Friday, March 28, 2008

All Night, All Right

Betty and Bimbo pulled an all-nighter tonight!

Bimbo wrote the definitive memo about green job creation in NYC while Betty read a 1980s article by John McPhee about the history of Louisiana floods and man's battles with the mighty Mississippi. Cocoa kept falling asleep, but she never went to college, so she doesn't know too much about all-nighters.

Betty remembers eating huge submarine sandwiches at four in the morning, feeling much much stupider the next day, and digging deep into Aristotle as if that were the only topic in the world. She remembers seeing greasy-haired kids asleep in the library, or stumbling into the computer lab at 2 a.m. to START the same paper of which she had blessedly just reached page four.

Please share your all-nighter stories!

2 comments:

Nodine said...

Betty, I have read that article! It's so riveting. My geology teacher sent it to us last year. I got really obsessed with the History of the Mississippi River after Katrina. It's all pretty scary, the humanity down there at its mouth, completely at the mercy of nature it seems. Maybe I shouldn't think that way....I am a civil engineer! But there are some processes we just can't try to master.

To answer your question, I have never pulled an all-nighter for school, but I've come close. Maybe it's because the engineering curriculum focuses more on tests than on papers, and I learned pretty fast that if I was tired from studying I'd do worse than if I had studied less. Somehow I managed to write a masters thesis without all-nighters, but by the time I was getting my masters I was no longer young and spry and I was committed to getting my rest. Which would lead me to convince myself that I could finish some chapters or a draft in the morning and I would wind up really stressed out the next day. But somehow I made it. I am impressed with your and Bimbo's diligence at your ripe old ages!

Montserrat Nicolás said...

never an all-nighter. sleep is under-rated. better a bad grade than bags under my precious eyes...

hence, my score.

love,