How to Pass (Out) Like a Pro

People have been asking lately about how to make time dash past more quickly during a deployment. The faster it flies by, the more quickly your sweetheart returns home, right? Right! So, for your edification, I have a few suggestions you might want to investigate further for yourselves.

1. Teenagers might be right. Sleep can be one’s best friend.

What one thing do most teens have in common no matter what school they attend or state they live in? They all know how to make a boring English class rush by more quickly. Ask them how and they’ll say, without a touch of sheepishness, “You just sleep through it! It’s over in a snap!!” As an English professor, I’ve been witness to many brilliant strategies in action. I’ve even involved my other students in awarding these championship sleepers style points for their public naps. It’s more fun when you do this as a group! Most in-class snooze-monkeys receive 5s for tilting a chair back and leaning against the wall. We’ve given an 8 to one somnambulant who made it into my class without waking up from his math class. He then leaned forward on a term paper that had yet to be turned in, and he proceeded to drool enough that the words on the top four pages began to look more like one of Monet’s watercolors. This student was awarded such high marks because the outcome was really quite artistic – actually, much more so than his writing ever was. :-)

My stand-out siesta queen did receive a belated 10 from the entire class. She arrived for class on Monday looking quite haggard after a weekend of…whatever it is teenagers do these days when out of sight of parents and professors. While her sleeping style was nothing to speak of - she put her head down on her book, pulled up her hood and nodded off - the length of her nap was impressive. After Monday’s class was over, I toyed with the idea of waking her up, but decided against it. After all, I still had to drive home and didn’t want to be on the road with a sleepy teenager who had earned a “D” on a paper from me the week before. On Wednesday, my class and I returned to the room to pick up where we had left off on Monday; we found her sitting in her chair, hood up, a puddle of drool on the desk around her face. Rip Van Winkle fans, take note. She had stayed there the entire time! (This was independently verified by other professors who also didn’t want to dislodge her from her seat during their classes. They, too, were flabbergasted by her commitment to unconsciousness.) Unbeknownst to her, she had mastered a deployment survival strategy. An entire two days scurried quickly by for her, thus expediting her week at school, hastening her toward another weekend of fun. Remarkable! Those of us who miss our mates during deployments might do well to emulate this Einstein and just sleep through most of the separation. But, if this works for us, I might have to re-evaluate the grade I gave her at the end of the class. She should have gotten an A!

2. Passing out is just like sleeping…isn’t it?

For most of us, sleeping through the separation is unrealistic. There are beds to be made, cat boxes to be cleaned, dinners to be burned. So, how about multiple short fainting spells? These swooning spells make time pass swiftly and, as a bonus, the fainter’s view tends to have changed radically upon awakening which, as we learned in an earlier blog, generates more dopamine in the physical system. Remember, dopamine is good for us. Go, Dopamine!!

Let’s list the myriad ways in which one can encourage fainting:

a. Insert mouse here…no, not the computer kind. EEEEEK! Plop! Time flies by!

b. Insert creepy-crawly here…anything with 6 or 8 legs will do. EEEEEK! Plop! ZZZZ!

c. Stand at parade rest with knees locked. Plop! Face, meet ground.

d. Stand near loved one when a limb gets poked, stabbed, or otherwise injured. Ewww! Plop!

And, last but not least,

e. Get a tattoo. One you really want. That really hurts. Owwww! Plop! Hey, is that a real tin ceiling??!!

More on the tattoo as deployment survival strategy in a future blog; it really works! And, it WAS a real tin ceiling. But, I’ll wrap up for now by summarizing our lesson. So, what we’ve discovered and tested thoroughly (Umm, I wouldn't really bank on that part. True scientists would laugh at us, and doctors might shudder.) is that losing consciousness for certain periods of time can, indeed, expedite a deployment. If you are willing to try any of the above tactics, please report back and we’ll make sure to include it in our VERY scientific study! :-)