Addictions don't always come with the shakes.
Nor do they have sweat dripping down your face
Or the gasping whimpers while curled in a corner.
Sometimes, they are just that moment at midnight
When you are still awake and staring at the window
Or just a feeling of something horribly wrong.
Sometimes, you don't really realize your addiction
Until that first moment of exquisite relief
You feel when you start right back up.

For the last two weeks, I've had a ritual. Every morning, I'd wake up, unplug the modem for a minute, then plug it back in and see if the Internet has been restored. Each day I was greeted with two blinking lights that basically mocked me with their inability to give me a series of tubes. Last Thursday, Mediacom was suppose to come in, but through a series of bad events, it didn't happen. Yesterday, they were suppose to come between 13:00 and 17:00. I anxiously waited, running through what-if scenarios that I do constantly. What if they don't show up? What if they can't fix it? What if the building collapses?

(Yeah, don't get me started on the what-ifs if Fluffy is three hours late coming home.)

When I finally got that phone call, I was so excited. Just in case, I unplugged my modem, waited a minute, and plugged it back in. Two flashing lights, nada. He showed up twenty minutes later. Unplugged it, waited a minute, plugged it back in.

...

And it connected.

He did it again.

It connected again.

Okay, I know he fixed it before he came up, but damn it was frustrating for a minute to just have someone walk in and fix it. Then, I realized the other things:

I HAVE MY INTERNETS!

So, um, let's just say the next 7-8 hours consisted of "poor time management" and resulted in me going to be two hours late to bed, hours of insomnia since I seriously considering doing "just a bit more", and being 15 minutes late to work the next morning. I'm exhausted, tired, almost caught up on email and forum stuff, still have 413 RSS feeds to browse through, my alternative LiveJournal account to go through three months of friends, and this game that I'm very happily coding. Oh yeah, and that homework thing.