Caffeine + Dessert > (and/or better than) Sleep + Carbs

I’m seeing if I can beat the clock for this post because I have ELEVEN minutes before my computer restarts for automatic updates, WHICH, by the way, I’m highly curious why this is the third time in two days it’s doing this. Really?? I think it’s just to annoy me.

I have two observations to note, and these are learned truths that I have discovered through personal experience:

1. I am a much more pleasant person when I’ve had my morning coffee

2. Carbs really are the devil; ice cream is the better choice

The first truth was evidenced this morning when I went to play tennis with Holly. (Holly, I apologize for being a big, dull dud who had lead feet and absolutely no sense of humor for the first half hour/45 minutes we played.) Normally I wake up at 6am, and in recent past, I’ve been even waking up at 5:15 to ensure I get the most out of my day (most = exercise, sunshine, reading, editing other people’s writing, and then mayyyybe working on my thesis. A little bit. In sporadic bursts.) Well this morning, since I didn’t have my usual round of morning escapades that include classes at the gym as well as tennis, I decided to sleep in until I needed to be at tennis. I could withstand not eating for an hour if I got that extra couple hours of sleep, yeah??

NOOO. Well, yes. Well, I don’t know. All I know is that sleeping-in in conjunction with no caffiene, food, or my usual two hours of early morning time spent WAKING UP are absolutely detrimental, not only for my happiness, but the happiness of others (again, insert apologies). We shan’t even discuss how it effected my tennis game (Oh, Legs? You don’t understand the concept of movement? How lovely.)

It was a rough morning. Not only did I feel like a lumbering dead weight, like that dead guy in Hocus Pocus who comes out of the grave and stumbles around because he’s been crammed, unmoving, into a coffin for hundreds of years, but I also had zero sense of humor. It was like my eyes glazed over and my brain lost its synapse connections, and after double faulting for the 37th (approx) time, I would have cracked my own racquet had I the strength to do so.

Finally, around 8:15 (we met at 7:30), I started to –not so much play better, though I was able to lift my feet off the ground enough to get in a few good serves–smile again. And the fact that neither Holly nor I could win on our serve for an entire hour was considered FUNNY when I stood there at Ad-Out, chalking up another one to the tennis gods.

2. Carbohydrates vs. Dessert (though most specifically Ice Cream, Breyers fat-free smooth and dreamy chocolate fudge, aka heaven in your mouth in semi-frozen form)

I gave up dessert for Lent, both because I knew it would a challenge, and also because I thought it was probably not a good idea to eat ice cream every day for lunch, which I’d taken to doing. Instead I chose to consume cinnamon raisin toast as a dessert alternative, which I ate before, but have now doubled in quantity. Plus, my parents, the loving and amazing cooks that they are, pay no attention to my overall carbohydrate intake and thus feed me devil food products like baked potatos and cheese-stuffed tortellini. I mean, seriously. How inconsiderate.

So I will let the results do the talking. They say: Jenny, for all your month-long no-dessert effort, you’ve lost one pound, which fluctuates on a daily basis.

Therefore I say, I’d rather be happy. Give me a cookie and ice cream, please.

(And in case you were wondering, epic fail on the time limit thing.)