When Your Soul and Your Foot Fall Asleep

My right foot and my soul fell asleep at work today. Boring, hope-sucking projects will do that. Here’s what I did to wake them up:

• I stomped on the floor several times, really hard (with my foot, not my soul–ouch), like a horse trying to communicate. This made one of my coworkers look over curiously. Interestingly, this is the same co-worker with whom I have a secret work language. “How are you?” we ask each other. We actually mean “How do you feel about work right now?” Accordingly, the responses range from “I’m pretty good” to “Need. Chocolate. Now.” and untranslatable noises. So when she looked over at me and my stomping foot, I’m afraid she may have thought that I had upped our language to the next level–morse code. I hope I haven’t established a new precedence, because I’d hate to have to learn how to stomp “chocolate” or “help” or “tell me it’s not Monday.”
• I ate my emergency candy. This chocolate was only to be eaten in cases of extreme crisis, and after much consideration and careful thought, I ripped into that sucker like the tasmanian devil. My soul needed that chocolate fix! After the initial taste, I tried to be like Charlie (of Willy Wonka fame) and only eat a little bit every once in awhile–to preserve the chocolately goodness and stretch the enjoyment out. But my self-control is minimal when it comes to chocolate. I’ve now decided that your name must be Charlie and your grandparents must all sleep in the same bed if you hope to achieve true chocolate rationing. 
• I worked on a different assignment for a little while. In theory, this was a great idea–a way to avoid work, but still get work done. But my distraction turned out to be an article on bakeries that needed fact-checked and edited. This meant looking at pictures of  gorgeous, scrumptious cakes and reading mouth-watering descriptions of baked goods. Since my last bit of work chocolate was now a distant memory, this was cruel…cruel indeed.  
• I took a ten minute break and walked around the outside of the building. It was pouring rain and I had no umbrella, so I mean I actually walked the outside of the building, following it’s shape and staying under the two-foot eave all the way around. It was nice to breathe a little fresh air (it’s a small office with, shall we say, unique smells) and look at natural light instead of computer light. But I felt a little like a crazy person, following the outline of the building and muttering to myself. (Did I mention that I was muttering? I’m telling you, it was that kind of project.) There aren’t too many other tenants in this office space, but I did pass a few who happened to be sitting right at their windows. Maybe they, too, were bored to the point of physical and emotional (spiritual?) paralysis. If so, I’d like to think that I provided a brief distraction–maybe even a wake-up call. At the very least, they could watch me hobble past and think “At least I’m not an intern.”
• I thought about the project and my foot and my soul and decided yeah, I can blog about this.

 And that’s when I started to feel tingles in my foot and my soul.