Well, other than regular old tea.

Important thing I forgot: Starbucks chai tea latte has more caffeine than the tea I’m used to drinking and, thus, having one at 8:30 tonight was a STUPID STUPID idea on my part.

No wonder I can’t fall asleep. I’ve been in bed since 10. I’ve watched a pretty awful movie on Starz - “Birth” with Nicole Kidman… the one where a woman thinks her dead husband has been reincarnated in a 10-year old kid because the kid knows some personal stuff about them. He bathes with her - no touchie, but still tremendously disturbing. I watched it anyway; it was one of those films I just couldn’t stop watching despite the crappitude. I thought it might put me to sleep due to the hypnotic/soporific qualities… but no.

I’m still wide awake.

I’ve taken to sleeping with my Mogu Body Buddy pillow. It’s a 4-foot long body pillow… filled with those awesome microbead thingies… and it’s royal blue… and looks like this:

It’s pathetically huggable. Or I’m pathetic. Or it’s huggable.

Regardless of which version you accept as true, it’s apparent that there is a significant percentage of the world’s population that is pathetic and calls for huggable pillows since they are being manufactured in various shapes and sizes… and being sold in various colors.

I finished my book and am waiting for a new batch of books to come from Amazon. I ordered John Barth’s “The Sot-Weed Factor”, Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon”, and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, just to round things out.

This is infuriating. I’m pissed off at myself for just blithely ignoring or being stupid enough to forget that caffeine has this strong an affect on me or remember how much of the damn stuff is in the chai (then again, Theresa and I each had one and we both commented on how much of the chai concentrate the barista used - it was almost too spicy and too sweet to imbibe). It’s almost 2 am and thus too late to take a sleeping pill since that would almost definitely result in an inability to wake up on time at 7:30.

Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. These are the moments when having someone around to knock me unconscious would be good. Smelling salts could revive me whenever needed… and there would be no prerequisite 7 hours of sleep, as with the sleeping pill.

I wonder if smelling salts are still available to the general consumer - since women no longer walk around tightly corseted and faint at the mere mention of exposed ankle flesh. Smelling salts are:

Ammonium carbonate, (NH3)2CO3·H2O, is a colorless-to-white crystalline solid commonly known as smelling salts; in water solution it is sometimes called aromatic spirits of ammonia. Smelling salts are used to arouse consciousness because the release of ammonia [NH3] gas that accompanies their use irritates the membranes of the nose and lungs, and thereby triggers an inhalation reflex (that is, it causes the muscles that control breathing to work faster).

A-ha. Well, I want to sleep. Maybe I’ll just screw it and take the sleeping pill. I am taking the train tomorrow, so perhaps I can even get a family member to drive me to the station if I’m too groggy to pilot an automobile myself. I can’t sit here all night, after all.