Spring Break

Break is just now winding to a close. I'm going to be honest. I expected to get a lot of things taken care of during break -- read some organic chemistry, buy new shoes, play basketball, work out, read a lot of good Christian literature, longboard several miles, write a lot of blog posts, short stories, emails.

Nine days feels like a lot of time when you're underwater in schoolwork and don't have five consecutive hours free. But nine days really isn't that much.

The long and short of it is that I didn't check many things off my itinerary.

Really, I checked off almost nothing. The reasons for this are manifold. First of all, I had important things to do like hang out with friends and family. But what stole more of my schedule was a combination of three key factors:

Sleep, fiction, and Tiny Wings.

I'm going to start by saying I didn't know it was possible to sleep as much as I did. At school when I'm on a regular sleep schedule, I put in eight or nine hours a night and feel super. This is a lot more than a lot of people I know, too.

Over break, I slept ten or eleven hours almost every single night. And every morning I woke up feeling like a hungover zombie.

My sleep schedule was somewhat more variable than it had been during school, but I was still in bed by midnight most nights. There's no real explanation why I suddenly required so much rest. It's like my body detected my vacation and decided to maximize my new free time. By wasting it.

So according to my math, if I was putting in ten and a half hours of sleep a night, then factoring in waking up and showering and eating, I only had about half of my day's hours to work with every day.

This explains away part of my lack of productivity.

Another explanation is mindless fiction. I am an absolute sucker for books. And my family, well aware of this shortcoming, left several mindless fiction books laying around the living room.

Whodunnits. One minute mysteries to tickle your neurons. Well for starters, they take more than a minute each, and when you lump enough of them together they take on critical mass and consume entire afternoons. I will say that I got an exceptional number of mysteries right. I will also say that the opportunity cost for this success rendered it meaningless.

There were various other books laying around too. And it doesn't matter what, or how boring, they are. If they're there, my mind wills me to absorb their contents.

Books, however, weren't nearly the pitfall of the last-but-not-least distraction: Tiny Wings.

A brief synopsis for the un-indoctrinated.

In Tiny Wings, an app for the iPhone or iPod Touch, you play the part of a hefty bird with bitty wings who longs to fly. However, you can only glide. To simulate flying you must dive onto the downsides of hills and then fling yourself up the upsides of hills like ramps, gliding through the air a little ways before diving again.

It's a game of skill and timing, where you tap to send the birdie diving and then release to let him glide. This sounds like the most boring concept of a game imaginable, but it is engrossing.

The colors, sound effects and music of the game have been Scientifically Engineered to be entirely addicting. The bird makes little noises and the music is soothing, and the game provides little score multiplier incentives to keep you reaching for the next goal.

The end result: scientifically engineered addiction.

In short, I spent more time unlocking new achievements in Tiny Wings than my pre-med peers spent studying for orgo last quarter.

That's a lot of time.

Between me and my little brothers, we shot through those levels like greased lightning through a whirlpool. We racked up score multipliers like no one in history.

All this came at a cost, however, because between my copious sleeping, uninhibited reading, and addictive Tiny Wings playing, I failed to do any of the important things I intended to. I didn't read the books I had to read, work out, or update this blog, among dozens of other things. I accomplished nothing this spring break.

Nothing, that is, besides a 22X multiplier in Tiny Wings.

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Note: My touchscreen pen didn't accompany me when I left my parents' house and that is why if the drawings in this post appear to be of inferior quality, it is because they were created with my index finger rather than a precision tool of graphic design magic. Apologies.