Last night at around...9ish?...we drove through Steak n Shake. No, I can't eat their fries. It's not that they taste bad - they are tiny and delicious - but since my body warranted a visit to the gastroenterologist my body tells me repeatedly that their fries, and most fries in general, are a huge delicious no-no. I can, however, drink massive amounts of Diet Coke, ever present in a combo meal.
Can I say too that I've essentially cut Diet Coke out of my diet? And this has been really, really hard. I'm a Texas girl, and an office worker at that - Diet Coke and a bagel are like ambrosia first thing in my workday. Some people drink iced tea, but office minions chug Diet Coke like breathing oxygen. So I quit cold turkey and have been substituting Crystal Light raspberry lemonade packets when I need something sweet to drink. Sure, I pee all the time, but if I'm going to pee anyway it might as well be healthy, drinking-water pee. ...wow, that was totally too much information. ANYway.
So here's the formula. Caffeine + a huge nap yesterday meant that I was still awake at 3 o'clock this morning. I'd been playing Sims since before midnight but then I was physically exhausted and my mind wouldn't shut off.
I thought about all the projects I was working on, and then it came to me. I got The Idea, the motherlode-slash-jackpot-slash-Girl Scout Cookie equivalent of Thin Mints type of story. I crawled into bed and listened to Jay breathe in his sleep and tried to shut my eyes but my brain just wouldn't quit turning it over. It was a Rubix cube of a kernel of an idea and I wouldn't quit trying to get all the colors to line up.
My problem is that this happens, sometimes. I get an idea right before I fall asleep, and my brain says "HEY you might want to write that down!" It then gets into a huge struggle with my body, who is like "Shut UP, Brain, as I am tired and will hit you with something blunt and shiny." Brain says, "But -" and my body retaliates by falling asleep. It's wonderful how one-sided their symbiosis is.
So I have a history of waking up the next morning, knowing that I had an awesome idea the night before, but with a huge blank space in my memory as to precisely what it was.
So I wrote down one word, on a little post-it note, with a dark green fine-point Sharpie, and left it on my desk. Not that it mattered. I knew the minute I woke up this morning what I wanted to do.
This may provide an all-consuming void-filler for the next five months, until Nanowrimo starts up. Or it may fizzle out after the first page. But here I go again, on another lovely jaunt. And yes, waking up at 9 o'clock means that I am doing this on six precious hours of sleep, so it may not make sense. But here I go anyway.
