[M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og - Braindumps on things Mel Chua has found shiny lately.

I’m pretty bad at being tired.

I am extraordinarily bad at sleeping. You’d think that returning from China (12-hour time difference) after sleeping, on average, less than 3 hours a day the entire time I was there, and making that return trip while sleeping approximately 1 out of the 36 hours in transit, would mean that I was tired – and you’d be right. I am. Not nearly as much as I think I should be, though. And I can’t seem to sleep, either – nor do I seem to need it. The longest continuous stretch of unconsciousness I’ve had since Saturday was 4 hours; the average has been somewhere between 1-2. I keep waking up at midnight, 1am, 2am, 2:30am, and being wide awake, unable to do much other than read tech education journals (IEEE Transactions on Education, I wish you would write papers more like SIGCSE does).

It’s not like this is the first time that’s happened; I sometimes don’t even need the time shift to get my sleep patterns into this state. It’s terribly annoying every time it does, though, because I keep on waiting for the other shoe to drop: sure, I feel great now, but at some point, I’m going to hit a wall. I was actually looking forward to crashing, because while I was in China I did feel increasingly tired, but no – as soon as I started for the airport, adrenaline rush!!! and I just haven’t really calmed down since, except for tiny occasional moments that I’ve mostly shaken off right away.

I think the trouble is that adrenaline is also a defense mechanism, and that I’m equally terrible at relaxing. Ah well. It’s 1:30am… let’s try this again.