Happy Tuesday

            Wake up much too early for your taste. You’d rather be in bed for at least another three hours, and yearn for the tender embrace of your comforter, but your six-thirty alarm pries you from its loving arms and unceremoniously shoves you out into the world. You flip the switch on your Mr. Coffee and slide into the shower, wishing it was warm but knowing that Meghan from 210-W wakes up thirty minutes earlier than you do and turns the downstairs bathroom into a sauna for every one of those minutes, so all you can hope for is a lukewarm stream at best, trying to remind yourself that one hundred years ago this would be the height of luxury. After the shower, which was absolutely delightful all things considered, you stiffly slide into your jeans and graphic tee, think about spicing it up and throwing on a cardigan today, but instead opt for the more practical flannel that you wear about every other day, and hurry at a brisk pace out the door.

            You’re about halfway to class when you realize you forgot to get your off-brand coffee out of the pot and that the warmer will be left on for the rest of the day, and when you get back to your room at the end of the day a strange charred film will have materialized out of the liquid on the bottom of the carafe to leave another permanent stain on your poor Mr. Coffee. That is a problem to be dealt with later, as the more prominent issue is the strain you can already feel tugging at your grey matter from missing your daily dose of wake-up drug. So you adjust your course to stop by the school café to get a different kind of off-brand coffee; the kind with enough sugar in it to distract from the fact that the espresso shots went bitter on the machine long before you approached the line.

            Getting in line, you look at your phone without actually looking at anything on your phone. You must appear to be busy doing something so no one will talk to you but if you are actually doing something, someone might see something on your phone screen and judge you, so you just flip back and forth through the selection options across various messaging apps. As your turn at the front approaches, you try to think of the baristas name you’re about to order from, because you know you’ve had class with her before, but you can’t think of it, and so you try to think of something funny to say because if you get her to laugh then it doesn’t matter that you don’t remember her name, but then you can’t think of something witty to say so instead you just order your quad espresso and walk to the side to wonder if you have social anxiety that should have been diagnosed in high school or if you simply cannot function without absurd amounts of caffeine anymore.

            Finally receiving your sweet, sweet bean juice, you move onto class, only arriving two minutes late today to mild glares from your classmates by the door and complete ambivalence from your professor. You settle into your seat and try not to let the existential dread set in. Don’t let it set it. Grimace, because it’s only Tuesday.