I’m sure you will all be pleased to know that I continued my plan of procrastination all weekend. Nary a single essay did I grade! “Tra la la,” I sang to myself, “Work? What work?”

Instead, I spent the weekend holed up in the apartment while someone cooked an amazing Mexican feast and we watched the second half of Doctor Who season six, the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, Dark City, and Gattaca. So that was the kind of weekend it was. Super lazy and indulgent, with a tinge of dark, dystopian sci-fi.

Come yesterday morning, however, it was time to get back to work. I had a pile of research papers to grade and six (six!) sets of quizzes also staring me in the face. And I did them. All of them. Along with a super speedy four mile run and some household puttering. I don’t know how I got all that done yesterday; honestly I have no idea. But thankfully, I did.

In a less awesome turn of events, I overslept this morning. I had just downloaded a new clock radio app for my iPhone (you can wake up to any one of thousands of radio stations, and because I am a predictable liberal intellectual nerd, I of course picked NPR), and in the process of waking up, I kept turning the volume down lower and lower until I’d managed to oversleep by half an hour. When I checked the volume it was down to zero. Oops. Guess I didn’t really want to hear that news so eagerly after all.

I quickly got dressed, slapped some makeup on, coated myself liberally in deodorant, and got ready to go in to work. The one good thing? I had programmed my coffee pot to start brewing at 6:00, so while I was busily dreaming and turning down the radio volume, it was hard at work percolating my morning dose of caffeine (or, as I like to think of it, Precious Life Juice). This is one advantage to making coffee in an electric pot rather than a French Press or a Chemex: programmed brew. Love it.

I only had one more hurdle to overcome this morning on my way to campus: I was out of gas. Fuel light on, gas needle sitting perceptibly below the “empty” line, OUT of gas. I had to stop at the station. And my gas cap would not open.

So here’s the situation: my car has that little lever near the driver’s seat that you pull in order to open the little door over the gas cap. Know what I mean? Except when I pull the little lever, the little lid does not open. It tries to open but it won’t swing all the way out. It just lifts up about a quarter inch. I’d need to pull the lever with one hand while reaching back to open the lid with the other hand. Being built much like my dachshund, however, all torso and no limbs, I am not able to reach that far. So I’m stuck trying to open the GDMF-ing gas cap with no gas in the car and no time because I’m running late to work.

Luckily, I am a problem solver with a gifted understanding of spatial relationships (just ask my high school guidance counselor). So I grabbed the seatbelt and wrapped it around the little lever near the floor of the car, used it to lift the lever with one hand, and reached back with my car key in the other hand to pry open the lid. And boom goes the dynamite. We have gas cap access.

Sometimes it’s like I do everything possible to make my own life harder: procrastinate until I have a seemingly impossible amount of work to catch up on, neglect to fill my gas tank, use an untested new alarm method on an early wake-up day. Why, self, why? Maybe sometimes I just like the challenge of racing out the door only to have to MacGyver my way across town to campus on time. Maybe I do.