I slept for six hours, then was awake for three, then slept for another seven. I lack the words to describe how much better I feel now than I did 24 hours ago.
Toward the end of my second sleep block, I remember several dreams. The last one involved me pushing a shopping cart (which I think I was using as a luggage cart) around what looked kinda like a hotel courtyard. I got in the elevator after first watching six people pack in to the right half of the elevator like sardines in a comical fashion. Then the elevator started moving laterally, and I realized that it was in fact a train. The six people and my luggage were now gone, and there were seats on the sides (like a subway train, only the car was still the same size as the elevator), and we were passing by large multilevel parking structures. In retrospect, it seems a lot like an airport monorail with very small cars. Then there were two women sitting across from me. One of them offered me a token for my return trip (for some reason, I knew that the trip there cost 3 tokens' worth), which I accepted, mentioning that I might still have a token on my Charlie Card (apparently, my subconscious decided that this elevator-turned-train was owned and operated by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority). The same woman asked me if I'd been talking to anyone lately, to which I replied that, no, I'd been spending a huge majority of my time on campus working toward my PhD, which was the first thing that's proving to be really difficult for me. Apparently my subconscious is also mildly bitter about this. And then I woke up.
As I ate a sandwich and some yogurt with fruit, I realized that I still pulled about the same number of all-nighters (or at least late-nighters) per semester in undergrad than I'm currently scheduled to for this semester. The difference in my mind is that those I chose to do by putting off my work, whereas here I feel I haven't been putting off my work. This suggests that while I feel that I've been procrastinating less, perhaps I'm just playing the game with the same skill level, except the difficulty just rose. In turn, I shouldn't worry about feeling exhausted all the time - I just need to get more proactive about the use of my time and be more intentional about my downtime, so I feel like I'm getting more out of it. Then I'll feel like the late nights are justified, since I chose to go do $FUN_THING instead of working.
I find it amusing that I'm consciously plotting to subvert my subconscious. I should finish reading Dan Ariely's book.
Why I'm frustrated right now:
--- 24.7.112.1 ping statistics --- 255 packets transmitted, 139 received, 45% packet loss, time 254798ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 6.171/22.678/85.815/13.199 ms (19:25:34) zarvox@kraken ~ $ ip route 24.7.112.0/22 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 24.7.114.10 default via 24.7.112.1 dev eth0
Comcast is coming out tomorrow to investigate (and hopefully, fix) this issue. I only hope that the problem remains long enough for their tech to diagnose properly.