Pudding.

My brain continues to feel like a big bowl of tapioca on account of all the sleep I lost earlier in the week. Although I'm sleeping a lot better now, I continue to feel exhausted, and hope I can make up a little of the sleep debt tomorrow morning (thank goodness the library doesn't open until noon on Sundays!). In the meantime I'll just keep chugging the coffee and pray that I don't short circuit my central nervous system in the process of trying to stay awake.

At least if I do crash, I'll only end up face-down on my keyboard here at the Circ Desk! Last night the cabbie who took me home from Salem Depot told me he had just started his eighth 12-hour shift in as many days, all of this after ferrying an Irish immigrant and her two children off to JFK Airport in the middle of the night (unbeknownst to her abusive husband, she was packing up and returning to her native country; when the man awoke and furiously demanded over and over again that the dispatcher put him in touch with her, her response each time was "Fook him!") earlier in the week.

The cabbie was running such an ass-kicking schedule to keep up with the price of gasoline, which comes out of his own pocket and whose now-doubled price he's not allowed to make up by increasing his fares (which are established by municipal fiat in Salem and the surrounding towns). When our idiot President maintains with a straight face that high energy prices are "good for the American economy", I wonder if he has people like this cabbie in mind, who's risking his own neck - as well as mine, thank you very much - just to break even these days. The cruel joke is that my cabbie was probably a Republican and staunch Bush supporter, as many of the drivers are up on the North Shore...

I guess you always hurt the ones you love - or the ones who love you!