i want to play too!

The latest blog craze: everybody is posting photos of their morning coffee (here and here and mockingly here). But I don't drink coffee!* Indeed, coffee is one of those things where I wonder whether it really tastes the same to other people as it does to me or whether I have some freak gene that produces a tongue enzyme that causes coffee to putrify in my mouth. Even a microgram of coffee in a cake or whatever is enough to turn my stomach. So, instead, I take my caffeine ridiculously inefficiently, in the form of bone-destroying and possibly-to-be-discovered-as carcinogenic** diet soda.

Being a non-coffee-drinker in as coffee-centric world as academia is enough to give a person an inferiority complex. Thank God for the book a friend gave me:



On the inside cover, in a epistolary preface addressed "Dear Self-Esteemer", the author does acknowledge the strangeness of pitching a book that would seem ostensibly about trying to increase the self-esteem of people who think they are complete idiots (actually, when put that way, it doesn't seem so strange at all, but rather on a par with The Best Person Ever's Guide To Humility and Realistic Self-Assessment). Anyway, while the editor moves to reassure the reader that of course we all know they aren't really a complete idiot, he then also says "We all have bits of the idiot in us." Upon reading this sentence, I thought: "Ah, the idiot. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti."

Also, note how clean my office desk is! Inspired by my trip home, I am fighting a War On Clutter on both home and office fronts, which makes especial sense given my impending move.

* Except this one time I was supposed to meet an acquaintance at a coffeeshop, at which I typically get hot chocolate, but instead the coffeeshop closed earlier than we thought and just before I arrived. She had been thoughtful enough to buy me a coffee, and we sat and chatted outside. I was sufficiently touched by the gesture and awkward about telling this person I didn't know well that I didn't drink coffee that I drank the whole thing, revulsed sip after revulsed protovomity sip.

** Or at least so insist a couple of my more health- histrionic friends.