3:58 am. Wednesday. –Extremely Frazzled!-
:: It sits on my mind, crouching like a black panther threatening to strike at the slightest sign of hesitation. Looms over me as a mountain would. It sends me to the edge of a cliff, straight down into an abyss::
How many days has it been? What, 29 days, about 696 hours, over 41, 760 minutes and counting? All I know is that its back. The nagging, unremitting, spiteful, foul obnoxious ogre I like to call…dun da dun…insomnia.
Some say it’s the workload...debatable. Maybe it’s too much caffeine? Coffee/caffeine pills/sodas = not in my vocabulary. Homesickness? HULLO! I’m from King of Prussia, a mere twenty minutes away, although I can get there in ten…but that’s another story. Nope. I don’t think there is a simple explanation for my need to be a zombie.
Maybe it was the fact that I drank too much coffee in 8th grade…which could also explain my ridiculous height of barely five feet…give or take a centimeter. I can tell you that I haven’t touched the stuff since then. Maybe it’s because my mother is known to be a light sleeper and walks around at insane hours of the night trying to tire herself out so she can sleep peacefully for at least three hour stretches. Or, maybe it’s because I hate “missing” anything. Ridiculous, right? You’d be surprised.
Yes, I enjoy crashing into walls at three in the morning. I treasure telling “stories” about “purple cows attacking my shirts…yea, I have a paper…would you like cheese on that?” to random people in Guild during finals week. How about deciding to take my bunk-bed apart, moving around dressers, setting up lights, swiffer-ing the floor, and attempting to bellydance to Shakira with my roommate till the wee hours on a weeknight right before our chem exam?
Forget all that. The best were the Dunkin Donut runs.
Possibly the only place in Bryn Mawr that has living breathing beings semi-awake 24 hours, 7 days a week (okay, PSB can give it a run for its money), it became a ritual every weeknight. This was the solution. No more barging into peoples’ rooms at five o’clock in the morning thinking it was the bathroom. No more trying to get people to hide in Guild’s bathroom after 2 am so we could get our papers done. In short, there were no more embarrassing “oh my god! She’s so harebrained/dense/bizarre/on crack” stories to spread around campus. No more because all my nighttime escapades occurred off campus within the equally insomniac Duncan Donuts’ clientele.
With an endless supply of glazed donuts, hot-chocolate, and French crullers (all within a student friendly budget), I got the benefit of maintaining my “must stay awake or I’ll miss something” mentality while gaining the freshmen 20. Double fudge. Not to mention the colorful characters that dominated the scene. Meet the “homeless” gang. Composed of about 8 people, they secure at least 3 tables in the right corner. One can usually find the group involved in a high stakes game of Uno, or arguing over the outcomes of the Civil War if the Union had lost (or some other highly intellectual conversation that no sane person should be involved in at outlandish hours of the night).
Or how about the bicycle men (and woman)? Usually outside on the curb, they create voluminous gray smog with their collective cigarette smoking. Occasionally, they’ll saunter in, glare around for a bit, order a coffee, and resume their guard outside the store.
Then, there’s always the sporadic local high school gaggle of overdressed and pancake make-uped cheerleader/valley girls that walk in with their equally pepperoni-faced boyfriends. After complaining about how fat donuts make them and how slimy the glazing can be, they order donut holes and quickly walk out, shoving at least 3 round dough balls into their mouths.
The college kids: mostly Bryn Mawr girls looking for a quick caffeine fix, groups of pajama/sweatshirt clad girls grab a coffee, a donut or two, and are quickly on their way. Haverford boys/girls race into the parking lot on their bikes (slipping most of the time on the pavement), since the nearest Dunkin Donut’s to their town closes at ten. Villanovans pull up in shiny cars, look disdainfully at the rest, grab their goodies, and rush off, most likely to get to the nearest “lets get so drunk that we can’t walk, so we can pee out windows” party.
Yeah…Dunkin Donuts…I could walk there. I could be engulfed by the steady flow of conversation, be jolted awake by the slapdash bouts of dispute, could be smothered by the nicotine smoke, given dirty looks from the Novans…but their probably out of honey glazed by now. What’s more ::yawn:: It’s getting late. Around six a.m. and I’ve totally neglected my philosophy paper that’s due, oh, noon-ish. Gonna go hit the sack.
Okay, so I’m not a “full fledged” insomniac. I still need my 3 hours of sleep, sorry. The constant walking into walls, blubbering about “purple cows eating my shirt”-isms have got to go and tonight seems like a good time to start.
