the all-nighter: why do we do it?

I'm an early riser, so I usually come to school around 8:30 in the morning, stopping first at the law review office to check for assignments. At least twice a week, I find some poor soul knocked out on the less-comfortable-than-Plex-furniture couch with his or her papers strewn across the floor. Sometimes, a few people manage not to succumb to sleepiness, but their blood-shot eyes betray their exhaustion. It's become so common now that sometimes I wonder if I should be equally hardcore, but then I realize that (1) I'm not a first year anymore that needs to follow the crowd, (2) all-nighters are a bad habit, and (3) my mommy won't let me.

Leaving aside reason #1 & #3, I would prefer if I had never been introduced to the concept of the all-nighter. In high school and during my freshman year of college, I was very diligent about working on papers. I started well in advance, collecting notes, making outlines, writing rough drafts. I even handwrote my papers to give a tactile element to the process.

Then came winter 2000, or as I think of it, the turning point of my academic career. I had three papers all due on the same Monday; on the preceding Friday, I had none done. I don't remember the exact cause of my procrastination at that time. I might have been too busy doing nothing at 1835. In any case, I felt a deep panic because Friday turned into Saturday which turned into Sunday morning. Knowing that a report card chockful of Cs were coming my way, I locked myself up in the Kresge computer lab for 14 straight hours and hammered out three long long papers.

You know what comes next: I get my As and, as a consequence, lose my fear of time. I came to embrace the pressure, the sounds of Evanston birds at 4am, the rush that comes with running to turn in your barely-finished, newly-printed, miserably-written paper.

The problem is that this afflicion has followed me to law school, where documents should not be written so last minute. Try as I might, I can't bring myself to finish a paper well before the deadline. I could attribute this to my workload, but really, it's just because I like watching TV.

I think all-nighters also makes people feel like they're working really hard, like they're really dedicated to the task at hand. This is true in some respect: the girls who flyered the campus all through the night for Mr. PanAsia 2001 definitely wanted people to see the performance of the raver's version of "My Heart Will Go On." But, for me, it's more because I get lazy and therefore not really as dedicated as the all-nighter might suggest. I want desparately to stop doing it. Maybe if my mommy tells to stop, I will.