*Transcendental *Logic

Doodly, doodly, doo…

I really shouldn’t be on the computer — I have a monstrous amount of homework to do this weekend, and typing extra for fun probably isn’t the best plan — but it’s too early to start watching TV (isn’t it?  Well, for me…I never watch anything until late at night, after everything else is done…it makes me nervous to "shut down" like that when there’s still work waiting!) and I’m not really in the mood for exercise.  Plus, I think the household might kill me if I started clattering around and cleaning at 4 a.m. on a holiday.  ;)

Holidays are actually a bit of a challenge on a polyphasic schedule.  Weekends are too, sometimes – I’m the kind of person who needs Stuff To Do to motivate my lazy butt into gear, and it’s hard to get up so early when there’s nowhere you have to be!  (I have my 3-hour mornings on weekdays stuffed to the brim with things that need doing.)  But weekends, at least, are regular, and can be compensated for:  for instance, I go out to breakfast with my mother-in-law every Sunday morning at 7, the second the restaurants open.  (She’s an early bird, obviously.)  And Sunday mornings, before breakfast, are my exception to the no-TV-before-work’s-done rule; I let myself watch something cool (usually Dr. Who, lately) if I’m up right at 4.  (So I do get up.  Plus, I hate feeling rushed, and "rushed" to me has now come to mean "I don’t have two hours to much about before I have to leave"!)  Saturdays I usually do start a cleaning-project pretty early — cleaning or filing or whatever’s on the list that week that Holy Crap Needs Doing, heh.  If I absolutely can’t do it becuase it’s too noisy, I either take a walk, or — predictably — sleep in. 

All this is a good example of the Computer Limit Rule, if you weren’t familiar with it:  To a new or hopeful polyphaser, it often seems like 4-5 hours of extra computer time is a great way to use up the extra waking hours.  But even for a veteran geek like me, the computer has its limits.  There are physiological costs to overusing the computer — eyestrain, neck aches, sore hands — and while those are surmountable every once in a while, you don’t want to plan on glutting yourself on computer time ALL the time.  (What if, like me, you’re polyphasic for two years??)

So, yeah.  Holidays are tricky.  I don’t automatically have a plan for holiday mornings, and I’m not real bright about making one in advance for every time I have a day off work, so I often oversleep.  And then, of course, Saturday is the day I let myself oversleep if I want to (which isn’t always, but if I’ve already overslept a day that week, it’s more tempting to — and a worse idea to, since sleeping extra more than once a week means I’ll be sleepy the next day!).  So holidays on Friday are even harder, because I have to be sure not to oversleep both Friday and Saturday — that would be a really bad plan, yo. 

Obviously I succeeded in getting up on time this holiday — on time to the minute actually — so, you may wonder, what was my genius trick to achieve this?  Well, it was an interesting idea I had a few days ago, but I told myself I wouldn’t write about it until I’d tested it, since it’s a bit counterintuitive.  I got up on time by removing all of my alarms but one, and having the one left be an alarm without the ability to snooze.  Yup, I beat the snooze demons by erasing their summoning-circle:  I put all of my snoozable alarms in a drawer, pulled the batteries out of the ones that would work without a wall-plug (I know me, and I would totally dig an alarm out of the drawer…;) –and set my one, analog, loud-as-hell ringy-bell alarm for 4 a.m. precisely.

And I mean I FLEW out of bed, heh.  By the time I had the alarm off, my heart was pounding so hard that I couldn’t have slept if you’d hit me on the head with a dictionary.

I’d call that a success!  Heck, it worked so well, I might keep just that one alarm permanently — I bet it helps towards my learning to wake up at 4 without an alarm (which I still can’t do, yet).  That thing is SO LOUD and SO JARRING that I can’t imagine "getting used to it"! 

Caveat, though:  I’m not sure I’d recommend the one-loud-alarm-with-no-snooze-button approach if you’re adapting; you’re more likely to need a backup alarm then.

(Snort!  I just realized that I had a backup alarm; I’d forgotten about it — Telepixie was still set up to ring my home phone at 4:30.  Scared the pants off me just now!!)

Well.  I guess that still leaves me on a holiday morning, with a huge paper looming that really means I shouldn’t stay on the computer…and more than three hours until naptime and my daughter waking up, heh.  (There’s NO possibility of working on the paper now, if you were thinking about asking.  ::bares fangs::) 

Okay.  Well, I can start some laundry, which desperately needs doing; and I can get my taiji practice for today out of the way (kun is closed today; Sifu’s out of town).  Then, if nothing else presents itself, I suppose I can watch some Dr. Who while I eat breakfast…it is a holiday, after all.  ;)

Happy Day Off Work to everyone!

And happy Pyromania Day to the Americans!

(I’m partially kidding…but seriously, you Americans would do well to contemplate what you think is greatest and most worth saving in this country; you’re going to need that information come election-time, and to make things happen afterwards!)

::runs off to wrangle with dirty underwear::

This entry was posted 3 months ago on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 5:13 am and is filed under polyphasic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.