and we even found time to squeeze in a lecture

So on Friday, I woke up too early, as usual, with a 5 p.m. deadline on a story I hadn't started, a hangover, and my friend CK sleeping on my floor.

I had every intention of having an omelet at Melrose diner and then seriously hunkering down to do this ultra-complicated story on the joys of neonatal bioethics (yikes!). But since I am easily persuaded and convinced myself I would get more done, I joined CK for a trip to an Internet cafe.

Halfway there, we ingeniously decided to instead just go to our old stomping grounds for free Internet, printer, stapler, the works.

I was feeling a little crunched for time as we giggled our way to get coffee and a cookie and meandered to what felt like every computer lab in the entire university (all occupied). But the hangover was keeping any panic about my story at bay.

We finally settle in, having successfully dodged my good ol' Econ professor and found an empty lab (save for the young man who informed us that it might a little strange but he was going to change clothes right then and there if that's OK with us.... "Oh it's not just a little strange," CK tells him, "it's a lot strange" and we proceed to talk incessantly and nervously for the next three minutes.) We are working away for a whopping 20 minutes before CK's very important appointment (hair cut), when who should walk into the computer lab? Ellen, our professor from DC, in town doing some general university brown-nosing. Ten minutes later, we had somehow agreed to speak to the new Intro class about the wonders of DC reporting. It was noon and I had barely a lede.

"But I haven't taken a shower!" CK tells Ellen. And I, eyes-swollen and feeling roughly like a pile of poop with a looming deadline and nary a clue about the complexities of neonatal ethics, was rocking a danky camo T-shirt from high school and dirty jeans. That didn't stop us. Nope. We stood up there and urged those fresh faces to surrender to the DC pull. I gave my shpiel about how I had no intention of going back to that god awful swamp, but that Ellen showed me the light it completely changed my Medill experience and my life.

We answered questions about how to find stories, what to do about housing, what our client papers were like. The wildest part was that she introduced us as alums. Yowza.

So by 12:30 we were out of there and racing to the car, just so we could sit painfully in traffic for the next 45 minutes, making CK late for her appointment and my head pound ever-so-slightly with dread, phrases like "moral consensus" and "hubris of the intelligencia" swirling around my mind. I could feel the time slipping through my fingers.

I finally got home, was visited by my muse and miraculously hammered out the story (haven't seen the edits yet, so not sure it was of the greatest caliber) and even had time for nap before heading to the airport to meet the BF.