The Battle Begins

Hold your ground, hold your ground. Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers. I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight! For all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West! ~The Return of the King (LOTR)

A day before the war began, the first battle was lost. The battle with insomnia.

Shucks! For someone like me who can easily sleep up to twelve hours a day and yet yearn for more, getting insomnia is nearly as impossible as the sky falling down. (Unbelievably, it has happened at least twice now; so you can start worrying about the sky falling down.)

The first one happened after I took teh tarik during dinner. Someone must have spiked my drink with stimulant because that night, I tossed around in my bed till dawn, unable to sleep. Man, the night was a long one!

That was when I learnt that insomnia is an awful experience you wouldn’t want to taste a second time. Unfortunately, the sadistic sandman has the inexplicable penchant for torturing us mortals. Worse still, it was most untimely that he chose me as his victim a day prior to the first day of my exam!

I went to bed at eleven that night, telling myself I needed more sleep for the big day. Imagine my horror when I got the message: “Brain 2005® failed to shut down”. God, how could this be possible? After all, it went into sleep mode all the time in the afternoon when I didn’t want it to! Now that I wanted to shut it down, it didn’t want to?

So, I hit Ctrl + Alt + Del to prompt the Task Manager and looked under the Processes tab. RandomThoughts.exe was running in the background. I tried to end the process but couldn’t. Great, now how was I supposed to shut down?

My situation could only mean one thing – hormonal imbalance, or adrenaline over dosage, to be precise. I guessed the adrenaline running in my veins was more than enough to pump up a whole army of men! Hey, just because I look calm doesn’t mean that I’m not nervous. It’s the dreaded STPM, just in case you forget!

“This is bad,” I told myself. I had to try something. So, I ran Meditation.exe, a program designed to let Brain 2005® focus on the breathing and to create a soothing effect. Alas, that didn’t work! Apparently, RandomThoughts.exe was draining too much of processing memory! I was reminding myself to lend Tan Sri Futurama Season 2; I was planning my activities after the exam; I was thinking of this and that… No!

I daren’t look at the clock. But I reckoned at least two hours had lapsed and I still couldn’t get to sleep! For God’s sake, I had to wake up at six the next morning! (Uh, I think I’d drifted into “the next morning”…) Finally, I managed to sleep roughly around one… until the rain woke me up. Sigh, I saw no end to my suffering! In the end, I’d caught an estimated three hours of sleep, one of my lowest record.

Luckily, I was able to stay awake throughout the three hours of the maths paper. I hate to brag but I breezed through the twelve question in 100 minutes – though I realised after the exam that I made a stupid mistake. Well, there goes my perfect score!

*This post is backdated.