Yesterday in my geology lab the student next to me arrived without his lab manual, so I shared mine and we worked together. That would have been fine if I had not been tired and if he had not been someone who thinks out loud all the time. In order to think, I need steady silence or steady noise, not someone talking to me every couple of seconds — I felt like I was trying to count to 1000 while someone kept shouting random numbers to throw me off. My nerves were on edge by the end of the lab, but I avoided appearing very frustrated. In fairness to him, he wasn’t annoying me on purpose, and the lab would have rubbed me the wrong way even if I had worked alone.

Last week I averaged 5.5 hours of sleep Monday through Friday. I got 5 hours of sleep last night and almost slept in too late to make my first class on time. I’m suspecting that my schedule is too full — by the time I finish work, I’m too tired to do homework effectively, so I end up needing extra time to do it, and that eats into my sleep time, which makes me tired the next day. My first three exams are next week, and if I’m not happy with the way they go, I’m going to cut back on my hours at my current job or quit it entirely. It’s fun, it’s good career experience, and the pay is fine, but I can only do so much. I’m not worried about my grades, but I would like to give my classes all the time they’re worth.

Finally, I browsed some poems by Walt Whitman last night and found a few that I really enjoyed. Song at Sunset and So Long! are somber and beautiful, and A Noiseless Patient Spider has some great imagery and would be brief enough to memorize without much trouble.