Let’s face it: Sometimes you go to sleep after you’ve told yourself a couple of white lies to ease the way.

1. I’m definitely going to sleep at midnight.

I … have unhealthy sleep habits. My parents know, my roommate definitely knows and I very much do know how late I sleep at night.

But if I set the goal at 11 p.m., and then it gets shifted back to midnight, and then to 1 a.m., well, I’ll have slept before 1:30 in the morning. And that, my friend, is an accomplishment, purely because I force myself to get up at 9 a.m. maintain a decent working schedule.

It’s usually equivalent to eight and a half hours of sleep. I’m also not growing anymore, so I think that’s a pretty good deal.

2. I will eat breakfast in the morning.

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day — if you’re General Mills. Seeing as I am not a giant cereal corporation, telling myself that I will eat breakfast — even if I won’t — is enough to motivate me to roll out of my bed.

Eating breakfast is an efficient way to inject energy into my body. Deciphering a scientific paper is more difficult than usual when my brain is crying out for glucose and my stomach is wondering why it isn’t digesting something at this hour.

Usually, the urge to eat something is strong enough to lead me to the dining hall and its assortment of offerings. But if I don’t make it down in time for breakfast, there’s usually a blueberry bar or two that I can inhale before heading to class. Thank you, PHE. Your offerings have saved my stomach’s soul countless times this year.

3. I love Qt Creator.

I do like coding. I just don’t like it when the compiler isn’t working, so programs without faulty logic don’t work the way they should. I especially dislike it when it creates all sorts of odd and unusual program outputs that take the deletion of one debugging cout statement to solve.

It’s definitely helpful to tell myself that I like it — seeing as I’m going to be using it at least until the end of the quarter. After all, fake it until you make it, right? I might never like it, but I’ll certainly have moved away from a burning desire to rip an intangible thing into bits and pieces. Raging at the little green logo sitting innocently on the bottom bar won’t take me places, but it sure is satisfying to let a bit of frustration squeak through.

4. This will be the last video I watch.

Like all of us, I end up on the odd edges of the internet from time to time. These incidents mostly occur during the late hours at night. Coincidence? I convince myself it’s not.

Either way, I enjoy where I end up. From learning about the practice of exchanging business cards in Japan to the 45 different knife skills achieved with 25 knives, I’m only one more click away from adding to my thick mental folder of miscellaneous knowledge. Or watching another compilation of the admittedly less than satisfying things that have happened on this planet.

But it is the last video. I promise.

Hey! I wonder why parasites do that …

5. I definitely understand internet slang.

I really do. LOL means laughing out loud, to sleep on someone is to overlook them, and tl;dr means — thank you, Urban Dictionary — too long, didn’t read. Yes. I have mastered internet slang.

I even found a small graph for translating words into Gen Z language! I may just be an old soul born into a young body.

Urban Dictionary is awfully handy, though.

6. I don’t tell myself lies to go to sleep.

To accept and then discard alternate versions of reality is one my greatest skills. It’s fascinating, really, to accept that I’ll eat an apple for a snack and then promptly turn around and turn the kettle on for oatmeal.

So, I don’t tell myself lies to go to sleep. At least, not in this reality. Check with me again in five minutes, when the clock’s ticking past midnight.

 

Contact Angela Zhao at angezhao ‘at’ stanford.edu.