I used my last two vacation days of the year for today and tomorrow. That means I traded 8+ hours a day sitting at a computer in an uncomfortable chair, dealing with diva-y, demanding reps, customers and freelancers for as many hours a day as I want spent sitting/laying on a worn out Ikea futon (in Ikea's defense, the mattress is from an old Walmart futon I used to own. It's killer. And I don't mean that in a good way) until my hips start to ache like I'm an elderly old woman, watching sappy, sad, supposedly heartwarming movies on TV, like Soul Surfer, which totally made me cry. It's awful. But it beats sitting at that damn desk. But torture, I tell you. For real.
For starters, I don't own a coffee machine. Well, technically, I own one. It's a little 2-serving contraption that I won at an office birthday party about three years ago. I have never taken it out of the box. Nor do I own any coffee grounds or filters or anything like that. I only recently invested in sugar, and that was only because I had a nasty cold and was forced to drink tea, but I'll be damned if I had to drink it without sugar. Or schnapps. Actually I'm pretty sure the schnapps cured the cold. But I digress. So, I don't own a coffee maker, which means that by the time 6pm rolled around, I had one of the worst caffeine headaches ever. I am so addicted to caffeine, that shit doesn't even keep me awake anymore. It's more like it keeps me a functioning member of society. Like the oil can to the Tin Man. So, I decided that I had to go to 7-Eleven, mostly because I have a reusable cup and thus get a discount. Otherwise, I'd totally have gone to Quick Chek, which, in my eyes, is a better establishment.
So I go in there, and get my French Vanilla coffee, and debate looking for some Billy's Pan Pizzas to eat with my coffee in my Ikea-furnished apartment and pretend I have a dragon tattoo, but in the end just opt for coffee. I get up to the register and it's $1.34. I fish out what I thought was $1.35 to give to the dude, so you can understand my consternation when he asks if I have four pennies, like it would be easier for me to fish out four cents than it would be for him to give me one back. Turns out, I only give him $1.30. And when I apologize to him, it comes out in a voice that I do not recognize at all. I don't know if it sounded weird to him too, or if he was merely reacting to the puzzled look on my face as I listened to a strange voice coming out of my own mouth. It was just an awkward situation, so I took my coffee and left. As I sat in my car waiting for it to warm up a little before I try to force it up the road back to my house, the voice echoed in my head. I can't even begin to describe it. It wasn't Danny Torrence-y, which is surprising given that the cashier was the first person I'd spoken to all day. But I had already been awake for about 8 hours, so the froggy voice had gone away. No, the voice was deeper and slightly detached from my body. I heard it like it wasn't actually coming out of my body, though it was saying the words that my brain was telling it to. It was a very strange, almost out-of-body type of experience. That ever happen to you? I can't quite shake it. The feeling. The odd, displaced feeling.
The coffee was really good though.
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