The worst kind of long weekend
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
Under normal circumstances, this is the greatest feeling in the world. Like finding a premium perfumed toilet right before you have explosive diarrhea.
No cancel that image, too graphic. But you get the point.
4 days off work. To enjoy, frolic with the family, catch up with friends, play that video game, do that chore, just have fun, you know? Right? That’s what’s gonna happen, right?
Nope.
Basically (“basically” and “literally” are two words I hate using, they add NO value to the sentence most of the time, but I digress).
So basically,
I have this huge test coming up on Sunday, yeah, you guessed it, this is study weekend. I’m going to somehow motivate myself to study two months worth of material within 3 days.
3 all-nighters, or as they call it in the engineering-nerd inner circle —
E A S Y
Turns out, not so easy. Thursday is over, and I firmly believe I’ve been cured of my 10 year long struggle with Insomnia. It’s unfair how spent I am. I am sick of my laptop screen. Sick of mashing buttons on this keyboard. Sick of shifting from work to study and back to work again.
But am I really that tired? Or is it something else? I mean I have a job. So what if I screw this test up? I’ll still be earning and living life.
Is that it? The Jeopardy or actually, the lack of it, that’s causing these eyes to droop?
That was what I asked myself 3 hours ago. It’s now 2:42 AM and I’m as alert as a deer on a tiger reserve. These past 3 hours I’ve studied more than I’ve done this whole past week. The reason — I asked myself why I was giving this test? What did it mean if I did well? I reclined back on my chair and imagined a life after having aced the test, and then doing well again on the next hurdle, and well again on the next, and the next…
In no time I was in a mansion. I was completely ripped, and luckily it was my cheat day in the future, so I was eating the finest gourmet fried chicken (whatever that is). The next moment, I was delivering a speech in front of a huge crowd, and everyone laughed at one of my witty observations. Next moment, I was with a beautiful woman, wandering the streets of Vienna or some other picturesque European getaway. It was glorious.
And just like that the sleep was gone. It went from, “let’s see what happens”, to “I WANT to do well in the test”. I began working. I didn’t feel like I had something to lose, but something better, like I had everything to gain.
What’s gonna stop me? Sleep? Time? Pfffft, watch me.
And hey, at the end of the day, I might eventually go on and screw it up, after all the deer still gets hunted by the tiger, but I’ll be content that, albeit with a late start, I tried to outrun that tiger.
This is not to say, that I can’t realize my dreams without this score next to my name. Conversely, I might ace this test and still fail to achieve that dream. But IT IS an opportunity, and something I’ll readily gamble upon.
Sometimes, when the fear of failure is not motivating enough, you need to call on the excitement of probable success to push you over that line. And even if that probable success is bordering on delusion..
So be it.
Edit: I got eaten. On to the next :)
