PMS: Pretty Much Stressed

Major upset: I misplaced my mitten.

During a day packed with classes, I found myself racing back and forth between campus and the Fort...no time for lunch, late to class, forgot to save a file on my flash drive.

Then, as I was about to head home for the final time, I reached my hand into my righthand pocket and found it empty of the righthand mitten that resides there.

Panic.

Why is it that I can't keep track of my belongings? It should be simple thing. Mittens, for instance: most people graduate from their mom clipping mittens to their sleeves after age eight.

But there I was at 5:45 pm, late for dinner at the Fort, frantically retracing the last three hours of my steps. Classroom, hallway, stairwell, lobby, classroom, stairwell, classroom. After the fourth time I obsessively scrutinized the floor of my Journalism classroom, eyeballs ricocheting like pinballs at a speed too frenzied to register any coherent object, I was nearly in tears.

Why cry over a mitten?

First of all, because it's not just any mitten. It's MY mitten, my toasty warm beautiful mitten, and part of the only pair I have aside from a some well-loved gloves with holes growing in the fingertips. Second, because it's part of the recently-cursed winter ensemble I meticulously assembled before my first year of college: high tech brands at brilliant clearance prices. Now, the hat and coat have disappeared in a manner of weeks, and all I have left are the mittens.

By the time I made it to the third floor of the Academic Building, I was nearly hyperventilating (granted, this may have been more a product of running up three flights of stairs than of my increasing anxiety and frustration). But when I stormed into the Computer Lab, coming unglued, there it lay, limply upturned where it had fallen from my pocket, illuminated by a pool of light from heaven.

I snatched it up, pulled it on, chastised my mitten and myself, and headed back to the Fort for a drink.

My beverage of choice in times of stress?

Chocolate milk.

We never buy it--I'm sure no one else in the house is that keen on it, and I believe it too frivolous to request on the shopping list. But there in the refrigerator when I finally reached home, was a half-gallon on the first shelf, waiting for me.