2004-04-19

I don’t drink coffee. I’ve recently stopped drinking pop (that’s “soda” in Yankee-speak) as well as black teas. I only drink green tea in the mornings. The upshot of all this sanctimonious healthier-than-thou abstention is that on the rare occasion I do ingest caffeine, it fucks my shit spectacularly, as they say, up.

Hence, last night, hours after drinking a cup of black tea I’d mistakenly thought was herbal, I found myself still awake at two-thirty in the morning with my brain performing explosive pinwheels of chemical-studded backwards logic. I had visions of ninjas performing in a chorus line. I had rapid-fire epiphanies of the “three lines of coke past last call” variety, re-examining my life and making sweeping plans for reform; then I started thinking about the nature of the epiphanies I was having as a sort of meta-epiphany; then I thought that if I were a superhero, I’d be “Useless Epiphany Girl”: “Help us, Useless Epiphany Girl! Linear Logic Luthor has trapped us with his Descartian Mind Ray! We need your inventiveness to free us! What should we do?” “Well, you sh—hey, I just thought of an awesome new recipe for sponge cake! Excuse me while I duck into a phone booth to write this down.” And then three years later, I fell asleep.

Today I’m not sleepy, but I know I should be, and I’m skulking around with the feeling that I’m getting away with something. Compounding the notion is the fact that my travel visa will be officially delivered to me today. I’ve got my ticket, I’ve got my visa, I’ve given my notice, I’m going to England and nobody can stop me, The End. And on this self-same day, I happen to have started my new book – a collection of essays written about living overseas (thanks Mom!) – and I’ve bookmarked it, sentimentally, with an old Air Canada boarding pass. Poetic, no?