3:30 a.m. I’m up drinking one of those cold Starbuck’s drinks with two shots of espresso in them that I bought at Hawk Station. I sit at my desk determined to revise the pile of papers to my right and read the pile of sociological research to my left, all due tomorrow.
The caffeine is not working in my favor.
I begin to feel loopy— too loopy to read, too loopy to write. My eyes want to close but can’t. My stomach feels heavy and my legs won’t quit shaking. My fingertips begin to uncomfortably tingle, and typing for too long begins to hurt. Thinking begins to hurt. Writing begins to hurt.
“Maybe I should read, it’s only a few pages,” I tell myself, but the font is too small and too close together. Instead, I stay up updating my Facebook status and watching YouTube videos.
7:30 a.m. The alarm from my phone begins to play a silly tune along with a vibration. After 15 minutes, the phone vibrates and smashes onto the floor. I open my eyes.
“Fuck!” I lie in bed and stare at the untouched papers on my desk and the blank Microsoft Word document on my computer screen.
I squirm out of bed, and for the seventh time this semester, I’m late to class.