During your college years, there is no such thing as a surprise all-nighter ~ you always know it’s coming and you always prepare in the same, well-thought-out way.

You wake up that morning and think, “There’s no way I’m going to bed tonight, I’ve got way too much to do. I’d better eat a good breakfast.” So you pour yourself some cereal, turn on the TV, and plop on the couch. Sure, you have a class at 10:00am but there’s no way anyone can expect you to attend ~ I mean, you’re going to be up all night. Instead you watch the entire hour of Sportscenter, bringing you to 11:00. Then at eleven, well, you watch it again. A little after noontime, feeling sports-satiated, you finally get up off the couch and shower…and then realize it’s time for lunch. Having three balanced meals before an all-night is essential, after all.

You stroll over to the cafeteria, spot some friends, and sit down. It takes you about five minutes to eat but you stay an extra couple of hours to talk about how test tube babies have really soft heads. HELLO, it might be useful information for your politics paper, so technically you might actually be getting a head start on something academic, right? Then on your way from the caf to the library you start to calculate in a delusional stream-of-consciousness, “3 papers, 16 pages total. No sweat. That’s like…I dunno…less than a page an hour? I’ll plump the margins, increase the font size, use exceptionally long titles . . . it’s like 10 pages really, maybe 9. I can probably write about 2 pages an hour . . . so carry the zero, divide by something, and even in the worst case scenario anything I write before 8:00 tonight is gravy.” (Here, it might be worth noting, is where an objective onlooker could argue that maybe test tube babies aren’t the ONLY ones with soft heads!)

Secure in your time management calculations, you take your time getting the books you need. You even read some of a…well, of a totally unrelated but festively illustrated book you find on the shelves. But, committed to the task at hand, you check out your books at 5:00 . . . dinnertime! Never before in your life have you eaten dinner at 5:00pm…but you tell yourself that you want to eat early so you can get started on your papers. Then just as you finish your early-bird special a couple of guys from your house sit down next to you. Neither of them had seen Sportscenter that morning and they had no idea that test tube babies had such soft heads… so really, you’re obligated to give them the details lest they continue to lead informationally-challenged lives. By the time you finish, it’s 7:30. If you go home now and write even a single page before 8:00pm, you’ll be ahead of the game. So no rush….whatsoever

You saunter on home with your books and discover that your roommates are watching a Full House marathon. It’s totally one of your favorite episodes, too. Hey, you’ve got half an hour to kill, so why not? But you’d forgotten that it was one of those “to be continued” episodes… and you’d also forgotten how it ends, and you MUST know. We’re talkin’ about Uncle Jesse’s future here. What’s another 30 minutes? You can write 3 pages in an hour to catch up…easy.

Your decision was totally the right one. The episode was brilliant (but you still can’t believe that Michelle is going to grow up to be two totally hot girls).

8:30pm. Time to start. History. OK. Focus. Name (new line). School (new line). Date (new line, new line, new line). “When Time Stood Still” (colon, new line). “The Antebellum South” (hyphen, new line). “An Historic Anachronism” (new line, new line, new line, indent). Half a page in two minutes? That deserves a break.

You have 3 good meals in your stomach, but you feel like you could still use a healthy snack. You grab a granola bar and a glass of water, watch a riveting infomercial for a bit, and then head back to your desk. You type a little bit about the South and its geographic location ~ basically, it’s to the South. “Except if you’re in Mexico” makes a great footnote to kill a few more lines. You are just chewing up this page! And you haven’t even started on the real meat and potatoes yet. But you’ll tackle that after a quick jaunt to the restroom.

9:30pm and you’re back. So first you reread the title to get the juices flowing…and you’re stumped. Suddenly, you have no idea what was so anachronistic about the antebellum South . . . you think it had something to do with that guy with the hair ~ at least you’re pretty sure it did. So you talk about him for a couple paragraphs without ever mentioning his name because you can’t remember it…and that’s as far as you get, because apparently it’s now time to stare blankly at the screen for 20 minutes…and then check your email. No new messages. So you read your brilliant thoughts on the antebellum South and then add a paragraph about the cotton gin. It makes sense, or so you think. After you check your email again you go get another glass of water. You sit back down and stare at the screen. Just in case, you check your email again. Finally you buckle down and skim through some of the books you got from the library which ~ you find out ~ don’t really have anything to do with your topic. No matter. You grab a few quotes about a Gold Rush in Mississippi and throw them in there. Not even 2 pages ~ but you can come back to it later. Just start on the Psych paper and let the ideas for the history paper gestate.

How hard can it be to write a Psych paper? “Come on, a one-toed sloth could type a psych paper in an hour while watching Family Feud with the volume full blast and the SAP button on.” You look down at the time. It’s 1:00am. For the first time, you feel it ~ your heart and your brain trying to simultaneously jump out of your body and escape from you, an academic black hole of destruction and granola.

2:30a.m. “That sloth was a freakin’ genius!” At this point you’re pounding out any word you can think of on the keyboard…“napster”… “happy”…“mormon” . . . White powder is smeared all over your lips and up one cheek from when you decided to abandon the healthy snacks in favor of confectionary sugar, the only thing now keeping you awake while you’re waiting for your coffee to brew. Think, think…what do you know about psychology? “Sex.” Your personal experience only gets you to the end of the page ~ and you even stretched to include the time you filled condoms with water and dropped them out your apartment window. You fix the margins…again. Size 13.5 Courier New font gets you to about the half-way point. Good enough for now. Time to take another stab at the history paper…

4:00a.m. You’ve been writing about how soft test tube babies’ heads are for at least the last hour when you start to doze off… so you hit the sugar again, this time managing to get it all over your front, your face, and your keyboard. Nice.

4:07a.m. You’ve hammered out two pages in the last five minutes ~ with no spaces or punctuation. You’re on a tear…so you stop to check your email. Nothing.

4:30a.m. Typing with one hand has slowed you down some, but you need that other hand to hold open your eyes.

4:45a.m. Now you need that hand to slap yourself intermittently.

5:00a.m. Ugh. Finally! Done. Time to proofread…right after a nap…

7:00a.m. You wake up, calmly review your history paper, and calmly realize that it’s all about sex and water balloons…and there are imprints from the keyboard on your right cheek and for some reason you feel as though you might be getting a cavity in every single tooth in your head.

1:00p.m. You spring to life and stare at the clock…3 HOURS LATE!! You don’t even remember falling asleep! Your heart starts pounding as you race around trying to remember where you put everything. You’re about to rush out the door with some paper towels you grabbed out of the wastebasket and stapled together when your roommate stops you. He says that you handed in your papers at 10 then came back and passed out. You can’t remember but you take his word for it.

1:01p.m. Victory! Another job well done. You grab a couple beers, toast your incredible time-management and research skills, and realize that you had it under control all along. Damn, you’re good ~ wonder why other people make such a big deal over all-nighters and paper deadlines. Slackers!