I don’t think I’ve ever stayed awake for 48 hours before. I also think it will be a while before I attempt it again. But I had fun.
Friday morning, I woke up as usual (after about 87 “snoozes” and 20 minutes of frantic pomeranian “would you WAKE UP ALREADY, you silly human!?!?!” hair-digging and ear-licking) at 7am. I was supposed to wake up at 6 to study for the final I had been too tired to study for the night before. Now that I’ve had the final, and know what was in store for my weekend, I’m glad I didn’t. It wouldn’t have helped, and I was gonna need that extra hour.
After being at school all day, and a quick Thai dinner with hubby Jeff, I headed for work. My shift on the Telemetry unitl starts at 7pm, so I’d been up for 12 hours. I do that every week though, so it wasn’t a big deal.
It was a busy night on the unit, but I thought I had a couple of hours still left in me, so after clocking out at 7:30am (we work 12-hour shifts), I called Jeff and woke him up to see if he wanted to go with me (translation: Come and pick me up and drive me there so I don’t have to drive myself) for a couple of hours to the A Simple Smile movie set, where they’re filming a story based on an op-ed I wrote last year. (It wasn’t really an op-ed when I wrote it, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)
Jeff is an awesomely patient and loving and supportive guy, even when he knows I’m nuts (and he evaluates people with serious psychological problems for a living, so he knows!), and sure enough, he was willing to get out of bed on his day off and drive all over creation just to make me happy.
The thing is, however, that watching someone play ME in a movie is much more fun than I had anticipated. Lunch time came and went, and we drove across town to a new location to film more scenes… I thought “I’ll just go long enough to meet the other actors who will be there, and then I’ll go home and sleep.” (Have I mentioned that I was scheduled to work again that night?)
Well, you guessed it… the sleepier I got, the more fun it was to watch the filming, and the in-between-shots antics of the cast and crew. Funny things are even funnier when you’re sleep-deprived! And to make matters worse, they gave ME a camera, to shoot random stuff for “special features” on the movie DVD. I adore special features. Whether my choices of what to shoot (it’s all a little fuzzy now, but I think I remember getting a really great closeup shot of the polka-dot wall covering in the elevator) actually make it onto the DVD or not makes absolutely no difference to me whatsoever… I had a blast!
When the filming was finished for the day, we had Chinese takeout for dinner on the set, and then Jeff drove me back to work, where we had the craziest night I’ve ever experienced on the unit. I think I sat down twice in the whole 12 hours.
When I clocked out Sunday morning, I had been awake for over forty eight hours. I felt it, too! I went back to the break room and crashed on one of the couches for three hours so I could drive home without killing anyone. (There’s stupid, and then there’s Stupid. I try not to be both!)