What Am I, Four?

Do you know what's stressing me out?  Bedtime.

Tonight I finished working out, fixed dinner, then looked at the clock and realized that I had just two hours left before I needed to be asleep.  Not going to bed.  Asleep.  Which means I needed to start the going to bed process in about an hour.

And immediately I started panicking.

To use a rather geeky metaphor, you know the countdown clock on Battlestar Galactica?  The big one in the control room that they set every time someone goes off on some stupidly heroic mission and Adama says "You have X minutes until we jump.  If you're not back by then..." and the heroic idiot finishes the sentence with a quasi-commanding, "You're leaving without us."  And then at the climax there's all kinds of quick cuts between the clock and the action and the clock hits zero and Adama looks all agonized and noble and then the clock starts ticking in the opposite direction and you wonder like a good viewer if Adama's going to risk the entire fleet for the sake of his child-of-the-week?

You know, that clock?

During the school year a similar clock runs in my head, ticking away in bright red numerals the minutes left until the time that marks 8 hours until I need to be up again.  The worst is when it goes past the zero mark and continues it's steady counting pace, marking the lack of sleep I'm getting because I'm so stressed out about going to sleep.

It's 7:31 right now, and I still have an awful lot on my to do list.  To get eight hours of sleep I need to be asleep no later than 8:45.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.