a few days ago, i wrote about how liberating and exciting and inspiring i find being home alone (for a few days). and, true to my word, my weekend home alone was liberating, exciting and inspiring.
and also terrifying. i might have forgotten to mention that adjective in my haste to use the others. see, i get these crazy ideas when i’m home alone at night. lately i do this thing where i come up with a plan of how a murderer would get into my room, what weak points in the structure he or she would exploit, and i picture myself, frozen in fear under my duvet, trying desperately to get a hold of 911 without being heard by the intruder(s).
these lovely bursts of rational thinking are, of course, exacerbated by late-night chocolate. oh, i know. i shouldn’t have chocolate ever. i mean never. never as in not ever. but i especially shouldn’t have chocolate late at night.
at the very best, chocolate makes me hyper. hyper like a 4 year old. a 4 year old on caffeine. and sugar. and speed. (the darker the chocolate, the worse it is, obviously). it makes me restless. it makes me talk faster. if i eat enough, it makes me shaky. it makes me giddy. it makes me unreasonable. sometimes, it makes me panic. always it makes my mind race.
but last night i really really really wanted something chocolatey. i don’t often crave chocolate, and i don’t usually have any around the house. (in hindsight i’m thinking that maybe i should keep a snickers bar or the like around for this sort of situation should it rise up again. so i don’t have to do what i did). anyway i had eaten a few chocolate-covered mini donettes earlier in the day (those are pretty harmless), but that was all the chocolate i had.
or so i thought (cue sinister, plot-thickening music).
but then i remembered: my parents had mailed me this absolutely adorable baking gift. it’s a huge mug (H U G E) that comes with a mini wisk and a cake mix. and you put the batter in the mug and bake it. well, the cake mix that came with the mug was a dark chocolate molten cake. it was something like 110% cocoa (or thereabouts). (it might be worth noting that only now that i live 3,000 miles from home do my parents give me chocolate as a gift. even when i lived in texas, a mere 1,500 miles from my parents’ door, i never got a chocolate cake present).
anyway i was thrilled. i started to bake the cake — and spilled about 1/4 of the mix all over. the powder was super fine and got all over the place — my shirt, pants, the floor, the counter, puffs of it in the air (i didn’t inhale). clearly i was hyper enough without anymore chocolate. but then i ate 1/6 of it. at 11:30 pm. ohhhh yeah.
in addition to envisioning my demise at the hand of intruding murderers, i also had crazy weird dreams all night — strange and panicky dreams, and it took me about 30 minutes in the morning to sort out the differences between reality and my dreamworld. many of you are lucky you didn’t get a phone call around 3 am from me wanting to save you from some imminent danger.
but, hey, maybe its not too late. there’s 5 pieces of that cake left. muhahahaha.
