About halfway through, I decided I was just asking for trouble, and decided to lean over my desk for the rest of the meal. Two bites later, a piece of lettuce (covered in dressing) fell off my fork, hit the side of the desk, slid off the desk and onto my pants, then slid off my pants and landed on the floor.

It’s things like this that make me think God doesn’t exist.

I wake up with a sore throat and headache (each of varying intensity). It starts to dissipate as the day goes on, and I usually feel fine by the early afternoon.

I’ve been getting about six hours of sleep per night. Maybe going to bed earlier will help.

It’s been a lifelong habit. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. In fact, once I do end up successfully stopping, I may start again. I just want to see if I can do it.

So far, it’s been a lot harder than I expected. I sometimes catch myself halfway through biting a nail (of course, I have to finish at that point, lest I leave half a nail hanging off). For the first few days, I wasn’t even sure if I’d be able to do it.

Now, my nails are longer than they’ve been since I was a little kid. Once they get to the point where a normal person would cut them with a nail clipper, I’ll consider myself victorious.

Sometimes, he sets my alarm clock back 30 minutes. Other times, when he wakes up way before me, he just turns the alarm clock off and I sleep for another three hours. He used to whisper in my ear (when I was in school) that I was way ahead in my classes and that I should take a break from them, or at least from my earliest one. Now, he looks for my work laptop so he can send an “out sick” email to my boss.

Yeah, he’s a jerk, but I’ve got his number. I put my alarm clock at the other end of my room, and leave my work laptop out in the car. He still makes it to the “snooze” button from time to time, but I always wake up and stop him before he can do anything more dangerous.

Problem is, I have to stay awake to keep him at bay. I have a 45-minute drive to work, which is almost entirely straight highway driving. From time to time, I catch him reaching for the wheel, or moving towards one of the pedals. So far, nothing’s come of it, but something in the back of my head (maybe him) tells me that it’s only a matter of time.

Today, after getting the recipe from her, I made it myself. The weirdest feeling was opening the oven halfway through. There was a dish I’d seen dozens of times before, but for the first time, it wasn’t in the oven at my house (the one I grew up in), and it was made by me instead of my mom. It was very surreal.

I haven’t tasted it yet. But when I do, I’ll post about it again. I also took some pictures, so I’ll be sure to put them up (once I find the cord for my camera).

TicTac container. Seriously, it saved my life this morning.

One day, with the prospect of playing a drinking game while watching Independence Day (drink every time there’s an explosion… ughhh…), I decided I’d try a lite beer, so I wouldn’t feel like I’d eaten an entire loaf of bread after my third bottle. I did a little research, and found that people had great things to say about Sam Adams Light. I got a six-pack, and to my surprise, I didn’t hate it as much as I hated other beers. $9.00 for a six-pack of somewhat-tolerable liquid is pushing it, but at least I could play drinking games with my friends without resorting to Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

The important part was this: instead of tasting like beer (and, by association, garbage), it tasted like water with a slight aftertaste of beer/garbage. This made me wonder: is there a beer that really just tastes like water? I asked my friend Trenton. The answer? Natty Light.

I’d been looking in all the wrong places. The people who had been telling me the “best beers” were people who loved beer and think it tastes like the nectar of the gods. I hate beer and think it tastes like the nectar that drips from a leaky garbage bag, so of course, the best beer for me is the one that tastes as little like anything as possible. And as fortune would have it, the best beer for me is also the cheapest beer. For less than the cost of two six-packs of Sam Adams light, I can buy a 30-rack of Natty Light.

Don’t get me wrong, it still tastes gross. In the end, I really just don’t like the taste of alcohol very much, and beer is no exception. But unlike with “good” beer, I can drink a few cans of Natty Light without dreading the taste of garbage each sip. And that’s something I think we can all drink to.

I got a great job offer from Cisco.

I have an interview with Google next Friday.

This is a November that I will remember.