sleeping pills are for whimps...

Once last semester I was interviewing for a newspaper job and the editor I was talking to looked at my resume and said "when do you ever find time to sleep?" I laughed her off and made a comment about dedication to my work giving me energy enough to go on lack of sleep.

The truth is sleep is very, very important to me. What I didn't tell that editor was that I'm not one of those people who runs on four hours of sleep and still manages to look good and rock a pair of heels. I most certainly require a large amount of sleep and still, very rarely, rock a pair of heels. Although my need for sleep is quite high on the priority list, my ambition still nudges past the snooze button most days of the week. My true answer for that editor would have been that to grab as many hours of sleep as possible I very rarely ate meals without walking, during particularly bad periods I helped up the stock in the Coca-Cola Company and I was more often than not found going to class with hair pulled back and no make-up (this would be a prime example of why my mother thinks I will never produce grandchildren).

Although I thought I had pretty much hit my limit when it came to ways to push myself with my final year of college, but all of that was just a preparation for the life sucking force known as teaching in the inner-city. I honestly did not think I would be one to devote 60 - 70 hours a week at work without getting some type of professional journalism gains. Who would have thought I would give up the journalism food chain for a bunch of middle schoolers who pretty much hate every good thing I do for them (hw, discipline, calls home) and aren't afraid to share with me how lame I am?

So how does one keep going when they have even less time to sleep than they ever have before? Apparently if you're my body you keep count of all the missed hours of sleep and you make it all up over Christmas break. It is actually kind of startling how much I've been able to sleep this break. If my sister isn't waking me up or I don't set an alarm, I've easily been sleeping 11 or 12 hours a night. What kind of person sleeps this much? I go to bed at a reasonable hour at night and once asleep I seem to fall into this "make up sleep" coma and wake up 12 hours later. No one needs this much sleep. Not even me.

I really don't think I can come up with some convincing way to play off my sleep deprivation in a future job interview. Perhaps I can just add "hibernation skills" to my resume and leave it at that.