Pulling All-Nighters

Hey everyone. Since a number of my gaming friends pulled an all-nighter as part of a 24-hour game-a-thon yesterday/today, I wanted to briefly talk on the subject.

In my mind, or at least from my experiences, there are two types of all-nighters: the kind where you need to do something important and the kind where you do something fun. To throw some easy examples out there, the "cram for tomorrow's test" and "watch the whole Star Wars saga now that the test is over". Whether the all-nighter is for work or play does seem to dramatically alter the mood of the experience.

Fortunately, I value sleep a lot so I haven't pulled that many all-nighters. In fact, I can only think of three times I pulled all-nighters in college, and they were all the fun kind. One was actually the example above (a group of us watched all 6 Star Wars movies after finals were done), and the other two were different times my roommate was home for the weekend and another friend would bring his Nintendo 64 over to my room. It's amazing how much you can get sucked into little mini-games and only realize that it's morning by the sunrise.

Then again, I can't say I did all of my school work while the sun was out. There were plenty of nights where I would be working (or putting off homework) until pretty early into the morning... but like I said earlier, I value sleep a lot, so I would make the decision that sleeping for at least a couple hours was better than the minimal work I could produce during that time.

After graduation, I've pulled a few near-all-nighters of both kinds, so I can't say all that much has changed. The toughest ones were when I was writing up & sending out progress reports for students in Missouri. There were times the morning after when I was amazed that my brain could still function enough to (1) recall specific experiences for each student (2) express my thoughts clearly and correctly (3) not just start writing gibberish while falling asleep. Of course the adrenaline of doing the job did help with keeping me on point.

It also doesn't help that my body wants to shift back to working 4pm-midnight like I did in Missouri, so I don't have the best sleep pattern for a 9-5 job. Of course, working in Student Affairs means I laugh in the face of any set work hours, but I still feel like I stay up too late.

Well, with that said, I do need sleep because it's late & I'm getting tired again. Tomorrow will be National Chocolate Cupcake Day, World Toy Camera Day, and National Sunday School Teacher Appreciation Day.

DFTBA