Let me explain a little bit about how my average weekday works. First, I have an actual full time job. I am not at full liberty to discuss my full time job, per se, as my employer doesn’t wish me to discuss it (we’re overthrowing the world, and it’s a secret,) but take my word for it that it is a job, and it is full time. This is forty hours of my week.

Second, I have children. Two of them. I am at liberty to discuss them because they are not yet old enough to know how to hire a lawyer. (They are, however, old enough now to read with a fairly high degree of comprehension, which is why I haven’t written about them so much lately.) I have to take the children to school each morning, pick them up each night, feed them, yell at them about their homework, and put them into bed. This is another twenty hours, not counting the occasional science fair. (I also have a wife, but she’s busy. If you would like to contact her, please leave a message after the beep.)

Third, I am still exercising. I mentioned this in a column a while back, and you probably figured that by now I would have quit, because, well, that’s what I figured myself. Unfortunately, my stomach is proving rather problematic. It’s supposed to be shrinking, but it’s not doing a very good job of it, although I have gotten my stomach muscles so toned I can now hold in my belly for pretty much the whole day. On the bright side, my shoulders and arms may eventually be large enough to make my stomach appear small in contrast. Anyway, I’m still exercising, and it takes up about six hours of my week.

Okay, that’s about sixty-six hours, out of a possible one hundred and twenty. If you will now consult your calculators, you will find that this leaves fifty-four hours, or, just under eleven hours a weekday. This is taken up by commuting to and from work, eating on occasion, the odd instance of mandatory housework, and of course writing and sleeping.

Ultimately, it boils down to this: do I write, or do I sleep? This is complicated slightly by an interesting side equation: if I don’t write, I also don’t sleep. So I have to write in order to sleep, but I can’t sleep while I’m writing, and I can’t write while I’m sleeping. For instance, I’ve spent the last three months writing a screenplay-- a rather intensive process-- and so I got hardly any sleep. Once I finished, I was pretty much exhausted, so I tried going to sleep early. But since I was no longer writing anything, no matter how spent I was, I couldn’t fall asleep. It’s my own personal ring of hell.

Here is where medical science comes to my rescue. I’ve been operating on the assumption that my schedule will eventually result in me dying fairly young, like, say, next week. Apparently, just the opposite is true. According to Donald F. Kripke of UCSD, people who sleep longer also die younger. Specifically, somebody who sleeps five hours a night can expect to live over twelve percent longer than somebody getting eight hours a night. He is quoted as saying "From a health standpoint, there is no reason to sleep longer." So it looks like not only am I not killing myself, given my sleep schedule I may never die.

And of course in order to make it through an average week, I drink roughly seven cups of Starbucks coffee a day. This is bad, right? Not necessarily. Menahem Segal at the Weizmann Institute in Israel recently discovered that caffeine improves memory, causing existing brain cells to swell, and new ones to grow. I’m thinking if I can figure out where to add two more cups a day without completely destroying my stomach lining, I may develop perfect recall.

After finding these tidbits it occurred to me that while it’s great of medical science to declare that I am not killing myself with my existing habits, what I really need is something to eliminate sleep altogether, because not only would this virtually guarantee immortality, it would give me much more time to drink coffee. Then I discovered modafinil. This is a drug invented for narcoleptics. It is designed to keep you awake for two or three uninterrupted days, with-- unlike amphetamines-- no apparent negative side effects. You’re just as sharp after forty-eight hours as you were after ten. Reportedly, the US government is looking for ways to keep soldiers awake and non-judgment-impaired for a full week, and this is the drug they’re looking at.

Modafinil may just be the greatest invention ever. Unfortunately, I’m not a narcoleptic, and I don’t know how to pretend to be one long enough to get a prescription for it filled. And joining the army seems a bit extreme. I do have a brother-in-law who is a doctor, but I think he has a couple of factory-installed scruples that might get in the way. So I’ll just wait for it to come out commercially. And you just know that’s going to happen. Bob Dole could do the ads. Can you see that? "Bob Dole hasn’t slept for five days. Bob Dole has more time now to drink Pepsi..."

I’m looking forward to the next exciting announcement regarding my lifestyle and the positive benefits medical science will discover about it. Like that nicotine helps people levitate, beer drinkers can heal the sick with their hands, and writers are sexy.

Okay, that last one is a long shot.

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