nighter was pulled. The good news was that I made it: I finished copying everything and organized most of the entire report at home. However, I had to get to the school early to print some things out because the lab printers were jammed the night before.
Being a last minute person, it didn't occur to me that leaving at 8am would be a problem. Did I mentioned that I walked to school? On the way there, traffic lights and vehicular traffic just stopped registering in my overloaded, sleep deprived brain. One red light and "don't walk" sign on a relatively quiet street went unnoticed and I ended up walking right in front of a car I completely didn't register. Woops. No injuries, just a lot of honking.
The Girl
On the more immature and less innocent end is the story about the girl. There was a coworker of mine, female, at work whom I was getting acquainted with quite well over the course of a year. We had each others' phone numbers and emails (practically the same thing in the age of smart phones), kept in touch daily in and out of work, harmlessly flirted, hung out at work, went on work outings, and were growing closer. She was also about 5 years older than me, overly confident, possibly to a fault, and best described as a "loud" person -- except when around me. We got along due to similar interests, educational backgrounds, cynicism, and dismay over our employer.
For a stupid reason, I couldn't sleep one night due to my neighbors doing something stupid and my overactive mind processing the issue all night. Honestly, it was a feeling of "excitement". That resulted in probably less than an hour's worth of proper unconsciousness that night -- not an all-nighter, but nearly as bad. Being an "excellent employee", attending work was an absolute must the next day. Work, indeed, was attended and most of the morning went off without a hitch. Most.
At that point, she and I were exchanging "good mornings" by email almost daily. I forget the exact details, but a conversation ensued, partly related to the neighbor issue and partly related to my sleep deprivation. Eventually, the subject shifted to money and she said that I should get a sugar mommy.
As a sarcastic and immature individual with all inhibitions removed being "drunk", I played along and she reiterated that I should acquire a mother of sugar. To which I replied, "it's as if you have someone in mind already. I'll bite." Not so subtly implied, and rightly inferred, was that the "someone" was her.
The relationship was just never the same after that. Contact became less and less frequent, and eventually it turned into a full blown game of ignoring each other during unplanned encounters -- just look straight and don't make eye contact.
If I were a narcissist and self-centered, I'd speculate that her consistent softening of character, displays of jealousy when discussing other women, and signs of nervousness played a role. Shall we say, exacerbated the incident?
Woops...
