"Desperate times call for desperate measures...."

...That is what my boyfriend S said to me on Tuesday when I told him I was going to go to the store to purchase *shudder * energy drinks.

I had only been up for less than an hour and was already falling asleep just five minutes into starting homework. Without my medication, my EDS (excessive daytime sleepiness) will have me falling asleep constantly throughout the day, especially if I have to do computer work or watch videos (which is 100% of my homework). As an added bonus, the past few nights have been especially active in terms of my REM sleep, so every night I have had extremely vivid dreams that have me feeling even more exhausted when I wake up than usual. It feels like I am acting out everything in my dreams instead of sleeping in my bed. The worst dreams are the emotionally-charged ones, as I feel like they must be taking twice as much out of me. For example, last night I had dreams of manual labor in my backyard digging up random household items buried by my grandparents (no doubt the result of watching two documentaries about paleontology for class yesterday), but the dreams that felt the most exhausting were the ones regarding the discovery of the sexual abuse of a (fictional) neighbor child by his step-father and the resulting fallout with police, and the one about being stalked by the abusive boyfriend of my twin sister (also fictional situation, but definitely rooted in real experiences).

I do not typically drink caffeine because I don't usually find it helpful in keeping me alert and I tend to experience the side-effects of nausea and nervousness instead, but I was desperate on Tuesday when I decided to try out the different offerings at Safeway.

I tried to buy the least impactful brands I could find, so basically the cans that were either produced locally, fair trade, organically, without gmos, or had some mix of those buzzwords on the label. I ended up with these:

Long story short, half of them tasted gross, the other half tasted OK, and they all did not do anything to keep me awake. I drank two and half yesterday (about 375mg caffeine), and ended up falling asleep twice and getting a stomach ache. On the bright side, I did not get any nervousness or heart palpitations, which would have really pissed me off to experience without any of the alertness benefit.

Despite the total failure of the energy drink experiment, I did complete my paper for my animal behavior class this morning, which is a big relief. I still have a couple things to complete by tonight, but I feel more at ease with the big assignment out of the way.

Tomorrow my goal is to finish the rest of my assignments that are due Sunday so I do not have any homework to worry about during the ALCC this weekend. I also hope to have my schedule and transportation plan worked out. We'll see.