More than an excuse to skip class

I’ve had fits of insomnia before. Freshman year, right around midterms, I would never be able… I’ve had fits of insomnia before. Freshman year, right around midterms, I would never be able to fall asleep before 3 a.m. I would sit and watch movies or play PlayStation while my roommate was gone, which was often because we didn’t get along.

The next two years of school, living in Lothrop, I would never be able to sleep, unless I was sick or drunk. I would sit up all night playing games online and look across the hall to my friend Ben, who would be up most nights with me, as we cheated our way through “Win, Lose or Draw” on Yahoo Games.

Last year, I had a job that kept me out until pretty late at night. I would not get home until about 1:30 a.m. But this year, working in a bar, I don’t get home until 3 a.m. at the earliest, and then it takes at least two hours for me to wind down enough to go to sleep.

My dilemma is that now when I come home, my roommates are all asleep, as some of them have early morning jobs or classes. So I sit in front of my TV and hope that the pretty lights will lull me to sleep.

Not getting to sleep before 5 or 6 a.m. can wear on you after awhile. I never wake up before 1 p.m., unless it’s something super important, and sometimes, much like yesterday, I don’t wake up until 3 p.m. I’ve wasted a big chunk of my day, and if it happens to be a day when I have to work at the bar, I only have five hours to do things, and then I have to subtract an hour for getting ready and making it to campus — living in South O is so convenient.

But beyond all of that, my insomnia has gone to a new level.

I used to be able to fall asleep early if I was sick, with the help of some cough medicine, but last week when I was sick, I still couldn’t fall asleep before 4 a.m., and after the second night, the cough medicine stopped knocking me out. I’ve run out of Web sites to visit, I’ve played all of the online Scrabble games that I can let myself play; it looks like it’s time to start digging into those DVDs I haven’t watched in a while.

I don’t mind not having anything to occupy my sleeplessness; that always seems to be something I work through, but what I am starting to realize is that the worst of my problems is that once I wake up, I don’t feel like doing anything, and that includes going to class.

I don’t learn anything in class, anyway, but that’s not the point. The point is that I don’t schedule classes before noon, because I know I have this sleeping problem, and yet I still can’t make it to class. I don’t even know when my next natural disasters test is, and that’s a class that I go to more than most (it helps that it’s at 3 p.m.).

Maybe it’s not that I can’t sleep until the early morning, making me feel like I need to sleep all day. Maybe it’s that I want to sleep all day so I don’t make it to my classes. I toss and turn, trying to stay comfortable so I don’t wake up before noon; that way I don’t have to sit through my 1 p.m. logic class. But that can’t be it, because it happens to me on days when I don’t have class and on the weekend when all I want to do is go out and do something fun.

Ever since I started working in a bar a little more than a year ago, I haven’t slept before the wee hours of the morning, even on nights when I don’t work. My body has been programmed. The worst time is when it gets to be spring and summer and the birds chirp outside of my window when my eyes haven’t even shut yet.

I don’t know; maybe it’s a combination of me really liking sleep and working late hours, mixed in with a little bit of hatred for classes and a dash of laziness. Call it what you want, I’ll stick with insomnia.

Brian Palmer is the A’E editor and if you ever need someone to talk to late at night or early in the morning, don’t hesitate to drop him a line, he’ll be up. E-mail him at bkp8@pitt.edu.