how i spent my wednesday night

so wednesday night was interesting.

i was tooling around in the apartment, watching the tivo'd america's next top model and veronica mars, packing, digesting a delicious indian dinner, generally being a schlub. 'round 11 or so, i checked the weather and discovered that there was a severe storm warning for thursday, with snow accumulation of up to 6 inches or so by evening. cripes, i thought. my flight was around 7pm thursday night, so i thought it'd make sense to instead get to the airport super early and grab the first flight out of dodge so i didn't get stuck in any sort of midwestern snowstorm.

around midnight, i had finished packing and went to bed. except. i couldn't sleep. it wasn't the noisy upstairs neighbor's fault, this time - he's been ominously silent for days now. just occasionally i am struck by bouts of insomnia. it probably didn't help knowing that in order to get to bumfuck airport and catch the first flight out, i had to wake up somewhere around 3 am.

it used to be that when i had a bout of insomnia i would agonize about it for hours, flopping back and forth in bed and stabbing my pillow for its inability to send telepathic sleep waves to my head. now, being the mature and patient adult that i am, i only flop about agonizingly for 10 minutes or so, then resign myself to the fact that i'm not getting sleep and go read a book or tool around on the internet till i'm yawning. or till i shotgun a bottle of nyquil.

this morning (ie, 2am-ish), i had a bit of time to waste, and i knew i'd be needing caffeine anyway, so i thought i'd indulge in a favorite habit of mine from my year in italy - making a homemade cappuccino with my stove top espresso maker and little milk foamer. yummy, right? i do it all the time. i packed the espresso in, put it on my oven, lit the burner and went about my merry way.

a few minutes later i realized that the espresso maker was not making the normal gurgly sounds it does when the espresso is bubbling up through the filter. huh, i thought. i went to investigate. everything appeared more or less normal, though no actual espresso liquid was showing up in the top part of it. but suddenly, it all smelled a bit smoky. then there was a loud, sudden pop from either the burner or the espresso maker - i couldn't tell as i nearly ran out of the kitchen, convinced it was all going to melt my face off. i crept back in after a second, and there was another weird, loud pop, and a fair amount of smoke.

shite, i thought, eloquently. then i thought brilliantly: maybe i should remove the espresso maker from the burner so it doesn't all pop to hell and singe my eyebrows in the process.

do you all know what a stovetop espresso maker looks like? like this:

except without the smiley face. i put that on. it adds a nice touch. his name is mario.

i went to grab the handle, the sturdy little bendy handle that has served me so well for the past three years since i bought mario in the italian equivalent of a walmart. but as i grabbed the handle, i watched in horror as it DISINTEGRATED IN MY HAND, sort of, and became a STEAMING MASS OF PLASTIC that detached itself from the metal body. i recoiled in disgust as i flung the shapeless thing to the floor.

then mario looked like this:

and i looked like this:

since i am smrt, i knew the maker would be hot without a handle, but it still needed to be removed, so i put on my oven mitts to take it off the stove where it was still inexplicably smoking. but as i brushed the top of the maker, its little black nubbin of topper also slithered away into a steaming black mass of plastic. and then mario looked like this:

well. crap, i thought. and then i suddenly realized there was kind of a lot of smoke going on. in seeming slow motion, i turned around to look at the smoke alarm that resides above the kitchen door. we stood locked in gaze. please, i said to it silently. it's, like, 2:30 am. there are innocent people sleeping in my building. i just lost mario to a terrible and utterly confusing gas burner incident. if this happens, i will be damned with months of karmic sound retribution in the form of my upstairs neighbor doing vigorous jumping jacks to toad the wet sprocket even more than he usually does. please, please do not do this to me.

the evil, merciless red eye of the smoke alarm blinked once at me, and then it went off.

"OH MY GAWD! OH MY GAWD!" i screamed silently to myself as i a) started waving a dish towel around frantically b) wrenched open the door and threw mario outside on the balcony c) realized that throwing this inexplicably hot metal thing onto the pile of dead leaves on my wooden balcony might not result in the best ending (see exhibit A) d) threw mario in the sink where he started steaming and sizzling up a storm e) began hitting the smoke alarm with a spatula as i am not tall enough to reach its off switch on my own.

it was, as you might imagine, all very graceful.

thankfully, the smoke alarm went off after about 15 seconds, and no one came banging angrily on my door, so i'm just going to assume everybody slept like babies through its piercing, epic screech.

then, with the magic of red bull (the only other caffeine in the house) i proceeded to stumble my way to the shower, stumble my way downstairs, stumble my way to the cab, into the airport, onto a 6:30am flight, and stumbled my way to shaw where i will be for the next 10 or so days. let's hang out, fools. i promise not to melt your appendages off.