listening to: empty-office computer hum
craving: painkillers would be nice. more coffee, too. they really need a coffee maker somewhere between the top floor of this building and the basement [where i work]. ooo. and i want a bagel.
last night: talked to several #nin people... i'm not sure how it happened, exactly, but everyone decided to start calling each other. so that was cool.
estimated hours of sleep: lessee... i ended up getting to sleep around twelve, so i guess i got about six and a half hours of sleep.
so far today: work. woohoo. i ran into one of my co-workers outside on my way into the building and we got harrassed by a homeless person. always entertaining.
current plans for later today: i have yet to decide if i'm going to lbv tonight. on the one hand, it's the last lbv at mother. so i feel like i should go. also, i wanna see krystal and everyone. on the other hand, it's also the "new york vampyres' ball 2000", which does not sound like my sort of thing at all, given that i tend to avoid anything containing the word 'vampyre' and its related creative spellings. plus, i should sort of be saving money right now because of the new apartment and everything. and it's really hot and i'm really tired. and i don't have tickets yet. still, though. the last lbv at mother. i dunno. we'll see.
what else: during my freshman year in high school when i first started trying to drink coffee in order to stay up later to do the work for my ridiculous course load, i hated it. coffee, i mean. it was bitter, nasty, and all-around bleh. i would choke it down for the caffeine alone, in the same way i drank jolt. even just for that, though, i'd have to dump absurd amounts of sugar and milk and such into every cup before i could swallow more than a mouthful.
eventually it stopped tasting so awful and i could drink it the way my parents did - just a little 2% milk, no sugar. i was used to drinking it enough that the taste didn't bother me, and the caffeine was invaluable. what happened, though, was that i started drinking it so regularly so that i could either stay up later or get up in the morning after staying up later [or both] that i developed a dependency on caffeine. since i got up around six, i'd usually have it in my system by six thirty. this meant that on weekends, when i had the opportunity to sleep in, i'd still find myself awake by seven thirty or eight with a caffeine withdrawl headache. i'd have to go get a coffee or a coke before i could even go back to bed.
sometime around my junior year, i stopped tolerating coffee and started liking it. and the summer i spent in cambridge taking classes at harvard, i'd sit around the coffee shops all afternoon nursing a ridiculously expensive caffe mocha or espresso. i learned all the elitist coffee bar jargon and had unshakable opinions on the benefits of one place's mocha over another's. i was a coffee snob, briefly.
then, the summer after my senior year, i worked at dunkin donuts, which is about as far on the coffee spectrum from the coffee snob as you can get. eight hour shifts of 'medium regular, four sugars, three creams' and 'small iced decaf, skim and sweet & low'. it was there that i developed a real taste for 'normal' coffee. there are times when you just can't get anything more refreshing than a dunkin donuts iced coffee, especially french vanilla or hazelnut.
now i don't really have time to go sit around coffee shops or even to go to dunkin donuts every morning. my coffee intake consists primarily of two or three cups from the coffee maker on the third floor kitchen in my office building. it's perfectly decent coffee, nothing spectacular, but not as bad as it certainly could be. i still put the sugar in the paper cup before the coffee, a habit picked up from dunkin that eliminates the necessity of stirring. at dunkin, however, we would also add dairy before coffee for the same reason. i've decided, though, that i like watching the half & half swirl around in the coffee when it goes in, and it's not the same effect at all if you do it the other way around.
dammit. now i'm in the mood for a caffe mocha.
