the good,the bad and the sleepy

Crazy comes in many shapes and sizes. One manifestation is the feeling of being driven crazy by sleep during class room lectures. Now more often than not, I’ll trace the origins of this to the lullaby feel-alike teaching style of the lecturers. But the fact that not everybody drifts off to dreamland means that ‘I’ (significant emphasis) am to be blamed for being a sleepy head. And this was a real crisis situation in the first year of my Alevels.Already blissfully dizzy on my Olevels result, the habit of late night movie marathons and hours of basketball practice meant that I was delirious in almost every class. So while everybody else discussed the Aufbau principle with the teacher, I was busy feeding Doritos to a troll. Had I been in Hogwarts, I would have been awarded a grade T(for troll level intellect) in subsequent class test performances. I guess dunce is human world equivalent of troll so I was awarded D in class tests (dunce level intellect).And this was nothing short of an electric shock for me; from straight A’s to the mighty D’s! The alarming situation needed to be addressed urgently. So I decided to cut down (a bit only, mind you) on the movie marathon hours and skip practice sessions so that I could open my eyes a little during classes. But apparently the angel of sleep was particularly keen on blessing me and these changes in routine had little effect. Hence I decided to adopt a different policy: beat the vermin habit with a pinch of cutting edge science!
This doesn’t mean that I intended on attaching a truck size battery to my temples or to take steroids etc .Instead I decided on doing some research on biochemistry of sleep and then figure out a way of controlling mine.Nerdy,no?But who cares as long as it works out fine?.And so off we go on an adventure involving lots of melatonin, some canthradin and absolutely no amount of epinephrine. So basically what I did was open up Wikipedia(our debates coach calls it a blessing on humanity) and start my research on sleep from the main substance which controls it. And that would be our friend N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine, or melatonin in simpler words. Now what Jimmy Wales’s miracle site explained was that melatonin was synthesized by light sensitive ganglions in pineal gland. And this little friend of ours causes drowsiness and hence promotes sleep. So it must be this punk who makes me sleep in classes! But BEEP! No! I had the wrong fellow. Melatonin secretion is suppressed during day light hours, which unfortunately is also the time when classes commence. And so it couldn’t be the fault of this buddy. I concluded that in order to battle my sleep, I had to discover something that could be used without significant side effects to keep me alert and awake. Nescafe all the way for the next week then. But even that wasn’t very useful; heck coffee is a powerful diuretic substance and only increased my discomfort. Apples? I had read somewhere that they could keep both, the doctor and the sleep, away .So next day the local fruit vendor got lucky as some crazy lunatic bought tons of apples from him.And the result? Shortage of pocket money and stomach ache. So this experiment had failed too. Then somebody suggested ventogen. This idea sounded good, and cheap too. And I did end up waking in the classes! but it was because of the burning ,sizzling feeling on my skin and God was it painful! Sure enough I didn’t sleep. But I couldn’t study either .So this was another failure, and a miserable one at that.
Now there was a friend of mine who was a lot into books and stuff. I asked him for help. He named a substance canthradin that could keep me alert without any danger if taken in correct amounts .Origin? Secreted by blister beetles .Say that again?!BLISTER beetles?!GULP. So where exactly had this wise fellow read about it?”oh I read about it in a novel by Roald Dahl”;and he was relaxed while saying it as if it was natural for an A-levels student to look up Roald Dahl for help with chemistry.”It was being used as an aphrodisiac by the way”. Hearing this convinced me that I was never, EVER going to that guy for help with such matters again.And so my wild goose chase continues.How I manage to stay awake a little during classes now is another story.But I am still looking for a wonder substance in this regard.Maybe next time I’ll try some bangali baba’s majoon.Just thinking out loud.