Welcome to Waterloo
[Postdated entry written on June 24, 2006. Would be too much of a stretch to include this in a current entry and it would end up being too long, so here's the story in relation to Friday, June 16. EDITED to include the picture I meant to include Friday night.]
Yesterday Tyler's girlfriend Heather arrived at a station in Kitchener following a nearly 3-day long trip by Greyhound from Kamloops to here. I was due to meet Tyler at one of the bus stops on campus at or just before 8:00 AM. Now, the night before I realized that I hadn't done my Japanese homework yet, due the next morning. It was an uncharacteristically complex assignment as far as past Japanese ones go, since we had to take a picture of or just draw our room and then make 10 sentences describing where things are in relationship to other things (e.g. "There is a phone on the desk") as in Wednesday's class we learned all the words for on, next to, under, between, etc. Even though the assignment is on its own worth just about nothing in the course, for some reason I laboured over it for hours, drawing my room (since I lack a digital camera...) and then handwriting the sentences (which had to be done in hiragana... I could have just used my neato japanese word processing program if I wanted).
Here is the picture for those interested:
To the Japanese speakers in the crowd (miwasatoshi and doinkies come to mind) I have no idea how good most of these translations of items are: online dictionaries don't seem to have the greatest track record, and sometimes I had to pick from about 6 different japanese words for the exact same translation, although I'm sure there are actually subtle differences. Also, words that should be in katakana are noticeably... not, since we haven't learned it yet. I could just copy it from a word processor but I'd feel so dirty :P )
All said and done, it was now close to 4 A.M., and I started really worrying about going to sleep. I absolutely knew I had to get up in the morning. I have no problem getting up, no matter how little I sleep, if I feel like it's a responsibility: it was whenever I was working, and it sure of hell was yesterday morning. But the catch is of course that I can get up assuming I'm woken up, even for an instant. However, I began being very paranoid about my alarm which had recently failed me a few times. You know how sometimes you decide on a course of action when it's really late at night and you're really tired, and it seems like a great idea at the time, but then looking back it seems so stupid? Well, the decision I was about to make turned out to be pretty damn stupid.
Out came the kettle and instant coffee! I'm not much of a coffee drinker - I'd say the closest together that I've ever had two cups of coffee would be a week. The instant coffee I'd brought with me in September was still unopened until that night, when I broke it out in style, drinking a full 5 cups of coffee between 4 and 7 A.M. I showered and headed out to meet Tyler, and my mind immediately got to thinking, "Hey, you know, it's not surprising that people get addicted to this stuff!" I seriously felt like I'd gotten maybe a 6 hour night sleep - not quite full, but pretty good nonetheless. Oh man, how stupid I can be...
So, met up with Tyler who was obviously pretty excited and probably somewhat nervous on the inside. He hadn't seen Heather in something like 9 months, and now she had just bused her way across the country to live with him. My hands were shaking just a little bit, but it was okay. We hopped on the scheduled bus and made it down to the terminal in Kitchener. We had to wait a while, as Heather's bus ended up being nearly a half hour late. Man, I tell you, I wouldn't want to be alone in that station. When she finally did get here, she and Tyler hugged for about a minute (I did the big stage coughing behind them, but they didn't seem to care) before we picked up all her luggage and walked back to the bus stop. We had definitely missed the bus we thought we would be taking back due to Heather's bus' lateness. We did get on the next bus (which comes every half hour) and headed back to the university.
At this point, we had to walk all the stuff back to the house. We had about 200 pounds of stuff between the three of us, and the walk is about 20 minutes normally. So, we figured out who was carrying what and set off on our way. And about 3 minutes in, my coffee high just died. Instant exhaustian. Yay for harebrained ideas! So now I'm lugging a huge box of stuff with nothing in my proverbial tank. inwardly cursing my own stupidity, on we went. Pretty early on a woman in a minivan who had passed us stopped and threw it in reverse to pull up next to us, and asked if we wanted a lift to whereever we were going. We politely declined, and as she drove away I said that I was sure we would regret it in about 10 minutes time.
We did make it, but by the time I got there my arms were dead. I'm talking, couldn't hold a drink tired. Couldn't bring a sandwich to my mouth to eat tired. Tyler kindly threw together said sandwich for me, as the original plan was for the three of us to have breakfast together, but with the delays of the bus and the long walk I only had half an hour to get to Japanese. I couldn't be late as it results in a deduction in marks and I couldn't miss it altogether as it would have meant there was no point in spending so long on that assignment (which led to the stupidly tired state of the moment). So sandwich in hand, off I hurried myself back to campus. I had 30 minutes. It usually takes 20 to get to campus from the house, and I hadn't brought my books or anything with me since I thought we would have had more time, so I also had to run up to my room to grab my books before then making the walk to my class, the longest that I have for any of my classes. I pushed on at the fastest speed I could, and by some miracle did actually make it to my class on time. We started every class as we do every Thursday Japanese class, with a mini-quiz, which could barely write. Meanwhile I had been awake for about 28 hours, and my thinking ability was at an all time low.
Made it out and collapsed into bed, getting up just six hours later to have dinner with Dave, Tyler, and Heather.
And that was how I learned to never, ever try to substitute sleep with coffee.
Yesterday Tyler's girlfriend Heather arrived at a station in Kitchener following a nearly 3-day long trip by Greyhound from Kamloops to here. I was due to meet Tyler at one of the bus stops on campus at or just before 8:00 AM. Now, the night before I realized that I hadn't done my Japanese homework yet, due the next morning. It was an uncharacteristically complex assignment as far as past Japanese ones go, since we had to take a picture of or just draw our room and then make 10 sentences describing where things are in relationship to other things (e.g. "There is a phone on the desk") as in Wednesday's class we learned all the words for on, next to, under, between, etc. Even though the assignment is on its own worth just about nothing in the course, for some reason I laboured over it for hours, drawing my room (since I lack a digital camera...) and then handwriting the sentences (which had to be done in hiragana... I could have just used my neato japanese word processing program if I wanted).
Here is the picture for those interested:
To the Japanese speakers in the crowd (miwasatoshi and doinkies come to mind) I have no idea how good most of these translations of items are: online dictionaries don't seem to have the greatest track record, and sometimes I had to pick from about 6 different japanese words for the exact same translation, although I'm sure there are actually subtle differences. Also, words that should be in katakana are noticeably... not, since we haven't learned it yet. I could just copy it from a word processor but I'd feel so dirty :P )
All said and done, it was now close to 4 A.M., and I started really worrying about going to sleep. I absolutely knew I had to get up in the morning. I have no problem getting up, no matter how little I sleep, if I feel like it's a responsibility: it was whenever I was working, and it sure of hell was yesterday morning. But the catch is of course that I can get up assuming I'm woken up, even for an instant. However, I began being very paranoid about my alarm which had recently failed me a few times. You know how sometimes you decide on a course of action when it's really late at night and you're really tired, and it seems like a great idea at the time, but then looking back it seems so stupid? Well, the decision I was about to make turned out to be pretty damn stupid.
Out came the kettle and instant coffee! I'm not much of a coffee drinker - I'd say the closest together that I've ever had two cups of coffee would be a week. The instant coffee I'd brought with me in September was still unopened until that night, when I broke it out in style, drinking a full 5 cups of coffee between 4 and 7 A.M. I showered and headed out to meet Tyler, and my mind immediately got to thinking, "Hey, you know, it's not surprising that people get addicted to this stuff!" I seriously felt like I'd gotten maybe a 6 hour night sleep - not quite full, but pretty good nonetheless. Oh man, how stupid I can be...
So, met up with Tyler who was obviously pretty excited and probably somewhat nervous on the inside. He hadn't seen Heather in something like 9 months, and now she had just bused her way across the country to live with him. My hands were shaking just a little bit, but it was okay. We hopped on the scheduled bus and made it down to the terminal in Kitchener. We had to wait a while, as Heather's bus ended up being nearly a half hour late. Man, I tell you, I wouldn't want to be alone in that station. When she finally did get here, she and Tyler hugged for about a minute (I did the big stage coughing behind them, but they didn't seem to care) before we picked up all her luggage and walked back to the bus stop. We had definitely missed the bus we thought we would be taking back due to Heather's bus' lateness. We did get on the next bus (which comes every half hour) and headed back to the university.
At this point, we had to walk all the stuff back to the house. We had about 200 pounds of stuff between the three of us, and the walk is about 20 minutes normally. So, we figured out who was carrying what and set off on our way. And about 3 minutes in, my coffee high just died. Instant exhaustian. Yay for harebrained ideas! So now I'm lugging a huge box of stuff with nothing in my proverbial tank. inwardly cursing my own stupidity, on we went. Pretty early on a woman in a minivan who had passed us stopped and threw it in reverse to pull up next to us, and asked if we wanted a lift to whereever we were going. We politely declined, and as she drove away I said that I was sure we would regret it in about 10 minutes time.
We did make it, but by the time I got there my arms were dead. I'm talking, couldn't hold a drink tired. Couldn't bring a sandwich to my mouth to eat tired. Tyler kindly threw together said sandwich for me, as the original plan was for the three of us to have breakfast together, but with the delays of the bus and the long walk I only had half an hour to get to Japanese. I couldn't be late as it results in a deduction in marks and I couldn't miss it altogether as it would have meant there was no point in spending so long on that assignment (which led to the stupidly tired state of the moment). So sandwich in hand, off I hurried myself back to campus. I had 30 minutes. It usually takes 20 to get to campus from the house, and I hadn't brought my books or anything with me since I thought we would have had more time, so I also had to run up to my room to grab my books before then making the walk to my class, the longest that I have for any of my classes. I pushed on at the fastest speed I could, and by some miracle did actually make it to my class on time. We started every class as we do every Thursday Japanese class, with a mini-quiz, which could barely write. Meanwhile I had been awake for about 28 hours, and my thinking ability was at an all time low.
Made it out and collapsed into bed, getting up just six hours later to have dinner with Dave, Tyler, and Heather.
And that was how I learned to never, ever try to substitute sleep with coffee.