In my months of greatest productivity—the last year or so of my PhD (for which we must return to the turning of the new century)—I found what I recall as a perfect pattern of waking and sleeping. Rising around eleven, I would shower, eat, caffeinate, work lightly from one to around four, then heavily from six or seven till around midnight. That left time for an hour or two of late-night recreation (not at all salacious: usually browsing webpages and watching infomercials on television) before the cycle repeated.
It was not, of course, this smooth: I worried a great deal about my prospects once the thing was finished, abused food and drink, fell out in various small and medium-sized ways with my flatmate (who was by necessity an early riser, with a young son), and was generally anti-social with everyone except my orchestra and thesis-writing friends. Nonetheless, I was living the owl’s life, and felt something like harmonious for it.
This option is no longer really available, except for short periods of non-teaching time and, if I dare, weekends. Work demands not only daylight hours but a bright, professional persona, with the result that caffeine is no longer a luxury but something like a component part of my day’s engine. Binges of exercise, or wine in a glass, or the kind of sense-numbing exhaustion that comes from administrative meta-worries are enough to put me to sleep earlier than I would otherwise go, as is the knowledge of the need to rise at an hour other those nominated by my body.
So it is that term-time weekends are an extended exercise in feeling out-of-sync with myself. To rise early and continue the body’s charade, or to sleep properly into the morning and knock my week out of its compulsory alignment once more? Whatever I decide, it’s wrong, and so I have a few hours each Saturday and Sunday of truculent self-and-other loathing.
I have Irritable Owl Syndrome.
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
That thesis-finishing-frenzy is a curious phenomenon. My SO went into it with a vengeance when our eldest daughter was about 3 months old, and come out, semi-sane, a few months later. He worked late at night, got a few hours sleep, did some more writing, had breakfast, went to work again. It was an astonishing, and very productive, period.
I was a bit more disciplined right at the end. I had to be, because my productivity resulted in one submitted thesis, and about eight weeks later, two baby girls. So no late night working – I needed to sleep – and no caffeine, but very serious nose down tail up work.
I wonder if the night owl preference was overlaid with thesis-finishing-frenzy?
I did my Masters thesis like that. In fact I used to get a good second wind around 2 a.m. That was in my 20s. I couldn’t do it now. Not only because I have to get up in the mornings with my sprog but physically I can’t handle it. Finishing my PhD (in my 30s) I only recall one night of working at 2 a.m- I do still find though I think best in the evenings.
What strikes me as I reflect on the thesis-finishing-frenzy is that I know my view of it is nostalgic; it certainly didn’t seem blissful at the time. I think the most exciting moment was about four months from the end when I was sitting at the dining room table in my parents’ house, pecking away on my laptop, while harvestbro and his best mate Jezz were editing a tune on the computer proper. The sun was moving into the west and I realised I had a final draft on my hands. The lads shared my excitement.
Perhaps what I’m wanting at the moment is that feeling of something like creative and academic expression intertwined, of being fully extended brainwise. Or maybe it’s being answerable only to my thesis and the misty university regulations behind it. Life now is happier and more stable, but it’s no wild frontier of the mind. I’m getting done all the things I didn’t much bother with when I was completing (housework, paying bills, watering the garden) but not the white-hot writing any more.
The terrifying thing about all this is that I was like that during the last months of my honours year. For the last few weeks my particular pattern was rising around 10, watching a MASH rerun (one needs some time to just be) then drag myself to uni, where I’d work till tea time, wander home to eat something that takes less than 20min to cook, then get back to work till 4 or so. The terrible effect of this was come hand-in day planA, rowdiness at the Capt. Cook Tavern, had to be replaced with plan B, being asleep by 6
But now I have real thesis to deal with. I fear to think about what I will become in the home stretch of this one.
I don’t want to think about this. Writing my MA dissertation required 36 hours without sleep to meet the deadline. The hallucinations were interesting, to say the least.
David: I pottered about and procrastinated to my detriment in my honours year, completing my extended essay (one paper of four) in the six weeks after I finished lectures for my other paper and before the submission deadline. It would have been hell, had I not been writing on Wallace Stevens. The story occasionally gets included in anecdotes-for-students on what you must never do, though I doubt it does much good.
My equivalent of MASH reruns at the end of my thesis was reality television in its infancy, specifically the locally-made show Weddings, thanks to which I now have an addiction to shows featuring tacky brides. It’s like a war wound.
Paul: I think any work that finishes with hallucinations is worth doing. I also suspect that without deadlines (birth in Deborah’s case, running out of funding and starting a new job in mine), no thesis would ever be finished. It may be academic myth, but don’t BAs in Germany usually take six or seven years, because you sit your orals when you’re ready?
I remember handing in a project for A-level (university entrance) and as I went outside for a self-congratulatory smoke my teacher came with me, lit up and said “Been up all night?” and I said “yeah”
Years later when I was not only doing my finals but was also in charge of and living in halls of residence, it was a fact of life that while kitchens in daytime were uniformly empty, no matter what the time of night, there would always be two or three people gathered in any given kitchen, at various stages of thesis/dissertation/essay finishing.
It’s the only way to do it.
I had forgotten the camaraderie of the kitchen in all this. Ten years ago I lived in a big villa in Bryndwr, where five of us shared a big kitchen. Many ruminative discussions were had at night while we were pyjamed or wrapped in a duvet and out of our minds on literary theory and textual analysis.