I want to develop a taste for coffee. Being awake and alert all morning is so vastly superior to being groggy and cranky even after a good night's sleep. Not that I've had a good night's sleep prior to showing up at work the last few weeks, but anyway. Runner's world too has, after a few years of waffling, come out in favour of caffeine as a safe running enhancer used in moderation. Not that I run so fast or far or so precisely that I care about whether I run a few seconds per mile faster after some coffee.

It's still gross, but I've been having a coffee every morning. I started with the girliest, most adulterated drink possible, a chocolate brownie frappucino with whipped cream and shit, and now I've worked my way down to an iced caramel latte thing. With an extra sugar cube. For some reason cold coffee is less gross than hot coffee. But maybe soon I'll be slugging back black coffee and muttering about wimps who dare to add honey to theirs. I picture myself doing this with the coffee in shot glasses, myself with uncombed hair and a visible scar and maybe a glass eye or something. You just know there's a foul-mouted sailor somewhere deep inside me.

In the same token, I wouldn't mind developing a taste for some obscure foul-tasting liquor, or maybe not even that obscure. Like, maybe having a taste for rye. I could drink it in half-empty bars with dorky but masculine wooden fixtures on friday afternoons, and mutter darkly about how the world is going to shit and complain about how my old war wound is aching. Another situation where a glass eye would work out. You know. I might settle for just being able to drink my girly vodka coolers without making such a big fucking production out of it, like oooooooh the world is coming to an end, brooke is drinking ALCOHOL! I have yet to have a drink without feeling the need to inform my companions that I'm a cheap drunk, which is kind of silly since I never GET drunk, I only ever barely have enough to make me a little wobbly.

I'm not totally sure what constitutes being drunk, where the line is, but I'm convinced I'll be able to identify it, that's it's some really discrete state and not just a continuation of the loss of motor control and giving-a-shit that a few drinks gives me. Being drunk is magical; you instantly lose control of yourself! you can't WALK! you PUKE! So I am convinced, although as far as I can tell from reality, watching my old co-workers get sloshed, you just get sillier and start doing things like carrying people piggyback around the kitchen or making jokes that are totally hilarious unless you're sober. Which other than the bad lush breath isn't that different than my normal behaviour when I'm not a comatose sleep-monster.

Well.

I had a lovely, lovely weekend on balance. It started out cranky and itchy and gross, I was in a horrible mood and was convinced that my boyfriend of 3 years and I were fundamentally incompatible and would have to call it quits. I almost tried to evict him. I don't.. remember why. I've had such a random week. Earlier in the week I kept being convinced that people I knew were dead. Not exactly hallucinations - I wouldn't have claimed it was really true - and not dreams. But I spent a lot of time worrying about funeral arrangements and assuming strange corollaries and thinking I should just throw out my guitar now that x or y or z of my guitar-playing posse was dead, dead, dead. But of course they weren't.

Anyway. I was all grumpy and anti-social but boy dragged me off to spend time with his family, and as usual that was the best anti-depressant there is in the whole world. We had fresh blueberries and lay around in the backyard where everything has gone SPLORT! Like, there are two foot tall pumpkin plants that weren't there last week, that grew of their own accord out of the compost heap from rotting pumpkin seeds put there 3 years ago. The dead pear tree, which is really more of a pear post, a dead branchless pear post supporting the clothesline that hasn't shown any signs of life in years, is now sprouting dozens of new little branches and offshoots and healthy green leaves. The rhubarb was ready to be harvested for the fourth time in as many weeks. There's drugs in the water, I tells you.

I fit in the trunk of a toyota prius. Well, that was no surprise I guess. As it turns out I fit in there with it closed with my 6'5" boyfriend too, although that's pretty snug. The prius has the cutest thing for would-be (or wouldn't-be, rather) jimmy hoffas - an emergency trunk release that glows in the dark when you shut the trunk. It's super. We all had to try it a few times.

I'm thinking we should maybe find an apartment with two ACTUAL bedrooms, because I'm getting a bit cranky that I don't have a door to slam or hide in because my bedroom is the whole living room. But then I think I'd just spend too much time holed up in my room getting cranky. So I don't know in the end. Probably laziness will win and I'll just keep hanging out in the living room. It's too soon to move anyway. Normally I'm ready to move after less than a month, but seriously dealing with this landlord's lazy procrastination has totally worn me out on all matters tenantial. Not that that's a real word. I may live here for years more just to avoid having to arrange moving out & things with this guy. This is probably a very successful strategy for him.

Next week I am having a dinner that I totally stole the idea for from someone on digs: a mystery cooking meet. Everyone will bring one ingredient which they're not allowed to tell anyone what it is beforehand. The grammar in that sentence seems very wrong but I can't think how to fix it. Anyway. Then we'll cook a dish that uses as many of the mystery ingredients as possible. And maybe whip up a batch of Blue.

Blue is a fabulous mystery blender drink. You mix ice, fruit, and then anything else you have handy in a blender. Then you add like, half a fucking bottle of blue food colouring so that every batch looks the same, and to disguise the possibly off-putting visual effect that adding frozen green beans or vitamin C pills or dinosaur oatmeal may have had. We've had some weird batches - the one that tasted really nutty even though we used no nuts, the hyperactive batch full of pixie sticks, the batch with the dinosaur oatmeal that I was afraid to try even though I was the one who brought the oatmeal. The only really tragic mistake we've made was the time we added mint jelly to it. Ew.

Well now that's a long entry. I better stop now. Happy happy to you all!