One night last week I woke up at about 4am and couldn't figure out where I was. I started to panic for a few seconds before I figured out what the hell was going on. This has happened to me before, but there was a whole new level of weirdness this time. Normally if you wake up and you don't know where you are it's because you got really drunk and passed out on somebody's couch the night before, right? Right? Anyway, there's always that moment where you've just slept off most of the alcohol and you wake up for a minute and realize you're not in your bed. Then you're all like, "oh...wait...oh, that's right" and then you go back to sleep. This time, however, I woke up (not drunk) and literally had no idea what part of the planet I was on. I had tacked a blanket over my bedroom window, crackhouse style, so when I woke up at 4am it was pitch black. I realized immediately that I didn't know where I was, but as I considered the possibilities I scrambled to gain my senses. No dice. I was completely awake for maybe around eight full seconds before I got a handle on things. That's a long time if you think about it. I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach like I get sometimes when something scares the shit out of me. Not sure what that's all about. Besides, I don't know why I get worried about anything anymore since I already know I'm going to die on Wednesday, March 30, 2044. Anyway, the waking up disoriented thing..I just remembered I used to do this in college all the time. I was under a lot of stress and doing way too much math. I would sit straight up in my bed from a deep sleep and stare at the digital clock. In my confusion I wouldn't understand what the numbers represented so I'd try to perform calculations on them. Sometimes it would take maybe ten seconds of trying to calculate the square root of 3am before I'd figure out I was looking at a clock and go back to sleep. Weird.