Of sleep

Ok, this is going to be a cliche, but... Why do we sleep one third of our lives? I mean think what you could do if you'd cut your sleep to, say, 3 hours a night. A quick comparison will show that if you sleep for eight hours a night, work eight hours a day, commute an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, that leaves you with six hours of handling chores, meeting friends, going out to see Ursula Rucker, and so on. Unless you phase in some overtime work. And the 8+ hours of continous work, at least for me, is pretty exhausting. Being a student, my attention span is roughly three hours. After that I have to do something else.

So consider a world where you slept for three hours. Say from 1 AM to 4 AM. You get up, commute and get to work at 5.30 AM. You work for four and a half hours and it's 10 AM. Go to a museum, catch up on reading, whatever. And eat. It's 2 PM. Go back to work, clock four more hours of work and by 6 PM you're out of work and not even nearly as tired as before, since you've had a nice four hour break from work in the middle of the day. So you can actually go meet friends and do something asides from crawling home and dying on the couch. And there's even 7 more hours until it's 1 AM and time to hit the sack. Ok, ok, this is just one scenario. Other people could plan their days differently, but the simple fact is that if your day went from 16 hours to 21 hours, you'd certainly notice the difference.

And now on an entirely different note: how do men in movies and on TV keep their just ironed shirts so crispy and wrinkle-free all day round? That's unpossible!