unfinished business

once again, i have proven that bringing work home results in either (and i’m talking about the times i don’t connect to the net):

1. me drinking way too much coffee and typing maniacally through the night (this happens only 0.12% of the time)

or

2. me exploring the forgotten files stored in “my documents” (this happens 100% minus 0.12% of the time)

last night, i found an unfinished essay i was supposed to submit to legmanila (to the curious: i used to contribute regularly to an online magazine. don’t bother looking for it. legmanila.com is now some kind of search engine. or something.)

i was writing about narcolepsy and the opening paragraph was supposed to be:

Have you ever fallen asleep while writing with a tech pen on a mimeographed sheet? If you distinctly remember waking up holding an empty Pilot shell, with your cheek partially stuck to a huge damp blotch of ink on what was supposed to be your morning report, then the answer is a resounding ‘yes.’

i don’t remember what the rest of the essay was supposed to say, but i do recall that i wanted to end with the story of how one time, while accidentally falling asleep in the middle of a narcolepsy lecture in med school, i woke up with the professor’s laser pointer directed at my huge forehead. i, along with a third of that class, provided her with live visual aid.

(in other news, some of the newer laser pointers don’t project just plain dots or arrows. i’ve seen stick figures and animals and entire words and other shapes. i suppose they had to come up with stuff like that partly to perk up an audience ready to fall into a coma. “look! an outline of a heart on top of the 34th bullet of the consolidated company action plan for 2005. time to wake up!”)