S M R T

Alright, I'll be the first to admit that patience is a virtue that I have little of at the moment.

What am I saying? I rarely have patience at all! The list of things (well, people) I patient for is short - students, old people... but there are still conditions: are they really challenged or just acting like it and being lazy? are they wearing a hat while driving 30km under the speed limit?

I'd like to think that I'm a caring individual but really, and those that know me well know this to be true - I'm a snob. I pass judgment on people quickly, but the problem is that I have rarely been proven incorrect about my initial judgment which leads me to hanging onto those opinions long after I should have just been a 'nice' person and let them go.

Case in point: Subway - 1 week ago.

Bella and I had ordered soup with our sandwich. The 'artist' had said that that soup/sandwich combo drops the price of the soup by a dollar (which is what the sign said that she was pointing to when she told us this). Get to the till and apparently that rule doesn't apply anymore. I'm sorry - you're an idiot! You just said one thing and then are confused about your answer a mere minute later? So Bella pointed out that in fact, the sign says... I really enjoyed the part when Bella told the 'artist' to read the sign he had pointed out to us in the first place. Awesome.

So we're sitting there eat our dollar soup and watching the three artists gather around the
till and then this arm shoots straight up out of the huddle and points at us, waves, and drops back into the huddle.

Bella and I look at each other, look at the counter, look at each other and roll our eyes and make yet another remark about the required skills to be a manager of this particular subway.

The problem was that they had just noticed that the interac was displaying "transaction not complete" which I had seen while I was paying with cash - as had Bella. They were sure it had to have been one of us that had ripped them off but as we refilled our fountain drinks illegally we assured the artists that in fact we had paid with cash.

That is just one of the many cases of stupidity I've encountered this summer that has made me realize how impatient and snobby I am.

As for right now - I'm impatient because I'm waiting for my editing to be FINISHED but I have to hand it into my final reader who requested it for this weekend. It's been ready since Friday night but he's not getting back to me. I have stuff to do other than have a forced holiday.

Sure, sure... I need to relax, de-stress, and all that other nonsense but I cannot do that when I know I have a whole pile of other stuff looming over my head next week and for the following 1o months. I have never been this unprepared. *sigh* Even though the forced holiday is almost done - I'm hoping - I still can't truly enjoy it because me head is still whirring. Stupid brain. Dang.

To caf or not to caf, that is the question

...Caffeinate that is...(that's not even a verb... meh)

Tweek just posted after a long hiatus and I might as well do the same - with the same topic: coffee.

I never drank coffee, of any variety, until I was in university; however this isn't the typical get hooked on coffee due to late nights of essay writing and cramming for exams. I got hooked on coffee during the summer months when Indigo Eve and I would go for marathon "coffee walks" after work. Our coffee was more of a dessert than a coffee: Tall Hazelnut Mocha - with the whipped cream and the chocolate syrup and the chocolate sugar power and the chocolate covered coffee bean on top of the mountain of whipped cream that you'd have to eat super fast before it sunk to the bottom. I'm sure that there was some espresso in there but it was more the sugar we were after and the coffee bit was a nice flavour.

Then I became somewhat calorie conscious, only somewhat. I started experimenting. First it was the skim milk instead of 2%. Then it was the sugar free hazelnut, and if the barista asked if I wanted the chocolate sugar free I'd go for that as well. Then I took the biggest step - no whip, just foam. *gasp* Suddenly, this was no longer a dessert in a cup but it was getting to be more like coffee.

Undergrad came and went and the dessert coffee's became a fleeting summer time romance that were slowly being replaced the current favourite: "tall, non-fat, no whip, sugar-free hazelnut mocha" or, if I'm in my usual coffee shop "the usual."

But here's the caffeine experience that leads me to the crux of this post. During my grad studies I was given a regular coffee one night by classmates. They had gone to the coffee shop for a break but I couldn't afford the time so I stayed behind. Unbeknown to then, while they were gone I had made and consumed a super caffeinated "usual" and got back to working. So when this coffee arrived - black, sugarless, and delivered with good intentions - I had to drink it. It tasted pretty horrible so I doctored it up a bit and drank it and no word of a lie, I could no longer work. My brain was so saturated with caffeine that synapses were going off like fireworks in my head but not connecting to anything. My eyes could not focus and I couldn't sit still. It was freaking me out man! I was trippin' on coffee!

I had tried plain old coffee before and hated it. Too bitter. But I thought that was just my underdeveloped palette rejecting new things. Apparently, it was my brain trying to communicate with me through my taste buds to tell me that I don't mix well with caffeine and to only drink it when masked by other favours.

I've realized that the favour of a mocha is excellent caffeinated or not therefore if I know I need to sleep, I'll ask for decaf and hope the barista actually remembers to use the right beans. I find that they generally forget the mocha part and serve me a latte instead, which is fine but still... not what I ordered. I have learned that I can still sleep when I have caffeine in my system because if I'm so tired that I'm drinking more than one mocha a day, my brain and body will override the caffeine and I'll crash anyway.

Kinda like right now... I've been running on only a few hours of sleep the past 2 days and have had many a coffee. That doesn't seem to matter at this point because I'm about fall asleep.

Tweek: I win. The time line between posts was longer on my blog than yours. It's like the race that never actually starts because neither person wants to get there first but you must have twitched over the starting line when in a caffeine induced state. Better luck next time.