Now I have two assignments due tomorrow… so it looks like I’m doing another all-nighter-uberman thing… Eh, whatever. It’ll all work out. I just took a 3-hour after dinner nap, so time to work now.

After my first uberman night, I was really hyper the entire next day and had a lot of (unfocused) energy. I played in a violin studio masterclass with my teacher and played one of the best performances of Bach I ever have… Being one day sleep deprived is an awful lot like being tipsy. It’s hard to focus and inhibitions are low… Apparently that’s good for public performance though.

I’m still pretty successfully a more organized person, but lately I’v slipped up. My room is actually kind of messy right now. But nothing as out of hand as it was last quarter. And more importantly, I know where everything is, and I can find stuff quickly. I’m keeping a calendar. It’s all going pretty successfully.

The time-management part of being organized still hasn’t sunk in. I realize that the only way I’m going to be able to get everything caught up over the next 2 or 3 days is by pulling several all-nighters. This sounds like a good case for uberman. I’m also going to switch back to being vegetarian as I felt it was giving me more energy. (did I ever update saying I’m not vegetarian? did I ever update saying that I was? I dunno, I’ve been neglecting this blog for a while…)

Lately I’ve been getting a terrifying amount of sleep. Over the past week I’ve averaged 11 hours a day. The worst was when I went to bed at 6:30 pm and didn’t get up until 10:00 the next morning. The first couple of days I felt really well-rested, but then I got really lazy, and thus the disorganized room and life… So I need to inject a little crazy into things, and uberman sounds perfect.

As usual I’ll try to update with any interesting experiences. I’m particularly curious about how hard/easy it might be to readapt after my previous experiments.

‘night :)

I was browsing some blog articles out of boredom and found one on new years resolutions and how to make a resolution that will stick. I was intrigued by the idea of over-the-top commitment, a philosophy similar to the military’s use of overwhelming force.

I got to thinking about what I’d like to change in my own life and realized that I’ve always been a disorganized slob. My room’s constantly a mess. It sometimes feels like the general disarray that I leave behind me wherever I go is a part of who I am.

I looked around and in a moment of inspiration thought to clean my room. I didn’t really know where to start so I cosulted google. I got “How to clean your room” and “How to clean you room, fast.” I realized that this wasn’t going to cut it. Sure I could force myself through an online tutorial, but there was a bigger fundamental problem — that I am — was? — a I messy person. That’s what I really needed to clean up.

So I refined my search: “How to become an organized person.” Yahoo answers gave me a couple obvious answers, but I felt like my own computer had joined the ranks of nagging mothers. My two personal favorite anwsers were “Stob being such a slob” and “Get a girlfriend.”

But there seemed to be more behind this transformation than a simple “just do it.” I was struggling with the question “how?” and worse, “why?” So I opened up a text editor — vim cuz I’m a nerd — and began:

“I want to become an organized and neat person.

I am disorganized.

why is this a problem? why do I want to change that?”

I continued a dialog with myself until I found the motivation, how, and why for my whole plan.

The rest of the day, I spent cleaning my room more thoroughly than I ever have in my life.

I think the most important part for me was finding internal motivation and figuring out why a change is important to me.

But I really feel that by making this change now, I will improve my life and save lots of time/energy in the long run.

So the overall process was really frustrating, but I’ve never heard anything positive about customer service and they actually gave me a straight-forward fix. The solution to my problem was so simple that I just have to post it here in case anyone searches it.

Problem: You have a website, and you used cpanel to reroute a url to another url… perhaps when configuring a RoR app. Now you can’t get the rerouting to go away.

Solution: Edit the .htaccess file located in public_html (for BlueHost) and remove the lines for that specific reroute.

If you don’t understand any of what I just said, then you can just be happy for me.

Huzzah! My site’s back up!

I’m also going to start a new project with my roommate to make the webcomic www.itsnotporn.com… We’ll see how it turns out… it should be a learning experience.

I rediscovered energy drinks now that I don’t have to take frequent naps. I have to hit just the right amount to stay focused but not hyper — it’s an art. It saved my life during finals.

Until you browse again…

While I was never really successful in my adaptation to uberman, the really neat thing is that I’ve trained myself to switch between different sleeping times really fast. I doubt that jet lag will ever be much of an issue again.

Last night, I slept very little so I decided to take a 3 hour nap after lunch. Soon images began to spin through my head. I had a very, very long dream that seemed to stretch for days. It felt longer than a typical dream during monophasic sleep. Then, All of a sudden, my eyes flashed open and I was awake.

Crap, did I sleep through my alarm? I have a midterm to study for! I got up to check my alarm, and realized that only 1.5 hours had passed. But the dream had been epic, long, and vivid. I went back to sleep and slept dreamlessly for the next 1.5 hours. The feeling was very strange and I’ve felt a little disoriented from it for the rest of my day. I kept thinking it was Tuesday or Wednesday, because it had felt like so much time had passed. Now it feels more like it is 1:30 pm rather than am.

The way the body responds to sleep never ceases to amaze me. The most unexpected things continue to happen even after I’ve been at it for a month.

I’m pretty sure that this curtain will destroy any semblance of a circadian rhythm that I have left… Yes, it is very weird. We get a lot of strange looks when people walk by our room. But screw normality! We’re in college, the only time in our lives when it’s socially feasible to erect a huge ugly sheet of black plastic in the middle of our living area. Life is good.

We spent about half a day buying the supplies and setting it up, but the final result is of pretty impressive quality. We anchored 15 feet of copper pipe across the ceiling attached to an emergency sprinkler fixture on one end and stuck through a cardboard box that rests on top of a wardrobe on the other end. We made a light-proof curtain using cheap roll-up black plastic, shower-curtain rings and some duct-tape. The curtain easily slides open to one side during the day, when we are both awake (sort of.)

One free-sliding 9×12 ft curtain-wall for under $50 ($25 each — totally worth it!) This should be a good investment for the rest of the year.

The only other time I’ve suffered a delusion that powerful was during a fever (which resulted in me sleep-walking and dialing 911 in my sleep — good story) I think the delusion is a direct result of getting really deep, high quality restorative sleep. After I woke up and figured out what was going on, I felt pretty refreshed and relaxed.

I assumed that an occasional 1.5 hour nap would be more refreshing than a 20 minute one, but maybe it’s not a good length. I’m sure that if I repeatedly force myself to get up after 1.5 hours that it will become more natural — after all, repetition is how I learned to take 20 minute naps. I’ll experiment with taking short core sleeps during the day when it’s harder to oversleep, and when I can have my friends check up on me.