Simply, My Day

Today was a pretty interesting one.

I woke up at 7:45 today and made the 10-minute trudge through the cold rain to campus. On my second stride outside the King Kong of all raindrops fell right into my left shoe (a caution: don't wear loafers in the rain), soaking my sock. So despite the fact that I was bundled up, I was chilled to the bone from my extremities. The discomfort reached the point where I was surely not going to be able to do my Politics exam in shod feet. So I took the test in bare feet. Despite a slight distraction from the foot freedom, I was able to proceed competently. After an hour and a half, my sock was still as wet as it was when it first met that blasted raindrop-from-hell, as was my left shoe. I charged across the Colonnade, my feet dampening with each miserable second, to Tucker Hall, where my Shakespeare class takes place on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Again, I went barefoot because the absorption capabilities of my loafers are matched only by that of a SuperShammy (http://www.simplygoodstuff.com/super_shammies.htm). Heck, it's still damp 15 hours later.

I returned to the fraternity house, ate lunch (pretty good pulled pork sandwich and some really crisp, tangy mayo-free cole slaw--a wonderful complement), and headed upstairs fully intent on beginning my ~6 page Philosophy paper, due in class tomorrow (more on that shortly). Naturally, I found myself helplessly drawn to all manner of procrastinatory activities--TV watching, video games, eating, Facebook, etc.--so profoundly so that I found myself in the fraternity house dining room at 7:15 PM having made scant little progress on my paper. So what did I do? That's right, dear readers. I went to play poker.

I had been looking forward to the IM poker tournament (I seize nearly every chance I get to play) all week, and no pesky little paper was going to come between me and the tournament; no sir! So I brought my Philosophy wares with me to campus, intent on finishing my paper in the library after I bowed out of the tournament. Murphy's Law took over, and I played some of the best poker I've played this year, finishing 4th out of a field of 15.

Now let me back up a moment. I declined to say above that I was dog-tired at 7:15 PM. I remedied that fatigue by doing a very uncharacteristic thing--I purchased a high-potency energy drink in the Co-Op. Now, I usually abhor such devious liquids, but there was no way I was going to make it to the finish line with my paper if I didn't get a pick-me-up. So I walked out with a 22-ounce gas canister-cum-bottle of Grape flavored Nos, a bottle of water (to try to dilute the energy potion, I figured) and a little box of Junior Mints (in case I found the Nos so revolting that I'd need to get the taste of it out of my mouth in short order). But the Nos was palatable. Check that--the Nos was de-freakin'-lectable. And like any halfwit energy-drink rookie, I made the mistake of drinking about half of the bottle between approximately 8:05 and 8:25. In that short period, I went from a barely-there zombie to a hyper-Herman with an interior stream-of-consciousness monologue going on that would tongue-tie James Joyce. And at nearly 2 AM, I still am feeling jittery and full of energy (as if the sheer volume of this blog post did not tip you off).

At any rate, after about 20 minutes of aimless lurching around trying to find a good entrance into the library and then an open study room in the library, I was able to isolate myself and do my paper. I ended up starting over from scratch (an extreme rarity for me) because my previous effort was so scatterbrained and unfocused that it was unsalvageable. I ended up mentioning David Bowie (ch-ch-ch-ch-changes) and mathematics (graphs with holes) in the space of 1667 words allegedly devoted to an outline and defense of Aristotle's views on time in his Physics, which I thought was pretty neat (I am appallingly nerdy, after all). I handed the paper in at 12:45 AM, a full 10 1/2 hours before the deadline of 11:15 AM. Ohh yeah.

It was as beautiful a nighttime scene as I've ever walked through as I strode from the library to Newcomb Hall and then back to the fraternity house. A rich blanket of fog covers the town of Lexington right now, softening the rim of every light, obscuring borders. It's pretty cool, to say the least (according to one nerd's opinion).

Anyway, here I am at 2:05 AM, still nowhere near sleepy enough to go to sleep. I'm going to catch up on my Shakespeare reading ("Othello") and hopefully shuffle off this sugary coil enough so that I may rest myself.

Nos is a heluva drink.

Good night.

--Timothy R. Gavrich, Madman