Like many others in my college, I love sleeping. Normally, that shouldn’t be a problem, given how flexible our class schedules are, and that scarcely any classes are held on Fridays and weekends. But the problem starts when you love to sleep and have no sense of time whatsoever.
My day usually starts with an alarm ringing around 8 AM, and me putting it on snooze for a few minutes. The next alarm rings at 8.15, and I turn it off, promising to get out of bed in ten minutes.
Well, ten minutes becomes an hour, and I have to dash out of bed to brush my teeth, take a quick shower, and get dressed before eating a hurried breakfast and sprinting to my 10.10 class. Some days, I wake up so late that I have no time for breakfast at all; this is all caused by a plan I make in the morning titled “Five More Minutes” which turns into “Definitely More than Five Minutes”.
Some days are as bad, if not worse, if I have my first class at 11.50. Those are the days I finally leave my bed at 10 AM and head to the bathroom; given my timings, it’s a miracle if I make it to breakfast before it closes at 10.30. On those days, I sometimes look at the time and decide not to eat breakfast at the dining hall and eat somewhere else instead, because there’s absolutely no way I’m making it out of the dorms before 10.30. That helps considerably with my timings, and I can shower at a more relaxed pace, but it’s a bit heavy on my wallet, especially if I do this regularly. Again, this is caused by the “Definitely More than Five Minutes” plan, but more often than not, it’s the “One Hour on Social Media” plan that makes those days go haywire.
Weekends aren’t much better, really. I’m writing this on a day when I made it to the showers just in time for a hot water bath. In winters, that’s the only reason for getting out of bed at all. There have been too many unpleasant occasions where I spend half the morning shivering because I woke up too late to enjoy a relaxing, hot shower that would prepare me for the day ahead. This time, however, it’s caused by a deadly combination of “Definitely More than Five Minutes” and “One Hour on Social Media”.
The end result? It means I don’t end up starting any work before 1 PM, sometime 2 PM if I’ve spent too much time at lunch. Even then, I find myself procrastinating, which doesn’t help my situation at all. The whole day goes by in alternating between trying to study and procrastinating.
At night, I find myself slightly sleepy at around midnight, but the situation is not very different from the morning. I spend at least an hour on my phone, either chatting to a friend outside the country, playing games, or aimlessly scrolling through social media. The one good thing that came out of this, however, is a new app on my phone which cuts the amount of blue light emitted by the screen and places less strain on my eyes.
Finally, I sleep at around 1 or 1.30 in the morning, but that just leads to a repeat of the previous day eight hours later, where I turn my alarms off and sleep for what seems like half an hour, but is actually two hours more than half an hour.
Edited by : Vedika Gupta All images are the courtesy of Sanjna Mishra