Block o' What?

I have been meaning to report on the progress I made this week on the grad school search, but I am thoroughly tired of the whole thing right now after spending 6-8 hours a day on it. So that will have to wait until I can bring myself to think about it again, let alone have any enthusiasm to write about it. I will leave you instead with this minutiae.

Two nights ago, I went to bed at midnight and early in the morning dreamed that I was in grad school. Things were going really well, but then in the dream I had this realization that it wasn't true and I woke up, saw that it was about 5:15 a.m., and could not go back to sleep. Kind of depressing. I was fatigued all day, though I did manage to do an incredibly long treadmill session and limit myself to one "medium" (read: pretty damn big) cup of iced tea and about half a dozen of Robert's tortilla chips when I accompanied him on an evening Taco Cabana run. (Given that fatigue plus low mood plus access to Mexican food generally equals 1000 calories of food consumption, this was something of an achievement.)

Last night, I woke up after about two hours with excruciating pain in my left knee and pain in the other joints of that leg. It kept me up a while, but I was able to fall asleep after what felt like forever but was really not too much time. Later, I dreamed that Jefe and I were playing some kind of board game with an ex-coworker of mine E (a great guy) and I got a card/roll/whatever that allowed me to draw from this big plastic Jack o'Lantern filled with goodies. (Jefe had already drawn out about 37 cents in random coins.) I pulled out a rectangular piece of candy that was about 1.5" tall and about 4" long called "M&M Block o' Choc." E said, "I know that you don't really like chocolate, right?" and I had to admit that I don't really like chocolate. And he said, "I do, and I know your sister does, so give it here." I did. He pulled out a knife and started cutting the bar into thin slices, revealing that the Block o' Choc was, indeed, a big block of chocolate with tiny M&Ms embedded throughout. It appeared to be dark chocolate and was surprisingly appealing. E started to offer Jefe some but then said, "Oh wait, since this chocolate isn't fair trade I guess I shouldn't tempt you to exploitation."

Note: I have no reason to think she wouldn't eat fair trade chocolate, but it would be like E to pretend that hogging chocolate is actually helping you live up to your obviously superior value system. And it's clear that this approach would not work with me, even in jest. I mean, exploitation is my middle name. In fact, for a while I considered going by S. Exploitation Porter but decided that it would be too easy for someone to confuse this with Expoitation S. Porter, which yields the initials ESP, truly an unacceptable result.