Sleepless Nights

It's been a long time since my first post. I think that first post (which I recommend you read if you haven't yet) was necessary for a little personal catharsis, as the thing in question was eating me from the inside. As it turns out, I should probably have saved that for a later post, because quite a lot of my motivation to write had simply vanished. But now, at 4.22am - and having survived the apocalypse predicted by the Maya* - I am still awake and in need of something to do.

Something that happens to me just about every time that I go on holiday from school (or as is the case now, University) is that my sleeping pattern very quickly degrades into what is more or less nocturnalism.** This can normally be put down to me having nothing to be up for in the morning and thinking "well there's no need to go to bed yet, I'll just finish [insert random activity, usually involving computers or consoles]".
For example, tonight I spent a great deal of time messing around with my laptop and installing cool little programs that won't actually benefit me in the slightest. Then the little app-indicator thing for one of my new bits of software didn't look quite right, so I spent half an hour tweaking that so it fit in with the rest of my theme. After having done that I messed around with google chrome, installing a few new extensions (again, with no real need for them); read a few emails; updated my google+ account (incidentally, everybody should use G+: it's vastly better than Facebook); and played a computer game for the best part of ninety minutes.
And now, it's not even that I don't have anything to get up for. It's simply that I've been going to sleep later and later and earlier and earlier (see what I did there?) that come 4 in the morning I'm just not tired. Then again, a couple of years ago when I was working every day in the winter holidays from 7 until 4 - completely missing out on any sunlight in the process - I still did this. Though at that time I just felt I was getting precisely zero time to myself to just chill out, so I'd end up working quite intensively on sometimes less than 3 hours' sleep. So maybe it's not that there's no reason to be up before noon on the morrow.
I think what I'm trying to say in all of this is that I feel that the older I get (because 20 years old is just ancient) the more and more I feel that there aren't enough hours in the day. But perhaps that's because I waste so much of my day doing nothing at all, that had I really done something useful with the hours of freedom, when it gets to the time I'd start to do something to relax, I've been doing it for hours already and just decide to continue.


Of course, I'll have to fix this minor mental malfunction (have some alliteration!) come January, and my exams. But in the long-term, I could do with getting it fixed permanently. Eventually I'll have a job, and it's likely that this job will require me to be up early and work from 9 until 5; ultimately leaving me with much less free-time than I would like. Plus there'll be meals to make and a house to clean and all manner of other things to do that are necessary.

...

I seem to think that when I started writing this that I had some kind of clear goal in mind as to the stopping point. I am beginning to suspect that I've lost my way a little, but can't quite decide if I have or not.
The moral of this story, then, is that I must start to do some more useful things with my days, and stop just wasting time. Carpe diem and all of that.


*If anybody is having difficulty pronouncing this word, consider that its pronunciation is not the same as Maia.

**I assume that nocturnalism is actually a word, but my browser's in-built spell-checker is objecting to it. I think I may have mentioned this in a post over on Diary of a Gaijin... But I'm not massively sure, and have no inclination to go and check, either. But if it isn't a word, then I shall begin a campaign to have it wordified, because it's clearly necessary.