I’m pretty sure I’ve touched on this theme before. This last Wednesday saw my latest example of enjoyable anime + disgusting lack of willpower equaling foolish behavior. Wednesday night I wrapped up my playing of WoW around 10:30pm. I needed to wake up around 7:45am – 8:00am the next day in order to leave for work by 8:30am so I could arrive by 9:00am. I didn’t really feel like going straight to bed so I decided to watch some anime. I have a pretty large backlog of series I’ve either been meaning to start or finish, and I decided I should check off one or two episodes from one of those. After a bit of deliberation I opted to watch some Suzuka (the linked review has some very valid points about the anime, although personally I found the characters to a bit more likeable than the reviewer so I’d grade Suzuka somewhere around 75%). I had watched the first episode of Suzuka last April and the second episode sometime last summer so I started off with episode three.
The next thing I know it’s a bit after midnight, and I’m thinking to myself, “Alright I’ve got to go to bed after this episode ends.” Then as I’m starting the next episode I’m rationalizing to myself, “Well once I’ve finished this episode it won’t even be 1am yet so I’ll still get seven hours of sleep.” A few episodes later I’m telling myself, “OK so I’m up too late, but I can watch one more and it will only be 2am, that’s still 6 hours of sleep.” A couple of episodes after that and I’m thinking, “What the hell am I doing up after 3am?” A stronger person than me would have gone to bed at that point; I kept right on watching. Sometime after 4am I went back to rationalization, “I can watch one more and it will be 5am and I’ll take a three hour nap before work, I’ve done that before, so I’ll be fine.” By the time 6am rolled around I was simply chastising myself, “This is stupid, I’m stupid, I’m weak, I should have gone to sleep hours ago, this is not the behavior of a responsible adult.” Naturally I kept right on watching more episodes. As it got closer to 7am I simply did the math, and decided, “Well I can finish the series and still have time to shower before I have to leave for work.” At about 7:50am the credits rolled on the final episode and the only question left to me was do I lie down and close my eyes for 10 minutes or do I shut off my alarm and go take a shower. I opted for the shower.
I doubt I’ll garner much surprise and even less sympathy when I say work on Thursday sucked – a lot. I think 10:30a – 11:00a was the worst; I had a very hard time not falling asleep, and concentrating on anything displayed on my computer’s monitor was somewhat tricky as my vision tended to get blurry. The sugar and caffeine from the ridiculous amounts of Mountain Dew I drank that morning started kicking in after that, and the rest of my shift passed without incident.
Surprisingly I didn’t go straight to sleep when I got home. I found I had a package waiting for me, the new DVD burner I had ordered as a replacement for the malfunctioning one that currently resides in my computer. I made a valiant effort at installing it, but was rudely stopped short when I learned I hadn’t done anywhere near enough research before I ordered this bit of hardware. My new DVD burner uses a Serial ATA connection; the old drive it is replacing uses Parallel ATA. Hopefully when my new video card arrives next week I won’t find I made a similar stupid oversight (I do at least know both my old and new cards use PCI Express).
Once I put my computer back together I decided to watch some more anime. This time I thought I’d play it safe and watch a movie (it was only about 7pm at this time but you can never be too careful). I watched Whisper of the Heart, a very excellent Studio Ghibli film (but aren’t they all). I had forgotten just how much I like that movie, and once I finished it I really couldn’t help but continue right on to its pseudo sequel The Cat Returns. Not too long after that I finally settled into bed for some much needed sleep.
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