Thursday, March 15, 2007

Just a simple case of baby fever... it will pass


So back to my raise. Here's how you know you are on the verge of financial ruin:

You wake up with that familiar and debilitating throbbing sensation pounding the backs of your eyeballs. You open your eyes and immediately diagnose the root of this oncoming migraine: lack of caffeine. You jump out of bed, making a beeline straight for the coffee maker. This is much too serious to stop first for a visit with the toilet or to squirt some saline into the arid orifices you use to SEE the coffee maker. You don't need to see it anyway because you fucking know where it is. It's sitting right next to the can of coffee your mom brought over from your uncle's house after he died, since everybody else was too weirded out to accept food from a dead person's house. You can't figure out how you were the lucky relative of so many superstitious lily livered sissies, but their idiosyncrasies have made for many happy evenings of frenzied kitchen raids on your part. You still have a few boxes of his favorite brand of pirogi in the freezer in case you have special guests over.... anyway....

You reach the coffee maker and fill the reservoir to the very top with water. You swish a little bit of yesterday's leftover coffee around the pitcher and figure that it's probably still good. Then you pry the basket from its nest, observing with not-so-surprised terror that it holds an old "single" that you found convenient to take from the motel room during your trip "Up North." This coffee single happened to be one of two. The other one is sitting discreetly on the counter next to the empty can of your dead uncle's coffee, which you wasted no time depleting. It happens to be the decaffeinated single, the disdained ugly twin of the wasted first.

You know that you have zero funds in the bank. You are not so careless as to incur a $35 overdraft fee in order to get a cup of coffee down the street. You throw the ugly twin in along with the used first, and switch on the coffee maker, relieved to have somehow bought yourself one more morning of peace.

You head to the bathroom to squirt a couple drops of saline into those brilliant eyes of yours. You congratulate yourself for opting for the $49.99 room instead of the $38.99 room on that lonely night a few weeks ago when you just couldn't go any further. Ain't no way that other motel would have provided you with two extra days' worth of coffee! As you see it, your past extravagence has actually earned money for you, seeing as how you might have been forced to use your debit card yesterday, this morning AND tomorrow, thus digging yourself deeper into debt with each trip to the coffee shop. You wonder what you will do tomorrow, because surely you can't use them again... but you never know.

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