By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: November 9, 2011
I am so tired that I had a single dream last night. It lasted two hours, which was all the sleep I got, and it was a single word, which was the French word for square. Carré. Carré. Carré. It was actually quite interesting. This is how tired I am.
The whole problem is that I am trying to pull up my GPA. It is currently a 3.34. (I’m not sure how polite that is to say. I get the distinct feeling that I may have just done the academic equivalent of streaking. Put a paper bag over my head. Hmmm, wonder who that is. Obviously not terribly well-endowed.) The point is it needs to be higher. I have not slept especially much lately.
This is how tired I am. I’ve had maybe 10 hours of sleep over the last four nights combined. At a certain point there is some interesting blurring between real life and things that are not real. Like Twitter. I am so tired that I’m thinking in hashtags. I should stop tweeting. The Republican party in the USA has apparently been developing an internet kill-switch for years. Can you imagine all the ways that could go horribly, horribly wrong? They should make it a huge, red button. Preferably emblazoned with the word “danger.” Oops. I was bringing the president his coffee and I bumped it. Goodbye internet. Goodbye forever. #MaybeICanStudyNowWithoutGettingDistracted.
My mouth tastes like copper and zinc. Yesterday I had 14 shots of espresso and three cups of coffee over the course of 14 hours. This shit doesn’t even keep me awake any more. Then I had a cup of tea. I was trying to trick my body into accepting more wakeful drugs. I was all, what is this hot beverage? This is not coffee! Wow. How delicious. What’s that? It’s caffeinated? Oh man, I didn’t know that. And so on.
I studied for a midterm so hard that I slayed it. This is why I didn’t really sleep two out of the last four days. I slayed it like a dragon. My word processor is trying to inform me that the proper past tense of the verb “to slay” is “slew,” which I knew. But I think I like “slayed” better. (The Copy Editor has conniptions. “Slayed”? “Slew”? Now that I’ve mentioned this conundrum specifically, you can’t just edit it out. Hmm. While we’re at it, does anybody really know how to spell imedieatley? Immediately? Immodiatalaw?) Now nothing looks right. I am sorry, Copy Editor. This is the problem with English these days. It’s tricky. It’s like a Mortal Kombat knockoff. Without the wicked theme song, it’s worthless – even if the animation graphics are exactly the same.
I am so tired that I have begun to develop a couple of genius ideas. One of them is to re-write T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland as a children’s book about animals. The last line will be “This is the way the world ends / not with a fang but a flipper*.” It’s a work in progress. To tell you the truth, that’s about all I have. But it’s genius. I’ll make millions.
I’m so tired I think I might be dying. My mouth tastes like zinc and copper. My tongue tastes like electricity. Life has that arid quality some dreams have. Like Donnie Darko. I want to drink three or four bottles of vitamin water. I wonder what it would be like to drown in vitamin water. Your body would be hating on you but also loving you. “Thanks for trying to hydrate!” It might say, “But who are you trying to fool? We know you don’t do yoga. We know.”
*Ocelot vs. shark. Obviously.
