Kayla that I work with and her genius plan

Since school got out there have been many merry hijinks on my part -- my lovely friends are lovely, you know, and none of us have schoolwork to do for a change, and then I keep starting reading books and wanting to know how they end, and then also dear little Kate (Kate!) came back from her university in the North where people tell her (and this is absolutely not an indictment of the North, which of course I love although I really feel that the (fairly common) Northern sense of superiority over the South regarding racial matters is not altogether justified) that they are not ignorant about race relations just because they have never met a black person, and then of course my computer is in the shop being diagnosed so I have to use my electronic typewriter, and it's very convenient when you have an electronic typewriter to write stories while watching films that you have seen several times, so I stayed up late watching X-Men, and that was only after we had all watched Hairspray...

Sidebar: So before last night it had been a while since I watched X-Men, but damn, how sexy is Hugh Jackman when he's all elegantly broody and cantankerous? Like when he comes round the corner, and with the claws, and he's all, if you want to shoot me SHOOT ME....? My younger sister and I both have identical reactions to this particular moment (it has been the subject of some discussion between us), and we do entertain some concerns that it is indicative of our deep-seated desire (endemic, I have been given to understand, to high-spirited women) to be mastered and thrown around by our hair by cranky menfolk. But that is neither here nor there.

Neither is this, my sidebar number two: James Marsden's face makes me laugh. I really regret that James Marsden has spent so much of his time in parts where he plays the nice guy who is so fundamentally lacking in sex appeal that he is constantly getting dumped and cheated on, and he is forever being really noble and unhappy and jaw-clenchy about it. I'm running a tally in my head, and I have thought of one, two, three, FOUR movies in which James Marsden plays Discard Guy. And, seriously, the guy has not been in all that many movies. So every time I see James Marsden in a part where he's cheerful, it completely slays me. We watched Hairspray last night, and I'm not kidding, every time James Marsden came on the screen I immediately fell apart laughing. He wasn't even doing anything! He was just grinning and dancing! Dancing and grinning, grinning and dancing and that's all he was doing! And I was laughing so hard I was crying, just because his FACE is SO FUNNY.

My main point, actually, is really nothing to do with my lovely friends, or X-Men, or my typewriter (a pale substitute (though helpful) for my true love, my dear portable blue Smith-Corona that used to live in someone's office until I saw it and asked for it, heart in mouth, and the people whose office it was went all around asking other office people if I could have that typewriter with the broken carrier case, and everyone we asked was all, That? She wants that? I say let her have it, get it out of our hair, which I fear did terrible things to my poor Smith-Corona's self-esteem and may be the reason that it sometimes inserts spaces where I have asked for none), or Hugh Jackman and my possible sexual dysfunction, or James Marsden and his hilarious face, the very idea of which is cracking me up as I type (no, really. There are tears of laughter in my eyes right now). My main point here is that I am really, really tired. I have not gone to bed before midnight any night since school got out, and I get up every day quite early in order to get to work by seven-thirty. And that's all very well for those insane people who function on three hours of sleep a night, but I myself require at least eight and probably nine or else I will feel really sleepy and run up a tremendous sleep debt.

And so at work today my eyelids kept falling shut. Like to the point where I had to pry them open with pliers and pin them to my eyebrows, due to all this tiredness that was going on. Even though I did things to make my day interesting like I sang little songs inside my head and I played my little game where everything in the world except our building gets destroyed and I am in charge of handling things to help repopulate the planet,* even though I did these things, I say, I was still completely impossibly exhausted.

Luckily, Kayla who I work with is a genius, and yesterday or the day before she came into our office to do her genius thing, which was to swipe some of the Christmas gift chocolate that has been lying around the office and put it in her coffee to melt, and then drink the coffee.

Okay, just think about that. Chocolate. Melting. In coffee. That is TOTAL GENIUS.

(I realize this is not a wholly original idea, as there are chocolate coffee drinks out there in the world, but you have to go and find them and pay for them, whereas Kayla's Brilliant Method is free.)

Today I refined this genius plan a tiny bit in order to make it suit my own needs; instead of using milk chocolate as she did, I used dark chocolate in my coffee and then drank the coffee. Now this is clever for several reasons. In the first place, dark chocolate lowers your blood pressure and prevents cancer, so it is always good to consume it. In the second place, dark chocolate is bitter but delicious, whereas coffee (which has more caffeine than dark chocolate and is consequently more effective at waking you up) is bitter and not very delicious; so the delicious bitterness of dark chocolate COMPLETELY MASKS the non-delicious bitterness of the coffee flavor.

That means that I can improve my health AND wake myself up AND give joy to my tastebuds ALL AT THE SAME TIME. Because of clever Kayla and her genius plan (but a little bit because of my native resourcefulness and adaptability).

I will say briefly, before letting you carry on to the footnote, that this has been one of the most parenthetical blog posts I have ever written. And that is saying a lot because me, I am a huge, huge, HUGE fan (you may have noticed) of parenthetical asides. I blame it all on tim and Steve, both parenthesis addicts who encouraged and enabled me (especially tim), and if either one of them ever tries to contest this, I have emails to prove it.

*I like playing this game inside my head when I am doing things that don't require my full attention, and I have felt really validated about it ever since I read that issue of The Sandman where a guy has more or less the same game (though his version is a hair less controlling - oh dear, I fear this says something quite, quite dreadful about me). Neil Gaiman validates me so much. Like when Fat Charlie sings at work without noticing because he forgets not to (incidentally, there have been three (3) other validations of my singing out loud without noticing, for a total of four (4) validations, a number that points to a fairly broad phenomenon rather than an isolated neurosis on my part: The Charioteer (hurrah!), Die for Love (also hurrah!), and About a Boy (hurrah again but not as much and no exclamation point)).