November 4, 2003 - 4:43 a.m.
All right, after 21 years, I'm finally ready to concede defeat to my parents. It's taken me a long time to say this, but here it comes ... I hope you're ready for it:
You were right when you told me I should go to bed early more often.
... thinks about it...
Wait. What have I done? Did I admit that out loud?!
Down the drain, now, are years of kicking and screaming and stalling and whining and staying up when I knew I shouldn't. My lifelong efforts at earning the rank of "night owl" are now in vain. All those times when I was 7 and 8, trying to convince my parents that I needed to see the end of "Rescue 911," only to discover later that my footy pajamas didn't provide enough traction on the hardwood floors to get away from mom when she chased me up the stairs -- pointless.
I've thrown away all the stalling techniques I used when I was even younger, to keep myself awake -- asking for explanations of bedtime stories ("Why didn't Jack just call the police when the giant came down the beanstalk?") or seeking answers to life's big questions ("Is there a God?"). My childhood's work has been for naut.
Now that I finally have the right to stay up as late as I want, I DON'T WANT IT! This means one thing: I, Ed Ronco, am a grown-up. I know this for several reasons -- I don't like candy anymore, I enjoy talk radio, and until a friend filled me in, I thought 98 degrees was the normal human body temperature, not the name of a boy band.
But the real indicator of my passage into adulthood is my level of fatigue. Let's face it: I need sleep; about eight hours a night, to be exact. I'm not getting that tonight, nor have I in recent weeks. In fact, this is probably my fourth all-nighter this semester.
I long for the days when I can get up at 5 a.m., brew a cup of coffee and read the paper feeling refreshed as the sun comes up.
I yearn for my alarm clock to signal the start of a promising day, not the end of some shortlived sleep.
I ache for a taste of well-restedness, which I don't even think is a word, but I'm so tired I just don't care.
And honestly, I could blame this all on my job. I could say that my shift (which ends around 11:30 p.m. every night) is largely responsible for my late nights. While that's true to an extent (I can't get to bed until I get home from work, obviously), The State News is only partly at fault.
The real culprit here is my complete lack of time management skills for things I don't care about. Give me a newspaper to edit and I'll give you a well-paced workday. Give me an English term paper to write, and I'll give you a couple episodes of "The Cosby Show," a few hours on instant messenger, a cup of coffee, a check of the day's news at all major news Web sites, another cup of coffee, an episode of "Roseanne," and then, maybe, if I'm feeling lucky and the sun is starting to come up, then a term paper.
I just can't bring myself to do it, so while half of me doesn't care about the assignment, the other half knows I have to get it done and get it done well, or else. So I stay up late, much like I'm doing now. And I stall. Much like I'm doing now.
My resolution is this: after I return from my trip to Dallas this week, I'll be a new man. Stop laughing. I'm going to have an EXCELLENT handle on my schedule (my WHOLE schedule). I'm going to be in every class, have every assignment done WELL in advance, not just right on deadline, and get to bed as soon as possible every night I can.
Unless, of course, there's an episode of "Rescue 911" on.
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