Trippy

Ultimately this story is about sleep, and my hate/stab relationship with it, that's not the interesting story, but that's what actually going on.

The interesting story starts on Tuesday, technically Wednesday, when I utterly failed my sleep check. Instead of getting the planned 8 hours of sleep I got three hours of something akin to fever dreams, with the distinct lack of any fever, followed by three hours of denial and the jimmy legs, as Jon Stewart calls it, followed by a collective consensus of "Screw it" and the decision that if I'm not sleeping for those two hours then I should really get something done.

Which of course meant 1 hour or reading and 1 hour of meaningless web banter.

Luckily my classes are fairly early, so I hadn't passed the exhaustion threshold when I went to my sociology lecture. I got through that just fine, took good notes etc. I then shambled to the HUB, bought two liter bottles (two bottles one liter each) of Vault, which allowed me to pull a popeye-esque revival and head to English. English was no less productive then normal, but I wouldn't exactly say that it was productive.

My second bottle of vault later I arrive at my human sexuality class. I'd like to pause for a moment to point out that the problems in the story below have already been addressed, PSYCH 210 has screencasts, which is essentially exactly the same as going to the lectures, so I was able to basically relive that episode of Winter Quarter 08, the Max Willson story, a Quentin Tarantino Production (stay tuned)

Anyway, preemptive countermeasures against parental fears aside, I made it though the first hour of lecture just fine. It was a fairly standard session of class including the generalized nervous laughter and at least one opportunity to respond to my classmates lack of deviance with a combination sigh and eye roll followed by the dismissive muttering of "Philistines..."

The problem came during the second hour when the energy drinks begin to wear off and the various lower cognitive parts of my brain become aware that I'm sleep deprived, at which point they begin shutting down the higher cognitive parts. This leads to a fading in and out of consciousness, where I'm fully aware in 15 second bursts, every minute or so, then black out until the next one.

I've told you all of that so that you can understand what lead to one of the most trippy experiences of my life. For an hour I, on the edge of consciousness, was getting bits and pieces of a complex examination of the breadth of human sexual practice. So to me the experience was:

"...although the technical definition would include everything from masturbation to the use of birth control..."

blackout

"...Remains illegal in several states..."

blackout

"...a figure radically at odds with the societal image of the male libido..."

blackout

"...has been stigmatized as homosexual despite the fact that 50% of college educated first worlders have engaged in it..."

blackout

"...Has been found to easily result in orgasm in over 70% of people regardless of gender or orientation..."

blackout

"...will develop new parasympathetic erogenous zones..."

blackout

"...despite the spinal injury and subsequent loss of regular stimulation..."

blackout

"...can be brought about through fantasy stimulation alone..."

blackout

"...use a form of hypnotic trance to..."

It's just plain trippy. And that's the censored version. The full one is a full out brainscrew.