Skiing and Bouncy Balls

Ok, so this is when I started to hit a downhill slide. It's 8 o'clock Friday evening and I've slept one hour since Thursday morning at about 6 am. My body was just about to give out unless I had some exciting event to go to. Well, turns out that the MIT Ski team info session I went to with Sara didn't quite do it in the "Keep Snively Awake" department.



I had to employ several interesting techniques to stay awake.

My first reaction was to down a Bawls Soda. That helped, well, a little/not very much. I was still fading in and out of consciousness, ESPECIALLY when they turned the lights down and started to play a ski movie. My second trick was to physically hold my eyelids open. All this did was dry out my contacts and make me want to close my eyes more. My last ditch effort was to film the movie with my camera, hoping that if I had to keep the movie in the frame, it would take enough willpower to keep me awake. That didn't work for very long, but I will share the lovely video I made.



In the end, there was no use fighting it, and I drifted off several times over the course of the hour. Not sleeping though! It was actually kind of cool. I'd close my eyes, have a quick 2 second dream/hallucination about the last thing I saw before I closed my eyes, and then wake up right away because of the music on the video. It was basically just hallucinating, not really sleeping.

Eventually the movie ended and Sara and I headed to our next adventure: The Senior House Bouncy Ball Drop. Basically, a dorm (Senior House) spent hundreds of dollars on thousands of bouncy balls and dropped them off their balcony. Now, Senior House has a reputation for being a bit sneaky, so during the time leading up to the drop a lot of us were concerned that they may throw water balloons at us or start shooting us with paintball guns, but in the end it turned out to actually be bouncy balls, so it was cool.






The logical thing to do after being pummeled with, what turned out to be 6000, bouncy balls was to a) throw them back and b) grab as many as you could and shove them into your backpack. Hank alone managed to gather over a hundred and totally filled his bag. After ransacking and grabbing as many bouncy balls as we could, we headed off to our next adventure: Meet the Bloggers!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you wondered, you were experiencing "microsleep". =)

Anonymous said...

i love dream/hallucinating! especially during AP US

Michael Nolhan said...

This is interesting, btw did any of the bouncy balls break? Or for that matter, have you caused any to run out of energy in the rubber?