Doing more with less; or, a little goes a long way

Graduate students have a funny relationship with sleep. Take Maslow's hierarchy of needs. As the argument goes, humans meet their basic needs first (physiological needs) and then graduate to more sophisticated needs (emotional needs, for example). Maslow considered sleep to be an integral part of our most basic needs. And yet, as a graduate student, that need goes more and more unmet as the semester goes on (or as the light at the end of the tunnel appears dimmer and dimmer). So "adequate" sleep (whatever *that* is) is something we need, yet something we can't obtain. We yearn for it, we covet it, we daydream about it and yet, like the fountain of youth, it eludes us. I could go all graduate-studenty on you and 'problematize' the issue by telling you that we aren't passive victims of graduate school, but rather that we have 'agency' in choosing to be graduate students in the first place. But I'll spare you. Instead, I'll head off to bed early tonight (when did midnight become early?) and try to think of Maslow.