Ah, the pinnacle of Humanity's evolution, right here, in this picture.
I'm exhausted. Thanks, Internet.
Thank you for the sheer
amount of interesting crap you hold within your digital spaces. Thank you for the,
uh, intriguing people you've allowed me to communicate with so far in a
meaningful, fulfilling manner. And, THANK YOU for causing me to stay up till FIVE IN THE
FREAKING MORNING.
My Circadian rhythms are SHOT. It's a MIRACLE I'm
actually typing right now. I'm so tired I'm having minor hallucinations, like Betty
White crawling on the ceiling over me with a knife in her mouth. Okay, maybe that’s more
of a major hallucination.
I shudder to think how long it's going to take me to get back to a regular SANE sleep
schedule.
Please sympathize with me, dear brother/sister Internet Slackers! I'm
sure you've stayed up all night on the Internet yourself more than a few times. Am
I right?
The evening begins innocently enough at around seven or eight as you sit down to
"quickly" check your email as you sip a nice small cup of coffee. That takes a couple
of hours, and then you get distracted by a funny link a friend sends you. You go to that
website, and you see more interesting links and another few hours go by. Might as
well get more coffee. Then you get a chat request from a friend of yours on Facebook. Before you
know it, it's midnight.
But do we go to bed, dear Internet Slacker?
Oh, no. It's not that easy….
After chatting with your Facebook buddy for God knows how long, you decide to wrap up the evening with a fun online game. Maybe a couple of your other online friends are playing that new multiplayer card battler on Steam you've been thinking of purchasing...
After playing a few rounds (actually, seventy-three) of virtual card games, you are still feeling productive. Or maybe it’s that ninth cup of coffee you’re working on that’s giving you some pep. Whatever…
Recognize anybody familiar? Hmm? HMM???
So you update your Twitter or Instagram you've been putting off for awhile, or you reply to
a couple of messages on some public forums, and what you thought was just ten minutes passing
turns out to be yet ANOTHER couple of hours...
You try to sensibly prepare to
call it an evening. You start closing all those now somewhat-blurry browser windows jumping
around on your monitor. You’re about to stand up from the desk when the thought hits
you: maybe you should download a couple of things while you sleep.
So you fire up the latest and hottest peer-to-peer torrent software and
search for interesting things to download (let's just leave it at that) but doing so takes
quite awhile because the damn search engine isn't quite finding the exact
media you're looking for. Or, the files you're trying to download keep screwing up, or
are coming in too slow, or you've accidentally set permissions to 'OPEN' on your
personal desktop folder and some guy from Wisconsin is downloading your entire collection of
animated Furry porn.
You finally get the torrent software working properly
(meaning you have 3,172 files queued to download and you've set the ‘Upload
Ratio’ to ‘0 bytes’) and stand up. Ah, done for night…
Oh, wait... you should really empty your desktop Recycle Bin. And maybe quickly
download the latest virus updates so you can also leave your virus checker running while you
presumably sleep. Ah, why not schedule the disk defragmenting tool, too? And maybe make a couple
new folders to organize those new files coming in over your P2P torrent client.
Heck, might as well check out 'em out to see what you've downloaded...
Good stuff. Those Furries can really get into it. Time to go to… hey,
new e-mail from e-Bay saying you've got a couple of bids on some crap you're
trying to unload!
So you surf over there and WOW there's a lot of interesting new stuff to buy! You have some
network lag problems purchasing that ceramic owl with big eyes that seems to be commanding you
to buy it, but you know it'll make a great birthday gift for Mom even though she's
morbidly phobic of owls.
"HOOO loves ya, Mom?"
When you wearily raise your head,
it's three thirty-eight in the goddamn morning. By this time most people are
sensibly asleep. But not you. By now your brain has short-circuited from constant
monitor exposure and you get the dreaded ‘Lack Of Sleep Delusional Thoughts’.
Yes,
we've all experienced THAT fun state, when the brain is SO DAMN TIRED that it begins
randomly firing strange and deeply unsettling thoughts because it desperately wants to enter the
dream state for some of those sweet ‘n nourishing rapid eye movements.
For example: a few evenings ago when I had the ‘Lack Of Sleep Delusional Thoughts’ I was convinced special crosswalks for only club sandwiches to use should be constructed on city roads. To end the horrible tragedy of club sandwiches constantly being run over as they innocently tried to cross the street, of course.
The crosswalk’s sign (as I saw it all-too clearly in my leaden medulla oblongata) was the standard triangle shaped black-and-yellow safety crossing sign, but instead of a couple of schoolchildren's figures there was a big silhouette of a bacon-lettuce-tomato club sandwich crossing the street.
This is not a sane thought.
I repeat, this is not a sane thought
The main symptom of this new type of cyber-exhaustion is the total loss of common sense when it comes to GETTING OFF THE DAMN COMPUTER. You decide, hell, it's four fifty-two in the morning now why not stay up longer because it’s almost the damn morning anyways?
The entertainment website you've surfed to has an INCREDIBLY FUNNY ARTICLE covering
'RuPaul’s Celebrity Drag Race' fan-written erotic fiction and the
literary masterpiece of five angry men wearing women’s clothing doing something obscene to
Jimmy Kimmel with a bottle of Heinz Ketchup(tm) has made you fall off your seat, staining your
computer den's rug with tears of laughter and other inadvertent bodily fluids. Hey,
you’d have every right to do so.
Yay! It's 6:17 A.M! You
glance outside the window and notice it's not so dark anymore: a bad sign to Internet
addicts, everywhere. But by now it's too late: you're slumped over in your
chair, unblinking eyes glued to the monitor not understanding anything but somehow horribly
TAKING ALL THE DATA IN straight to your quivering protesting hind-brain.
You click and you cLiCk and you CLICK that mouse, surfing yet another page, looking, searching,
QUESTING FOR THAT MYTHICAL LAST PAGE OF THE INTERNET THAT WILL FINALLY ALLOW YOU TO BE FREE AND
GO TO BED PLEASE GOD MAKE THE CLUB SANDWICHES AND THE OWLS STOP
Everything goes dark.
A couple of hours later, you regain consciousness. You’re laying
on the floor, groggy as hell, and it’s eight fifty-five in the cruel bright sun-shiny
morning.
You don't remember what time you passed out and slumped to the floor from your ergonomic
gamer’s chair, the only thing stopping you from major head trauma being the cushiony left
arm rest pressed against your skull, slowing you as you fell.
You slouch
like some rough beast towards coffee in the kitchen. Your body feels like it's made out of
nine-day old Play-Doh(tm) that's been left out in the sun. The actual sum electrical energy
in your brain at that moment wouldn't be able to gently high-five an individual electron.
Sitting down with an incredibly heavy sigh to sip from the shaking coffee mug in your trembling hand, you SWEAR to yourself YOU WILL NEVER stay up all night on the Internet EVER AGAIN. It's just NOT HEALTHY.
“Good Lord... I need to go outside in the sun and touch the grass!”, you
protest to yourself.
YES, you are determined!
Enough of the 'Net, for now. Fresh air and exercise, a regular SANE sleeping
schedule, and working on a social life with real physical people will set you right as rain!
Damn straight. Good.
You'll start right now. Hit the sack and get some real sleep! Yes!
And
then you hear it. From your living room.
It’s a ZOOM call.
From your work.
Oh crap, that’s right… it’s Monday.
And you’re severely delusional from lack of sleep and wearing a bathrobe and there's no time to change into work-appropriate clothing. Debbie from H.R. is gonna be right pissed this morning.
Congratulations and Be Proud. You’re a real Internet Slacker. And I love you for it.
I don't care what Debbie from H.R. says, you're awesome.