Yawn.

I haven't gotten much sleep. I'd wanted to, but couldn't, for most of the night, finally zonking out at around 7:30 AM. Thanks to my alarm clock, I got up again in the neighborhood of 12:30 PM, so I'm still a few hours short. If I'm lucky, I'll get 'em tonight.

On the bright side, my first class is at 6:30 on Mondays. Although I have a nagging feeling that there was a meeting at the school paper at 1 PM. I'm not sure; I forgot to find out when we're having them this semester. Guess I'll find out.

In any event, I have stuff to take care of. On the advice of a professor, I need to bring a stack of newspapers to the 6th floor of Klapper Hall, where the English Department is located, in the hopes that the English professors will pick the things up. Exactly where there's room for them is still a question. Then I have to find a nearby copy shop and get the stuff I need to read and write a journal entry about for tomorrow's class. Plus I need to buy a saucepan. With a cover. And I really need to write up my editorial guidelines.

It's not really the soda machines that have the problem; it's me. I can't really afford to keep buying sodas on campus; two cans of Coca-Cola set me back more than a 2-liter bottle would. And I tend to go through rather a lot of Coca-Cola, especially during late nights working on the paper.

A few possibilities considered and rejected: You can't put carbonated beverages in a Thermos, or so the literature that came with it insists. Schlepping around a two-liter bottle is a bit too unwieldy, even by my standards, and any other potential container would cause the stuff to go flat. So bringing my own soda is mostly out.

How about tea, then? Not a bad idea, but one really bad experience in the past suggests that if you're going to add milk to the stuff, you want to do it as close as possible to when you're going to drink it. Although I was getting over a cold the time I tried preparing it a couple hours in advance, so I'm not sure whether the stomach-turning results were due to the milk curdling or something, or just due to the fact that I was sick. I'd just as soon not try to find out, though.

Without milk... I dunno. I've gotten attached to having the stuff. Except in Sleepytime, or some other herbal tea, but there's no caffeine in Sleepytime, which sort of takes the fun out of it, not to mention the placebo effect.

So it occurred to me last night that the solution was simple: Bring two Thermoses. One for the tea, and a smaller one for the milk.

That I thought of this only suggests that I'm creative. That I didn't dismiss the thought, and, indeed, am still considering it, proves I'm a geek. :-)

(Except I'm not sure that geeks drink tea. A real geek might have found a way of getting cheap Coca-Cola on campus. Hmmmm.)

I've been thinking of taking on the whole "niggardly" brouhaha myself in my column this week, but after finding a number of articles on it in the papers over the past few days, and noting that even she got it right, I'm not sure there's any point in doing so. Unless I can come up with an original slant on the issue, I think I'm going to skip it.

On the other hand, an essay may be in the cards. The question isn't really about one ridiculous incident; the question is about the broader implications of a society that seems exceptionally permissive in some respects, but downright Puritanical in others. What is with people that certain words can't be abided, and even using perfectly good terms that sound like them can ruin somebody's career?

It suddenly occurs to me that this is the sort of thing likely to be covered in "Ideology and the Power of Culture." Good.