graphical evidence of my destructive patterns

It is a truth universally acknowledged that I'm a little screwy when it comes to sleep. But up until now, the only proof of this has been merely anecdotal; I'll have told you stories about that time I blacked out in lecture after weeks of getting 2 hours of sleep a night, or the time I fell asleep during my tutorial at Oxford (yes, it was a one-on-one session with my professor; yes, he noticed me dozing off - lucky for me, he was sympathetic)... I'm a night owl through and through, and even having a 9am-6pm job has done little to abate that.

Well, yesterday I was informed of a pretty extraordinary application. Sleep Cycle is an iPhone app that tracks your body movements during your sleep. And because movement patterns supposedly vary according to each phase of the sleep cycle, the iPhone's accelerometer is able to graph out your sleep cycle throughout the night. The app then uses this to set a window of time that precedes your scheduled alarm time so that it can wake you up during the period in which your sleep phase is at its lightest (i.e. you're close to waking up).

Pretty sweet, eh? Undoubtably, there's no way this application is going to be anywhere near as accurate as having probes attached to your head to monitor brainwaves, but this is still a really awesome tool. I downloaded it right away and tried it out for the first time last night.

If this thing is even mildly accurate, then I'm fucked. Take a gander at my graph (you can send the graph from the app to your e-mail, or share it on Facebook).




Sleep statistics for 29 - 30 Sep (Thu).

Went to bed / woke up: 12:24 AM / 7:55 AM
Total time: 7h 30m

Analysis made by Sleep Cycle.

Truth be told, it seems like it takes a couple of days for the app to calibrate itself according to your movements, but still... I'M IN DEEP SLEEP EVEN IN THE MORNING??? NOT fair. But it might explain why it is virtually IMPOSSIBLE for me to wake up in the morning. I've had trouble my entire life trying to wake up early. So has my mom. And I told her frankly that one of my biggest motivators for trying to go back to grad school is that my crazy sleep habits were fucking made for academia. You know, in addition to my desire to learn about the contemporary languages and literatures of immigrant communities travelling westwards........(i promise this comes first, benevolent gods of grad schools. please admit me.) And she supports me 100%! Man, I love my mom.

I wish the movement patterns as measured by the accelerometer were also taken into account in this graph. Naturally, there are a lot of inaccuracies and flaws with this app, but as a bare indicator, it's pretty freaking cool. And, in my case, depressing, because now I have a graph that just screams LOOK HOW FUCKED YOU ARE, CHUMP.

Okay, Ellen and I haven't forsaken this blog. We're just tryin' to survive out here in The Land Above The Garage (might I add that the smell of garages is actually one of my favourites on earth, so I have no complaints about this set up). So yeah, a full time internship + grad school applications + job applications + reading reading reading + attempting a social life = world of pain. But you know, this isn't 'Nam, it's NorCal.

Anyways, it's that particular time when I am racing to finish a cover letter while watching outrageously idiotic videos on youtube and trying to go to bed at a decent hour, so I figured - perfect time to blog. Really. Not that I have anything specific to say, just that we're still alive, happy and surprisingly well-fed (the place where I work is ridiculously generous and takes me out to lunch way too often. I love them. My mother loves them - anyone who feeds her daughter when she cannot is a godsend).

I still haven't gotten used to going to bed before, oh, 4am. I'll fall asleep like a grandma around midnight, of course, but waking up at 8am continues to be the most horrific part of my day, no matter how much sleep I get. I've convinced myself that the only way to survive this is to go back to grad school. Or to become a janitor. Either one works.