#39: Pull an all-nighter in Clemons

All nighter in San Sal >>>>> Clemons

I just got my work schedule, and I still don’t have work or classes on Monday. And even though I ate a sizeable portion of my body weight in cheese and fat last night for the Super Bowl, I just don’t feel like going to the gym this morning! My day started off with a false phone call, progressed to blueberry bagels and vitamins, and I am so content to sit here warmly in bed with OneRepublic in the background and my astronomy book within reach—in case I feel like mental exercise. So vigorous haha!

            I’m feeling a bit antithetic as I choose this blog to write because a majority of my undergrad experience as an Envisci major and soc minor involved two to four hour labs in bio and the evsc departments accompanied by (sometimes) lengthy sociological papers. A complete creature of comfort, I never could get myself to write up these reports and essays anywhere near my comfy bedside. But I also have firmly resolved that I am still at least 60% little girl and require an exorbitant amount of sleep! So unless it’s really down to the crunch time, I never stay in libraries past 1am.

            In the spring semester of second year, I was probably near my all-time-low. There were a bunch of family problems, friend issues and issues in my Lambeth apartment, Joe being the whole campus away and us fighting a lot, my being fat… the list goes on. I was also completely stressed out coming from working my butt off in bio the previous semester and coming out with C-work; this semester wasn’t looking up. In addition, I had just taken on my first EVSC lab: ecology. Nowadays, people still complain about the Ecology Lab. THEY HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO REASON TO. Nowadays, the little buggers get two full lab reports and an “applicability” paragraph to write each week. Complete BS.

            In MY lab, we had a lengthy lab report every week. That’s eleven FULL labs. And by lengthy I mean BARE MINIMUM of 12 pages, usually15 or 16. It required extensive research for the introduction, complete understanding of how you were to go about calculating your results and why you did it that way, and a grasp of statistics that I had never been introduced to. I was constantly in my TA’s office (#57: Attend Office Hours): highly recommended: thank God for Erin (I can’t even remember her last name, but she changed my academic writing and scientific thinking and I am forever grateful). But with trying to balance a semblance of social life, Chi Alpha, seventeen credits, and reading and lab reports for biology, I rarely found time during the week to write my report. Until the day before when I would meet up with Haley Walker and Paige Mische in Clark to “crank it out”. Thank God for them too, I couldn’t have done it without someone sitting by my side to make faces at or just spontaneously start moaning with!

            One of the first two weeks of lab, Haley and I worked on it from 6pm until 5am straight. Checking our calculations. Formulating graphs and tables. Researching. Writing. I made myself go back to Lambeth at 5am and sleep for two hours before I got up to finish the stupid thing (and skip bio lab lecture). I was basically in hell all year, but I did it. That was my one night in Clemons—not even just Clemons but the 1^st floor, where everything goes to die: molding Chinese smells, creativity, sanity. I call it dehumanizing and it made me hate Clemons more than ever. I have to say if I had never had this experience I probably wouldn’t have made myself pull an all nighter in Clem just to finish these things…that’s how much I hate it. Unless I was watching movies and eating gummie worms on the couches upstairs. That would do, pig.

{P.S. I got an A+ in that lab, and I had never been more proud!}

“Staying up all night is a waste of sleeping, and a waste of sleeping is a waste of dreaming, and dreaming is important because the more dreams you have, the better chance you have of one coming true.”