Wild Yam Root looks, smells, and tastes like dirt.

Last night I woke up at 3:30 AM. My mind automatically told me to go back to sleep, but for whatever reason, my body was having none of it. I wandered out to the living room. Want a soda? Why, yes, thank you very much! Pop...fizz. Perhaps the guinea pigs need some food. Is the newspaper here yet? (Don't try to reason with a half-asleep wanderer.)

Finally, I woke up enough to realize that I needed to be back in bed, so I drained the soda and lay back down. Toss, turn. Eric had taken advantage of my stroll to sprawl out in the center of the bed, and he was giving up no territory willingly. My nose was congested. Get back up, go find a tissue. Snort. Push Eric over, lie down again.

I finally managed to drift off to sleep again, but I woke up every half hour or so until morning. Bah. I'm surprisingly refreshed, though; these days I seem to need quite a bit more sleep than I did in my former life as an Energizer-Bunny/Undergrad student.

One thing I noticed during my wanderings: my mind doesn't shut up. I mean, it seemed to be carrying on a full and enlivened conversation without the benefit of my consciousness. I think the voices were discussing a particular dinner party, though it apparently was one to which I myself had not been invited.

No, I'm not insane.

Maybe I'm going out on a limb here; maybe nobody else has ever experienced this, and when I step out of the library this evening, I'll find men in white coats waiting to take me to a pleasant and safe new home. Has nobody else ever found themselves continuing a conversation long after the other person has left the room? Have you ever done this without even noticing it until far into the discussion? I mean, it's not a question of whether or not I talk back to the voices in my head; they seem to get along just splendidly without me.

Anyway, it seems that they're at their liveliest when I'm half-asleep. Interestingly, it appears that they always use proper grammatical structure, and interrupt each other for correction when they don't. (Thanks, Mom; you've embedded yourself even more deeply into my psyche than I had originally thought.)

You can all notify the authorities, now.

Hey, can somebody tell me whether or not an anteater and an aardvark are the same thing? I always thought they were, but a little patron is trying to inform me that they aren't. He only wants books on anteaters, you see, not aardavrks. Not that it really matters; the only books coming up on my screen for his level are all about Arthur, anyway.

Eric talked to his mom last night. She's feeling better, but they transferred her to another, better hospital, just in case. I wasn't really listening to their conversation until I heard him start laying into her about smoking. I believe his words were,

Mom, I know you won't do it for me, and you won't do it for Bryan or Dad, but do you think you could quit for your grandchildren? Because I don't remeber Grandma Andril, and I'm sad about that. Could you quit just to see your own grandkids?

I really hope she takes that to heart. I didn't ask him, but I could almost bet that her answer to him was,

We'll see.