Midterms Week Fall 2011

Students never learn from their mistakes. I never learn from my mistakes. The consequences don't seem to bother me that often because I sleep every damn night. I am under the deadly impression that if I lose one night of sleep I will survive the next day by consuming and relying on copious amounts of dark coffee. I may feel fine, but the damage has already been done. In fact, nights of lost sleep accumulate to a final ultimatum. I have no idea of the silent toll that the loss of sleep has on my body. I can't feel it, but I have been warned that lack of sleep leads to major illnesses that awaken in my body. My Mom would warn me, "Bok biang tung sung" which means hundreds of illnesses will live. She is warning me that a lack of sleep will lead to a fatal host of illnesses that will eventually cripple the body from inside out. It is more than important that we get at least eight hours of sleep, television says. Nowadays it is lucky that we squeeze in five hours and settle our minds down from the cramping of exams, writing tiny words on index cards, and copying over notes so that we can energize our photographic memory. It is a pity that we do not manage or budget our time. We don't even budget our time to budget time. We can't even take out time to look at our schedules and organize ourselves. We lack proper, continuous priority to function. If our cell phones are on, we are most likely scanning Facebook for fanciful updates to distract me and inject a dose of unboringness into our lives. When we are at home, Facebook is on right next to Microsoft Word. It is miracle that after two hours our names are the only things we have typed on our double-spaced Word document.

It is clear that we become prey to time. We believe that can cram once time arrives and when we are faced head-on with a few remaining minutes. But if you recall exams, we lose to time. Time competes with us every time we try to finish up an exam before the proctor announces demonically, "Time's up, put your pencils down." That dreadful vocalization either puts tears in your eyes or it derails your entire train of thought and trashes your whole line of hope depending on whether you are done with your sentence or not.

Midterms week is upon us and it is miracle that we get to recall everything that we have learned this seven weeks of the semester past. I observe the huddled masses of students gripping their notebooks and making love to their biochem/orgo textbooks. Their involvement shields are erected and they cannot be interrupted. Their hands are fastened to coffee mugs or large Starbucks's cups. I can only imagine the amount of coffee they consumed for the entire day, or will consume for the rest of the night. This coerced, forced intake of chemicals are surefire way of staying up because they make you, force you to stay awake by increasing your heart rate, but these chemicals are extremely dangerous because overdosing can lead to heart failure. Also, any chemicals that reside in your body will shift your body's homeostasis levels, and upset some part of you which you may not recognize immediately, but the damage might be done. It is the subtle changes that occur inside of your body that you do not get to witness or feel that haunt us and tease us into believing that we are ok. Take the few sudden deaths that we read in the newspapers. Local man dies out of nowhere. Suddenly he collapses not of a heat stroke or fatal heart attack, but simply dies. Coroner's reports indicate that he had a heart condition that he never checked out with his physician. It seems that his odds of living would have increased if he visited his doctor for his annual checkup or if he doubted his body. But it is likely that he felt absolutely nothing, because our bodies trick us into believing that we are alright, that we are fine. The most fine changes may mean life or death.

My Dyker Heights Junior High School classmate Joe said that he counts on his willpower to keep him awake. He does not rely on coffee. I think that he is either boasting or incredibly powerful in that he can utilize his willpower. Maybe he simply gets adequate sleep more than I do. Some people are stronger than others. I collapse when I am incredibly tired. But then again, who does not collapse when they are incredibly tired?!

To keep me awake I usually consume one small cup of coffee and two teaspoons of 3-Hour Energy Drink that I buy at my corner deli. Usually when I doze off into sleep, I slap myself in the face to wake myself up and force myself to keep going. When I can go into a bathroom I will throw water on my face as my mom always advises me to do. It's quite refreshing. But nothing does the trick better than consumption of caffeine. I seldom experience crashes unless I pull an all-nighter, which I did once throughout my entire educational life. It was awful because I crashed mid-day and I had a massive massive headache like a eighteen wheeler truck was coming my way. Migraines are devastating because you feel like you're trapped inside your head and the space is closing in tighter and tighter, and as it grows tighter you cannot escape the dizziness and tension inside your head. This feeling of tense headache is killer.