No, Seriously, I'm Awake

Necessity is the mother of invention.

At least that what's they say (though it makes no sense why anyone would think it's a necessity to pay for tap water bottled by Pepsi).

Improving D+ grades in Religion 101, though, can be seen as a necessity -- that is, if you want to justify your existence at the university in hopes of one day filing like cattle across a stage to get a replica of a piece of paper that somehow is supposed to legitimize you as a likely productive member of society.

Part of the perception of command of a subject, it seems, is that a student not sleep through an entire class and, especially, not a series of classes.

The test be damned. It seems that, unlike the high school psychology teacher, the amount a student sleeps in a college religion class goes a long way to judging how much a student knows about fundamentalism. As if being sleepy is an insult to the pursuit of knowledge.

Where were those eyelid stickers when we needed them most?

Think of it: Stickers, resembling as realistically as possible a pair of open, attentive eyes. Pick your color: Blue, brown, green, hazel, albino.

They could be applied to the closed eyelid, engineered with such precision that the perception of on-taskness could be so convincing that the student never appears to blink.

Their usefulness would spill over into the post-graduate world, full of worker drones resting in adjustable chairs of boardroom boredom for whom corporate buzzwords are lullabies.

Yes, eyelid stickers. Shattering the persecution of the tired masses once and for all.