Sleep Deprivation and Judging the Hunt

CONCEPT

This time of year, this time of year. This time of year, being April through June, I always push sleep deprivation to the most advanced stage at which it can be maintained for any period of time. It’s different than pulling an all-nighter under different circumstances… at no point am I really getting no sleep, but as one responsibility stacks upon another, and the hours tick by… 3 hours of sleep tonight. 4 the last. 5 the last. 3 the night before that.

The locus of this is Scavhunt, of course. For all the noise made out of the “mystery” of judgment, most of our activities are relatively mundane and some are quite tedious. There is, however, I’ve found, no substitute in team experience for the nuanced task of preparing the list. It’s perhaps most comparable to the Hunt itself… even as the work becomes more refined and detailed, there’s a growing conviction that everything must be perfect, in harmony… balanced. After all, without balance, this sort of suspended cadence, these golden ratios in points and activities, our List is just a list, and our Hunt is just a hunt. These are all responsibilities one has, running the World’s Greatest Scavenger Hunt.

But there is no way to really account for the time this tinkering takes. And so it always takes longer than we expect. And so these last weeks before the Hunt are spent in an hallucinatory daze. And who knows, maybe that contributes to balance itself.

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