The holidays are upon us, and they’re like to bring lots of rest and relaxation. It can be too much of a good thing, though, Jesper Lodin groans in the last Culture Column of the year.
Cheers! Guess I get to close up shop for the year here at the Culture Column manufacturing plant, just as most students prepare to return home to their families for a generous helping of glacial boredom and meals consisting of more than two different ingredients. I’ll say this – if you’re a foreign exchange student spending the holidays here, don’t miss the Donald Duck Christmas Special, which is the beating heart of Christmas in Sweden. For a single, gloriously hand-drawn (if somewhat overfamiliar) hour, you’ll join as one with the entire Swedish populace.
But instead of going through the motions with these obvious Christmas-y subjects, I’d like to adress something else entirely, namely the trials and tribulations of having a troublesome circadian rhythm. The seasonal pit-stop at your parent’s house is surely welcome in many ways, but for people with as messed up bedtimes as me, it’s historically been a friggin’ death knell for the last vestiges of your sleep-cycle sanity. Of course, university life in itself is not exactly hospitable to the sort of gravely dysfunctional biorhythms that some of us came pre-installed with, since many courses follow a roller-coaster schedule of, like, three days of lectures so early they brick your phone when you load them into the calendar app, and two days of comparatively lax lunchtime sessions. But when you go home for the holidays, there’s absolutely nothing to keep you from snoozing until the heat death of the universe.
Not that I haven’t tried to quell that tendency, mind. Over the years I’ve splurged for not one, not two, but three of those electronic-snake-oil “smart” (i.e. still dumber than a frozen block of codfish) alarm clocks. Not a one of them did anything to help me besides waking me once or twice and politely suggest I refrain from sleeping like Nosferatu. Curiously, something that did work was programming an iPod speaker by my window to shuffle through a playlist of embarrassing music in the morning, as I would instinctively catapult out of bed and sprint to turn it off out of fear that my neighbors would peg me as a man who listens to godawful Kiss songs at 8 AM, but something tells me that starting every day with the Destroyer album would cause my hair to fall off and my life expectancy to shorten.
I also tried chemical warfare – back before I started drinking coffee in earnest, I somehow got it into my head that caffeine pills were more convenient than just having a cup of coffee like a normal person every morning. Well, to a caffeine neophyte like I was back then, those pills were practically prescription-free methamphetamine, and one especially drowsy morning I ingested an accidental overdose of like three times the recommended dosage. Let me tell you, I was tripping balls on that particular Crime fiction seminar – the shaking was so bad I thought I was gonna glitch through the floor and find the Warp Whistle in a treasure chest and then I’d get to toot on it and be whisked away to a master’s degree course of my choosing, man. And what do you know, I still napped furiously the minute I sat down when I got home that day.
Seriously, I am washing my hands of this nonsense and directing 100% of the blame towards my body. Consider the following scenario: You’ve let your sleep cycle get a bit out of hand, to the point where you find yourself unable to fall asleep until about 3-4 hours later than you should every night. To correct this, you rise early one morning to ensure that you are tired enough to fall asleep at a reasonable hour the following night. You slap yourself around, put out cigarettes on beloved body parts, anything to keep you awake and fight the urge to have a three-hour nap in broad daylight, until finally you allow yourself to fall into the arms of sleep around 11 PM, a nearly perversely wholesome bedtime…
…Only to jolt awake, fully refreshed and poised to seize the day, two hours later. Because your internal clock’s so far outta whack that your body thought you were having an afternoon nap. At midnight. Jeez… As the Swedish expression goes, I’m starting to wonder if my body’s just plain ’dum i huvudet’.
Welp. Merry Christmas though!
