Wash Your Face...

In my last couple of years of school at Ole Miss, I was in a huge hurry to make up for lost time and graduate.  In all my enthusiasm to finish college I foolishly enrolled in 18 credit hours of Summer School… it was rough to say the least.  Half way through this adventure in hell, I took Stats II, a difficult class in its own right, even before wedging the course into 4 weeks.  Thank God I had the good fortune of my friend Ryan taking the class with me (who I think really passed the course for me).  What made this class interesting though was who taught it.  The teacher was an Eastern European former Soviet Bloc refugee with a very unique perspective.  He really viewed all of us as spoiled, arrogant, dumb, lazy Americans.  And you know, he wasn’t that far off the mark.  Of course, that’s pretty easy to say when you’re presented with the average Ole Miss classroom.  What made him memorable were his teaching methods.  He wore a giant gold ring on his right hand, and he would turn it upside down so that the lump-like crest of the ring was facing the inside of his hand.  Bear in mind, that this was a four hour class, five days a week, at 8:00 am… we weren’t exactly attentive or even awake at times.  It wasn’t as if the fascinating subject matter of statistics was keeping us riveted.  Whenever he noticed such a lack of alertness, he would slap his ring against the chalk board with such force that a loud clapping sound would echo through the room, and immediately everyone would turn to the front.  He would shout:  “WAKE UP, WASH YOUR FACE!”  Wash your face?  I had never heard a teacher tell me to do this.  I didn’t really understand what it meant.  After days of yelling at us, he went on to explain the command.  Washing your face wakes you up.  You know when you wake up and take a shower and you get a rush of feeling more awake.  The science behind this is simple.  The warm water causes your capillaries or small blood vessels to expand inside your skin.  Flushing your face with oxygen rich blood and increasing your circulation, which makes you feel more awake and alert.  To this day, whenever I feel a little “blah”, I splash water on my face, and I swear it’s like a breath of fresh air.  So the next time you get, as 5-Hour Energy commercials would describe as “that 2:30 feeling”, go wash your face… see how you feel then.