Saps

It was a long day with not enough coffee in it.

Coffee: I drink between seven and fifteen cups of coffee a day. This morning I got up around 3:30 and couldn't go back to sleep. I didn't start drinking coffee until about 4:30 a.m. I had one and a half cups, then took a half-hour nap before I had to get up and start a ridiculously long day. That was the end of my coffee intake until about noon. It doesn't seem like a long time, but when you're a coffee addict you'll crawl those last couple of hours.

How The Brain Functions Without Caffeine: I was supposed to meet my niece at school to help her sort through a handful of red tape-ish things: financial aid, registering for the GED, talking to a counselor to make sure that she's taking the right classes to petition the nursing program. I ended up meeting her on campus, but I was a little early, so I went to the cafeteria to buy a fountain soda, a diet Pepsi. (It's caffeine, yes, but it's certainly not coffee--but then again neither is the "coffee" they serve in the cafeteria.)

I got a cup, 32 oz., and put ice in it and filled it up with diet Pepsi. Then I went looking for a straw and a lid and, finding them, discovered that I was already holding a straw and lid. When did that happen? The Brain seemed noncommittal. Short-term memory? Maybe later.

So Tired, Me: What the hell? I am so tired recently and then I can't stay asleep. I'm so tired that my eyes are all burny and achy. It doesn't help that yesterday I put my contacts in for dinner and then when I took them out later, it felt like my eyeballs had undergone some kind of dessication process designed to make me feel about five-hundred times more tired than I was already. Those hygroscopic contact lenses are so not worth it.

Acid-Base Chemistry: One of the things I hate about chemistry is acids. Another thing I hate about chemistry is bases. So of course today's tutoring session with my niece was about acid-base chemistry. I should not try to tutor while sleep deprived because I am normally pretty short tempered, but when you mix sleeplessness and lack of caffeine together with acid-base chemistry, you get ka-boom. (I had an organic chemistry professor who used to write "ka-boom" on test exams when students started willy-nilly mixing explosive reactants together to try to synthesize molecules.) Ka-boom is not a desirable thing in a tutor.

Sap: I am only thirty-seven years old. I am very old in dog years but very young in redwood years. I'm practically a sapling. In the whole of my life, I've probably had fewer than a dozen gray or white hairs on my head--until recently, that is. I looked in the mirror the other day and I could see five gray hairs. FIVE of them, all at the same time, growing out of my head.

God, this is so self-indulgent, this talk of gray hair.

The Brain has long longed for gray hair (but all-at-once gray, all silvery gray, like Georgia O'Keeffe), but now can't decide how to feel about these five invaders. Do we welcome them with angst or with joy? I nixed The Brain's suggestion to pluck them, but I haven't nixed the idea of dying my hair. (Though if I dyed it at this point, it'd have to be blue or perhaps green. I've always wanted hair the color of sunlight through a leafy canopy of trees in spring.)

It Seems Like: It seems to me like I should know a poem about a tree, no? At least one. But I don't. It seems to me like the internet should know a poem about a tree if I don't, no? But the internet only gave me a lot of hippy-dippy crap written by hippy-dippy, poetry-writing tree huggers who apparently became hippy-dippy, poetry-writing tree huggers because they failed English in college and writing crap poems about trees was the only avenue left open to them. Or something. Something?

I didn't find a single poem about a tree that was worthy of its subject, but I did find a poem by William Carlos Williams. It's still not worthy of its subject, but at least it's by a credible poet, right? Anyway, here it is:

WINTER TREES
by William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

Eh. It's not the greatest poem, really. I think writing poems about trees must be more difficult than writing poems about love. Every putz thinks his pen is up to it, and every putz is wrong, no?

I See What You Did There: That was a joke.