The following contains excerpts of my journal over the last 24 hours and has some fairly chaotic, messy ramblings – please enjoy.

Wed, 15^th July 6:53pm

Okay, I screwed up. Felt pretty tired after my lunch at 2pm so decided to take a 15 minute nap. Thought the alarm was set for 2:23pm but turns out I set it at 2:23AM. Ended up waking just now.

You’d think the occasional long nap would be awesome: you’re fully recovered from the morning’s activities and can now turn your attention to the evening’s agenda. Right? WRONG. When you wake up from an unnaturally extended slumber, the first instinct that hits you is panic. You’ve done this before and you know what it’s like. Indeed, you may feel refreshed for a split second but as soon as you think of the night to come, you are filled with dread. When you lay down to sleep at your normal bedtime, sleep will evade you. You beg for it to come but it ignores your pleas. Out of desperation, you go knocking on sleep’s door but sleep isn’t in. There’s only a sign on the door that says, “Oops, looks like sleep’s taking some time off – he’ll visit you in a few hours!”

Those hours can be unpredictable – frustrating at best, dark and demoralising at worst. I think I’m a pretty good mental state right now so I doubt an existential crisis will be waiting for me, but the problem goes beyond those hours spent wide awake. Your next day is ruined as well. You show up for certain activities – classes, meetings and what not – but you’re not really there. You’re more like a shell, like a part of your consciousness has been severed from you. Anyway, I should start catching up on my afternoon’s schedule. Will probably check-in again at a disgusting hour.

Thurs, 16^th July 3:23am

It begins. I’m actually so alert right now it’s not even funny. I tried reading a book but my head is like a jar of countless fireflies colliding with each other and it’s hard to focus on anything at one time. So I thought it might be good to record down some of these thoughts swimming around in my head. Here goes…

Who the heck named the zebra? What a bizarre name…

The Christian gospel is actually the most extraordinary story of love ever. If someone made a movie remake of the gospel in a modern setting (old, wholesome grandpa dying for a bratty child etc.), I reckon it’d be a hit. Not sure how politically correct that would be though.

Not sure how I feel about passive nihilism. On one hand, the philosophy seems liberating in that if you seriously believe nothing matters, you aren’t held back as much by fear of failure or disappointing people. On the other hand, it can lead to some pretty dark existential crises. Trying to create meaning in a world you don’t believe has one sounds terribly exhausting.

I should really clean my room.

Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever baked a cake myself before. I see people doing it on Instagram a lot and it seems pretty fun and not too expensive. Could be worth a try one of these days.

Adobe Premiere Pro keeps crashing on me, should I switch video editing apps? Getting pretty tired of trying fixes that don’t work.

Maybe if I shower I’ll get tired. I don’t want to wake my housemate though. But surely he’s sleeping, right? Wait, I just realised I didn’t shower tonight. No wonder my armpits stink. Okay, I’ll go for a shower.

4:20am

Well, I’m clean and feeling sleepier now. Hair’s still a bit wet but we’ll cop it. Made sure I set the alarm for 8:30am, NOT pm. Might try and see if sleep will pay me a visit now.

8:43am

Holy cow, yesterday’s nap was so dumb. Got 3 hours of zoom calls ahead of me and I feel like I’ve been hit by a train. Can I go to hospital for this? Probably not… Anyway, if there’s one takeaway from this experience it’s that I should really pay attention when setting my alarm. Those 5 seconds can really make or break the next few days. Long naps really suck. Think I had a dream about two cats falling in love by the beach though, that was pretty cool.