We can't get enough of it. We want it every day and once we get a taste, we just want more. We get it around the clock - in the morning, afternoon and our big dose at night.
You'd better know darn well what I'm talking about, eh?
Well, without further hemming and hawing over the matter, I might as well confess it's sleep. Have you ever met someone who said they needed to sleep LESS? I don't believe I have, and I doubt you have either.
Unless, of course, you're a close personal friend of a giant panda. In which case I don't particularly want to know any more details, since I have a thing against being stabbed in the face with bamboo.
In this day of 24-hour news channels and tabloid magazines, CNN and the National Enquirer, maddening classes and ceaseless work, it's hard to take time out for things that really matter.
I suppose right about now you're ready to put the paper down, expecting some polemic on the value of getting a good night's sleep. Well, you'd normally be correct, judging from this space's usual occupancy (or For Rent sign blowing in the breeze, whichever you prefer).
Right now, though, I really don't care. I'm going on about four hours of sleep in the last forty-eight, and I've had so much Starbucks that I'm thinking of opening a Siegfried Hall franchise. Ah, the joys of PLS.
No, really, I love PLS, and that wasn't supposed to be a snide joke aimed at business majors either - another difference between me and the Energizer Bunny that is the campus dead horse of all jokes. It's just that sometimes, I really question my sanity - especially at 3 a.m. when things still aren't done. Like this column, for example.
I'm fully expecting the great newspaper god to fly down out of the sky and smite me dead with a charcoal-smeared F on my forehead, but that's the beauty of it. I can do this not out of some desire to see my own words in print, not out of some desire to see a certain configuration of letters on my report card, but out of, aw heck, let's be honest: adrenaline and caffeine. Probably in some proportion that would make my normally quite genial family doctor turn the air blue.
There's no moral to this story, there's no lesson to be learned; thing is, maybe that makes me happy. Maybe I need this or that or the other, but then again, maybe I just need to cover my television set with Crisco and heave it into one of the lakes.
If you ask me, the probabilities are just about even...
