Too. Early.

[mrissa]

Here's the thing about having all the grocery shopping done by 6:00 a.m.: apparently the bit of my brain that goes, "Ooooh, shiny!" is much more active between 4:30 and 6:00. (This is probably to compensate for the 4-5:30 p.m. time, when nothing whatever is shiny. The problem is that I try not to be awake 4:30-6 a.m., and I almost always have to be awake 4-5:30 p.m.) So I had to wrestle my hindbrain into not buying a "graffiti eggplant." The forebrain thought processes went like this: no one in the house loves eggplant, and I'm the only one who even likes it a little. I am unlikely to make myself a spontaneous eggplant for breakfast. Therefore the eggplant should stay in the store. The hindbrain thought processes went like this: it has stripes. It is a racing eggplant.

The brain compromised on some tomatillos (forebrain: I can put those in a sauce for with eggs; hindbrain: ooh, crinkly!).

Grocery people once again mistook my physics T-shirt for a sorority T-shirt, but this has been happening for years now; I'm used to it. (* is not a Greek letter, people! Psi, yes, but *, no!)

To add insult to injury, I awoke before the 4:50 alarm, because I was just so hungry. Not fair. I had dinner last night. I had ice cream in the middle of the evening. But 4:30, there I was, ready to gnaw markgritter's leg while he slept, so I got up. Sigh. Don't know what to do about this (other than getting up and eating breakfast).

Anyway, markgritter has been successfully taken to the airport, and the groceries are bought and put away, and that, as they say, is that. Maybe there will be a nap. One lives in hope.

Comments

[cadithial.livejournal.com]

Why not adjust your schedule to get up at that time, since your body is obviously forcing you to anyhow? Then you can take a nap at that 4-530pm timeframe that you don't enjoy?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for trying to be helpful, but:
1) I am not that reliable a napper, so
2) I don't want to have to go to bed at 8:00 p.m. and never have a social life again and also
3) never see markgritter again, because his body clock is somewhat different, and his work clock is very different so that
4) we can't have dinner early in the day because he's still working, and if we could,
5) I'm not convinced it wouldn't pull my schedule still earlier in a vicious circle.

I'm hypoglycemic, so meal times are not nearly as flexible as one might hope.

[cadithial.livejournal.com]

Speaking of social life, when markgritter is back, we need to get together for lunch or something, as I've still got birthday gifts collecting dust :P

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yay birthdays! Definitely we should have lunch.

I'm getting my remaining wisdom teeth pulled, though, so definitely we shouldn't have lunch right after that.

But I have written "arrange [your real name] lunch" on my list for after his return.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

When I was a child-geek, probably 17, I had a t-shirt someone had given me which i am *sure* could find on the web if I looked, which said,

AND GOD SAID

followed by three lines of equations which I had been assured were Maxerll's equations of light, followed by,

...AND THERE WAS LIGHT.

I liked this t-shirt. One day, a middle-aged man who was something about science teaching came up to me, saw my t-shirt, pondered, and then, with fine academic disregard for social niceties, poked me in my adolescent chest thoughtfully, saying slowly, "I'm not sure about that one, and I'm quite sure he didn't say that one."

I liked the t-shirt anyhow, of course.

My college had a tradition (what am I saying? My college scarcely could /move/ for all its traditions! Some of them had only been traditions for five minutes, but they were traditions) of small runs of t-shirts that all started with the name of the college, and then however many years the school had been running at the time the t-shirt was made, and then some description of the (all-female) students. There also departmental ones, pretty much every year for many departments. One year, chemistry made a splash with "104 years of free radical women," and on another year, Classics, Anthropology, Archaeology, Latin, Greek, and maybe a couple others teamed up to break the mold a little with "DEAD CULTURES SOCIETY" modeled exactly on the "Dead Poets Society" logo. While I was there, the physics department had, at my instigation, "105 years of strangely attractive women" with a Lorent attractor as an illustration, but then the next year overshadowed this completely when some genius came up with "106 years of women in classically forbidden regions."

I miss being a physics geek. My life would be really different now, if I'd stayed with physics, but not necessarily in a bad way.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Fandom means never having to let go of the physics jokes.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Typing upon waking: an indictable offense. Among other things, they're Maxwell's equations of light. I don't know who this Maxerll guy is.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Apparently the guy who came up with more dubious electromagnetic field equations!

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Apparently!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

WHen I lived in College Station, TX, home of Texas A&M, I was once wearing a polo shirt with a logo involving a pentagram and words that said MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ALCHEMY. At a sandwich shop a clerk making conversation asked me if I worked in that department at the university.

I think I just said something about how I liked the shirt.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The first summer I had this shirt (*gulp* nine years ago), I was in Toledo for the summer, doing research. (The Ohio one, not the Spain one.) A woman walked up to me in a coffee shop to ask, "Does your sorority do babysitting?" I said, "I'm sorry?" She said, "I know some sororities do babysitting for fundraisers. Do you do that? Because I could really use a good babysitter." I said, "I go to college in Minnesota. I'm only here for the summer." She said, "Oh, okay, thanks anyway," and wandered off. I suppose I had answered the question she most wanted to have answered, but the assumptions...oof.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Sorry about the waking up early.

I think you could have gotten the racing eggplant anyway, under the category of temporary art rather than food.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

That's what I was going to say, but I know I'm one of the weird ones who will buy a few delicious apples and then create a still life on the table. When I overbought bell peppers, there was a pyramid as well.

Also, 'racing eggplant' is a happifying combination of words.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So far as I am concerned, the only use for Red Delicious apples is to create a still life on the table!

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Oh, no. Apples that have to tell you they are delicious are best used for projectiles. My delicious apples are the ones I get from the Apple Man at the farmer's market.

And now, having said 'delicious' so many times, I am convinced that the word itself would taste good, although it would get me drunk somehow.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, actual delicious apples. Okay then!

Racing Egglplant

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

You are a stronger person than I.

Also, less fond of eggplant.

Re: Racing Egglplant

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Why, do you make yourself spontaneous eggplant for breakfast?

Re: Racing Egglplant

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

For breakfast, no. I rarely make spontaneous breakfast. But I also rarely go grocery shopping before breakfast.

Re: Racing Egglplant

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't, either.

I had breakfast at 4:30 a.m. today.

Now I have to have food again very soon or I will fall over.

This hypoglycemia thing: it is not the barrel of laughs it was advertised to be.

Re: Racing Eggplant

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I think you should return the hypoglycemia, then. Get your money back.

Re: Racing Eggplant

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Clearly I have paid too much for it.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Sympathies. I've been up since 3, tossed and scratched (I think there was a mosquito in the room) for a couple of hours, woke up and checked the grocery store website and found my local one didn't open until 6. So I goofed around until 5:30, showered, dressed for work, and made my trip to the market then.

(But grocery shopping is much faster when you're in the "use up all food int he house before moving" stage.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"Hmm...what goes with 2/3 c. of rice flour, Worcestershire sauce, and cilantro?" Yes, I remember that stage well.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Actually, if you kept it to a spoonful or so of the the flour, it sounds like the beginning of a stirfry sauce. (Well, OK, not sure just how Worcester and cilantro would combine!)

I'm also at the squirrelcage brain stage. "So much to do! So little time! Oh and I forgot this task and this task,a and that one, and I have to remember to pack that thing too!" And those things always seem so insurmountable at 3AM, even if a few hours later they look perfectly possible.

And apparently I get the "Ooh shiny!" effect in early morning marketing too. I don't quite know how else to explain the organic apple-cinnamon Pop-Tart-equivalents.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, I hope your 3 a.m.s get more bearable soon, as it all starts to snowball into doneness.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

I'm also at the squirrelcage brain stage. "So much to do! So little time! Oh and I forgot this task and this task,a and that one, and I have to remember to pack that thing too!" And those things always seem so insurmountable at 3AM, even if a few hours later they look perfectly possible.


Hrm. The squirrel-cage brain is pretty much a constant chez moi these days (though I call it hamster-wheeling), but being a night owl, 3 a.m. is when things look most doable -- it's 3 p.m. where I feel most faint of heart and feeble of brain.

(I keep not getting around to checking in with you even though I keep meaning to -- stuff along the lines of "soveryexcitedforyouandIwannacomevisitandgoodluckandyayandsafejourneysandbessenjeneverandWHEE!")

:-)

[pameladean]

This is also a danger of shopping online for groceries, which can be done at any hour. The shininess is somewhat less in ickle images, but it is there. Also there is no instant gratification, but rather wondering, in the cold light of day, "What IS this? Did I ORDER it?"

I could not have resisted the eggplant. I'd have roasted it while eating something less interesting. then again, I'd probably have forgotten to set a timer and burned it to a crisp.

Would eating something high-protein an hour before bed help, do you think? I have to take stomach-ripping medication before bed, and after vast experimentation have discovered that high-carbohydrate snacks make me wake up very hungry but high-protein stuff doesn't. Then again, my calibrations are different from the get-go.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. What do you roast eggplant with?

I tried ordering online, but I did rather poorly with trying to buy food I couldn't smell. This may also be why fresh produce is my grocery shopping downfall but most packaged foods do not appeal in packaged form at all. Grapefruit, for example: I never sit around home thinking, "I could do with a grapefruit," but when I walk past and smell them, oh.

I will try to think of high-protein things for that timing. High-protein and I don't always get along very well: I already overrely on nuts, I suspect, for my late afternoon crash. This morning when I needed something to keep me from having 10:15 lunch, I had cheese, and that was all right. Maybe if we had edamame in the house. Hmm.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

I am *so* stealing the racing eggplant for a poem. :-D

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do!

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Eggplants have go-faster stripes now?

I fear.

[matastas.livejournal.com]

Depending on the grocery store person, I don't know if it's as much 'mistaking your t-shirt' as it is 'staring at your chest.'

I'm just saying.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But nobody ever really says, "You have breasts -- you must be in a sorority." It's always, "You have breasts with Greek letters on them -- you must be in a sorority."

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Racing eggplant! I do not think I'd have been able to resist. (Daniel and I both quite like eggplant, though I have only a middling-fair record of being able to cook it well.)

I had semi-spontaneous steamed choy sum with soba noodles for breakfast on Sunday, because I got overenthusiastic at the Asian veggies stand at the farmers' market.