This is what my alarm clock looks like. What a calamity. Every morning, I go through a series of warfare with my relentless phone. Usually, I come to defeat, but it sure is a dirty fight--all because of that “snooze” button.

Whether or not I go to bed early does not seem to help much. Even when I put myself to bed as early as 9 p.m., I still can’t avert the morning conflict. It’s true that waking up at 6 am is more likely when you go to bed at 9 p.m. than 5 a.m. Still, I never find it comfortable to “rise and shine” early in the morning.

Even then, we do not necessarily have the luxury to get under the sheets at 9 p.m. every night. Getting well rested 8 hours of sleep seems almost extravagant to a lot of us. Especially when we are in college, the time we transition from systematic high school schedule to sporadic schedule that changes every semester, it gets exhausting. Not only that we have to constantly re-adapt into the alteration of class and work schedules, but there are a lot of other things that keep us from calling an early night.

For some mystical reasons, time evaporates after midnight. A few nights ago, I was at the library around 10 p.m. I’ve meant to get home by 12 a.m., and by the time I checked the time, it was 2 am. Then after about what it felt like 45 minutes, that thick red clock hand was heading towards the number five. I was to be up in two hours to make it to 8 am class. I set the alarm to go on for every 5 minutes from 6 a.m. with the maximized volume. I was most definitely ready to give in. Did it happen? Absolutely not. It would have been better to have not slept at all so that I would not have missed my only class that day. The silver lining was that I had only one class that day; but what if it happens when I have four classes? We can’t afford to miss four classes, no.

I agree, it was not a very wise decision to have made, and I could definitely have better time management skills. But to me, college isn’t all about planning, discipline, and early-birding. It is doubtless that they are important too. Then does that make it inevitable for me to be sleep deprived and chased by the deadline unless I make sacrifices, all throughout the college? Then will the college be an end to the vicious cycle, or does it prolong until I succumb through the discipline and responsibilities, I ask. So that is adulthood.