Hi cool people-
Hm, it's been a while since I've last written in my blog. I wonder why that would be? Oh, I know:
High Holidays are over now!
OK, now that I can start collecting my thoughts and catching back up on my schoolwork, here's a thought that's been on my mind for a few weeks.
I've been taking a course out of Biology and Society, an upper-level seminar called "Food, Agriculture, and Society." I'm taking the class in the hope that it will deepen my understanding of the subject of my thesis, which involves agriculture in France in the Vichy era. Everyone else in the class, as far as I can tell, is in CALS, either studying international development, or nutrition, or something. I haven't mentioned my status as a History-French double-major from Arts and Sciences (Arts and Crafts?), but I strongly suspect that the others notice that I do, in fact, know nothing. At all. It's really something of a downer to realize, especially seeing as I'm in my senior year of college, studying at an Ivy League university, but it's the truth. If I make comments, they tend to be unhelpful, statements of the obvious, or just plain wrong.
I think that this must be how Engineers feel when they take History classes. In retrospect, I now feel more than a little remorseful the way I've just assumed that everyone else in the classroom eats, sleeps, and breathes what I do, i.e. history. When I talk about the "Third Republic," I'm not used to specifying the country which I'm describing: of course it's France. Likewise, when I refer to the Abbasid Revolution, Maimonides, the Spanish Civil War, Deng Xiaoping, Aristophanes, Sukarno, Khruschev's "Thaw," the Haitian Revolution, Botticelli, Plutarch, Petrarch, Pinochet, or Pisistratus, I don't always remember that not everyone around me knows what I'm talking about. I guess that it's a little bit similar to when, say, Josh Polevoy starts referring to Rabbinic authorities of whom I've never before heard, and I need to ask "where and when is Rabbi X ben Y," but at least then, I still understand the dialectic at play, and, usually, the question at stake. In my BioSoc. class, I sometimes don't even know what's painfully obvious to everyone else in the room: last week it was that, no, pesticides do not seep into drinking water. I didn't know that.
I'd like to think that this is good for my humility. If it isn't I don't know how to solve that particular problem of mine.
Have a sweet New Year, everyone!
~JD
Friday, September 28, 2012
Friday, September 14, 2012
A Brief History of CU Sleep Deprivation
Some of you perhaps have noticed that I haven't written any posts for some time. Between my thesis, job applications, and High Holiday planning and preparation, in addition to just plain academics and studying, I haven't had much blog-time. One post that I've been working on for I-know-not-how-long is currently languishing, inchoate, ready to be finished. Too bad for it.
I unfortunately haven't been sleeping much, recently. That fact alone is not unusual: I rarely have had enough time, during any semester at Cornell, to sleep more than six hours on a weeknight, or eight hours on Friday night. I know that I get a lot more sleep than some people -- JR and RS, I'm thinking of you two in particular -- who are lucky when they can sleep a whole three and a half hours before staggering off to use power tools in workshop at 8:00 am.
However, my quality sleep deprivation has changed somewhat in the past three years. I used to act with much more discipline.
Freshman year, I didn't sleep because I insisted on waking up at 6:10 am every morning for a 10-mile run. I can't do that anymore, unfortunately. I tended to go to bed between around 12:30 am and, on really bad weeks, 2:00 am. I remember that the week following my cousin Rachel's Bat Mitzvah, I slept exactly 4 hours every night that week, and had needed to pull an all-nighter in Uris Library the day before I left. There was probably a connection between my lack of sleep during the fall, and my sickness throughout winter break, lasting for maybe a month into Spring semester. The second semester, I remember a few all-nighters for Professor Hull (totally worth it), including the night before my final paper, which coincided with a movie night.
Sophomore year, I did not learn, although I was no longer waking up early every day in order to run in rain or shine. My first semester was the Semester of Six Classes, when I sometimes had Ancient Greek and French classes on the same day. Confusing. Unfortunately, I have very few records of this time, because I was so busy that I stopped writing in my journal in August: I wrote one entry in November, and didn't write anything else until February, when I began to bewail how miserable I was, because of my complete lack of contact with other people, in complete dedication to my academic work. I remember my friend Shea introducing me to his parents, telling them that I spent all my time at the library, and didn't sleep. Which is the case. Over break, I had similar symptoms of overwork as I had had the winter before, unable to arise befor 10:00 am, even though I was often going to bed around midnight (I was reading a self-imposed minimum of 100 pages every day). By the second semester, I was getting up at 7-ish to get work several hours of work done every day (rather than for running). I can still remember making oatmeal for myself every morning, when the dormitory staff was showing up to work. I took my course on the Enlightenment with Professor Kaplan that semester, which, I remember, resulted in my pulling an all-nighter on the second week of class, in order to finish Persian Letters and Lenin's What Is To Be Done (for Prof. Verhoeven) on the same night.
France: Yes, I slept in France. Not a problem, really, because I didn't have much work.
Junior Year, second semester, the good discipline of my earlier years of college had been officially broken in France (it still is). I stopped being the guy who always arrived at class 10 minutes early, who was completely on top of all of my work at all times, and who had time to draft a paper 2-4 times before it was due. On the other hand, I was very, very, very happy, living on 106 West Ave. I began to feel guilty about not getting up at seven every morning, in order to participate in the daily activity next door, and so I began to do that, fairly regularly, by the end of March. By the last few months of the semester, almost every night, I was toddling over to S and M's apartment, in order to read with S. That was fun (I actually automatically began walking to their Eddy Street apartment last night, when I was supposed to be walking to 706 Seneca). I miss them both. I only had a couple of nights when I didn't sleep, such as when I was finishing my thesis template and my final paper on the Holocaust in France (again, for Prof. Hull) on the same night, turning in 30 pages of writing on the same day. Busy throughout graduation week, I stayed up the whole night before graduation, reading.
Senior Year: Wow, I'm inefficient. I used to stay up late reading hundreds of pages of history books: now I stay up late writing e-mails. If I'm not careful, I fall asleep on the (gorgeous new) couches downstairs, and need to stagger upstairs at some awful hour. Before this week, I was next door absolutely every single day, but I've gotten up after 7:40 three days this week, already.
Well, this is the right time of year to be thinking about Resolutions. I need to be a better student, and get back to reading more.
~JD
I unfortunately haven't been sleeping much, recently. That fact alone is not unusual: I rarely have had enough time, during any semester at Cornell, to sleep more than six hours on a weeknight, or eight hours on Friday night. I know that I get a lot more sleep than some people -- JR and RS, I'm thinking of you two in particular -- who are lucky when they can sleep a whole three and a half hours before staggering off to use power tools in workshop at 8:00 am.
However, my quality sleep deprivation has changed somewhat in the past three years. I used to act with much more discipline.
Freshman year, I didn't sleep because I insisted on waking up at 6:10 am every morning for a 10-mile run. I can't do that anymore, unfortunately. I tended to go to bed between around 12:30 am and, on really bad weeks, 2:00 am. I remember that the week following my cousin Rachel's Bat Mitzvah, I slept exactly 4 hours every night that week, and had needed to pull an all-nighter in Uris Library the day before I left. There was probably a connection between my lack of sleep during the fall, and my sickness throughout winter break, lasting for maybe a month into Spring semester. The second semester, I remember a few all-nighters for Professor Hull (totally worth it), including the night before my final paper, which coincided with a movie night.
Sophomore year, I did not learn, although I was no longer waking up early every day in order to run in rain or shine. My first semester was the Semester of Six Classes, when I sometimes had Ancient Greek and French classes on the same day. Confusing. Unfortunately, I have very few records of this time, because I was so busy that I stopped writing in my journal in August: I wrote one entry in November, and didn't write anything else until February, when I began to bewail how miserable I was, because of my complete lack of contact with other people, in complete dedication to my academic work. I remember my friend Shea introducing me to his parents, telling them that I spent all my time at the library, and didn't sleep. Which is the case. Over break, I had similar symptoms of overwork as I had had the winter before, unable to arise befor 10:00 am, even though I was often going to bed around midnight (I was reading a self-imposed minimum of 100 pages every day). By the second semester, I was getting up at 7-ish to get work several hours of work done every day (rather than for running). I can still remember making oatmeal for myself every morning, when the dormitory staff was showing up to work. I took my course on the Enlightenment with Professor Kaplan that semester, which, I remember, resulted in my pulling an all-nighter on the second week of class, in order to finish Persian Letters and Lenin's What Is To Be Done (for Prof. Verhoeven) on the same night.
France: Yes, I slept in France. Not a problem, really, because I didn't have much work.
Junior Year, second semester, the good discipline of my earlier years of college had been officially broken in France (it still is). I stopped being the guy who always arrived at class 10 minutes early, who was completely on top of all of my work at all times, and who had time to draft a paper 2-4 times before it was due. On the other hand, I was very, very, very happy, living on 106 West Ave. I began to feel guilty about not getting up at seven every morning, in order to participate in the daily activity next door, and so I began to do that, fairly regularly, by the end of March. By the last few months of the semester, almost every night, I was toddling over to S and M's apartment, in order to read with S. That was fun (I actually automatically began walking to their Eddy Street apartment last night, when I was supposed to be walking to 706 Seneca). I miss them both. I only had a couple of nights when I didn't sleep, such as when I was finishing my thesis template and my final paper on the Holocaust in France (again, for Prof. Hull) on the same night, turning in 30 pages of writing on the same day. Busy throughout graduation week, I stayed up the whole night before graduation, reading.
Senior Year: Wow, I'm inefficient. I used to stay up late reading hundreds of pages of history books: now I stay up late writing e-mails. If I'm not careful, I fall asleep on the (gorgeous new) couches downstairs, and need to stagger upstairs at some awful hour. Before this week, I was next door absolutely every single day, but I've gotten up after 7:40 three days this week, already.
Well, this is the right time of year to be thinking about Resolutions. I need to be a better student, and get back to reading more.
~JD
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