It Almost Killed Me!

There's actually a reason for all this Coca Cola, you'll see

Lessons learned the hard way are a dime a dozen, and we never see them coming, never! The lesson I learned is that everything is permissible but not everything is beneficial. I know the words, I have known them for years but for some reason I get the feeling this is one lesson I will be learning till my dying day, such is life. But I have delayed telling the story long enough so let me jump right in to it.

Those who know me know that I love me some coca cola. It’s my regular expense. I actually think I have spent more money on coca cola than I have on any single item combined in my life, saying that out loud sounds quite sad, good thing its written not said. Anyway, the past month or so I have been on a fast food eating spree, this was supposed to boost my productivity. I have been putting in a couple of extra hours of work, three to four nights a week, that means I would usually sleep around 3, 4 or 5am, four nights a week. There’s this place that sells Dürüms for 6TL just outside my dormitory, that’s not that bad a price, plus there is a place where you can buy pizza for 12TL and the best news, in hindsight not so good, was that there was a promotion in Lemar, which is the grocery shop on campus, they were handing out two coca cola’s for 6.50TL. Bottom line this was a great time to immerse myself in to all kinds of late night work. Oh yeah and my favourite cup noodles were back in stock at Lemar so to say the least I was a very happy guy.

So the late night “shifts” begun. At the beginning they were an outstanding success. I would work, till 5am and sleep on the couch in the room and be in class at 9am. The couch was literally a steal and practically a gift from God, I blog from the couch, I nap from the couch, I watch football from the couch and I read from the couch. It’s a love story. I would put in a nap late afternoon to evening to get some sleep back. Back to the picture, A friend of mine, Oscar, was also into these “shifts” so we would work till 2 30am, him in his room me in mine, head out to either grab a Dürüm or a pizza, if it was pizza we would do a 6TL split and eat the food for 30 minutes, washed down with a coke, there has never been a point during the whole semester when he and I have not had a coca cola bottle in either of our fridges. In hindsight that has not helped matters. Anyway the first couple of days it was a success as I said, I did my school work, had time for writing, video editing and I would do extracurricular reading. It was the best of times.

A little glimpse into what a discount does to the cheap mind [not my fridge though]

Then my body started to give up. It started with me losing concentration in classes and getting very tired very early. I decided to go a couple of days without the “shift” to get my system back to normal but that didn’t work. I found myself increasingly worn out with no drive to do any work whatsoever. Even my hobbies became tedious. I was not interested in anything. Not food, not school, not even coca cola, granted I was still drinking quite a lot of that. School work suffered quite a lot for a week and a half. I received my slap that brought me back to reality when I got my first ever terrible result during my time here. It felt like I was naked in the cold. I realized then that something had to change but what was it? I needed the “shift” to get back to winning form, but how do I make the system work? Yesterday I was with a friend of mine who is into all things fitness, I will say this again for emphasis, all things fitness, its borderline ridiculous how motivated he is about such stuff. It hit me suddenly that my eating habits were the problem, lord knows where the thought came from, we were not even talking about anything to do with that. I had not been eating at the right times, sometimes not even eating at all. I ran the idea past Trevor, that’s the fitness guy, and it seemed to make sense to him.

After a bit of a pocket reshuffle I managed to get the funds together to get me some fruit and water, I don’t drink that much water, my logic is that there is water in coke but that’s beside the point. I even went for a jog, granted now I feel like a truck ran me over but yeah.. I went for a jog. The point of all of this is that, in a university setup you are your own man. The decisions are yours and the consequences are yours and a lot of people see this in one aspect, that being the decisions are theirs. So they turn away from the system and life that they had known at home and try to be this new person, but the new person is not always better. They like me see things in terms of short term goals and think that will sustain in the long run when in fact short term thinking will rarely get you through the month.

Short term thinking is potentially catastrophic

Everything is permissible, you can decided to abandon school and cling to life or decided to cling to school with reckless abandon. But not everything is beneficial, the way that you choose has its effects on you in the long run and so it is best to look at the effects when weighing a decision. You just might find yourself in a position where all seems doom, gloom and bleak and might think the world is at an end when in actual fact the problem was the decision you made to live the life you live. Life is a product of balance and priority. The system I advise is put God first and balance out the rest.

Note: This is not me saying I’m staying away from coca cola, but I will cut down on it. 5l a week from now on :D