The glory of the iPhone. It lets us do all kinds of things - shoot birds at pigs, track our calorie in-take, stalk our facebook friends from any location. For me, the most important thing the iPhone does is weigh down papers when it's windy. The second most important thing it does is keep track of and analyze my sleep patterns. I think this is worth doing even if you don't have narcolepsy, but it's pretty much required if you do.
So, you see that light gray horizontal line right through the middle of the blue screen on the left? That's my sleep goal which happens to be nine hours. Think about the last time you got nine hours of sleep. I'm assuming based on my known readership that most of you don't get that much very often. When I don't get nine hours, this app scolds me! It grades the consistency and stability of my sleep, and when I stray from my usual hours it gives me a bad grade, leading me into a downward spiral of shame and self-loathing. It makes me feel sorry for my students, because most of them are failures too.
If you look closely, you will also notice how much the month of July sucked in terms of "sleep debt." Thanks a lot UMasss Boston and specifically Professor Brown. I don't have much data from the school year yet since it's only 4-days-old, but on the far right you can see that teaching isn't doing me much good either.
So here is the question I constantly wrestle with: Can a single 26-year-old woman have a good social and professional life with an 8:30 bedtime? Based on how much fun I've had this weekend and the fact that I have not gone to bed before 11:30, I'm leaning toward no. Nonetheless, it's been an enlightening few days because I haven't been tired at all. Sure, I get to sleep until 9:00, so I'm still getting 9ish hours of sleep, but even at midnight I'm not that sleepy. As I said to a friend over lunch on Sunday, different kinds of energy come from different places. Maybe allowing myself to be with people and enjoy my waking hours will give me a kind of energy that can combat the deficits in my brain (stupid hypothalamus...). Then again, narcolepsy is a neurological condition. The power of positive thinking does not repair the damaged hypocretin producing cells in my noggin.
So, since this was a pretty serious entry, I will leave you with something hilarious and vaguely related: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc20vMz0V7Q
