Inspiration in the form of a plush rhino

Mourning the loss of the afternoon nap.

While I'm generally glad that when I get home at night, it's all "me" time (read: no more papers to write, tests to cram for, or outlines to compose), there are still certain things about the college lifestyle that I miss. In all honesty, I think if I could go back to the days of working a $8/hour job 30 hours per week, still pay my rent (ahh, student loans), make my car payment, be insured, and not have to actually attend or pass classes, I'd do it for a year or two until I got bored.

In all seriousness, I miss the afternoon nap more than anything else. Even when I was working and in school full-time, and therefore on campus roughly 14 hours per day between classes and my job, I could always find time to nap. Musics of Texas? Eh, who really needs to attend that when you can curl up on the oh-so-comfy couches of the UTC for an hour. Left Management early, and have 45 minutes to kill before an Adv. class? The Jester quiet study lounge is right around the corner.

There were, of course, the rare days when I could make it home to sleep in my own bed. However, most of my napping was done on campus. By the time I graduated (3.5 years at UT later), I had probably slept in 80% of the buildings on campus at some point. Benches, couches, two chairs pushed together... anything and everything that was a flat surface was fair game.
Then, I made the mistake of graduating and getting a "real" job.

See, you can't nap at a real job. If you're suddenly ass-tired at 3 PM, you don't get to say to yourself "Eh, I don't really need to be in on that conference call at 3:15... I'll just go snooze for 45 minutes and get the meeting notes from Jim Bob."

You could, but I imagine you'd get fired pretty quickly.

My afternoon napping is now restricted to Saturdays. I'd nap on Sundays, but the issue you run into there is that sleeping from 2 PM to 5 PM means that you will not fall asleep until 2 AM that night, which really screws with your 7 AM wakeup call on Monday. Sunday napping is only permissable after an exceptionally rough Saturday night (that said, I seem to nap on most Sundays, which might say a lot about how I spend my Saturdays).

You can sneak in a nap at work, but you have to do it in your car, at lunch. Since the weather in Texas is comfortable enough to enjoy without a/c or heat approximately 6 days out of the year, this means that you also have to have the car on, wasting gas, to keep yourself from dying of heatstroke or hypothermia. In addition, your co-workers will most likely make fun of you mercilessly if they see you sleeping in your car. I know this because I've made fun of my co-workers for doing this.

I also miss always being free at 3:15 PM on Thursday to trek to El Arroyo for 99 cent margaritas and the Cozumel Dinner, but that's a story for another time.

posted by K @ 12:09 PM