Please tell me a teacher was helping you over a fence...

My sleep schedule is all messed up. All messed up. My typical day starts somewhere around noon to 2 pm. I leave for work at 3:45 (lately it's been to the gym at 2:30 to be at work by 4:15), get home around 11:00 if I'm lucky. Then, if I'm not too tired, there's a good reason or it was an annoying night, I'll get dressed and head out to grab a drink....or five. If I stay in, I'm up until...oh...say...the sun comes up. Then I'm all tired and I lie down...and I'm up at 2 pm. Now, I'm told that sometimes people that work in restaurants fall into this schedule, but it's completely anti-productive.

Then, there's my crazy ways to try to get back on a normal person's schedule. I'll stay up in the hopes that I'll be so tired when 10 or 11 pm comes around that I'll fall asleep at a more normal time. But, since I've been up for about 40 hours, I'll sleep for soooooo long that I'm back to waking up around noon. Or, as has been happening lately, I'll fall asleep around 7 pm and wake up around 3 am. Then, well, the schedule gets thrown off again. Hardly more productive. I'm not really sure what the answer is right now, but then again, I haven't been to sleep in awhile.

Ok, on to jello.

My mom has pulled some fast ones on me. Even though we lived in Hawaii where chocolate covered macadamia nut boxes grow on trees, she convinced me they were only for giving away, never for eating. Even though we had a HUGE mango tree in our yard, mangoes were only for pickling and giving away as gifts. It could be that I'm just a dimwit about certain things, but these things happened when I was really young, so I just believed everything my mom said, no questions asked. Well, when I was young, my mom just didn't like making jello. I have no idea why, but she just didn't. So, she told me that jello was too hard to make. So, when there was jello offered up at some kind of extended family meal, she would tell me to take advantage of it because jello was too hard for her to make. Now, this from the woman who would make cornbread from scratch every third sunday morning or so; the same woman who basically made the entire Thanksgiving dinner from scratch for my immediate family...all 15 or so of them. She did all but raise the turkeys herself.

But jello, she would always tell me, was too hard to make. No smile, no smirk, no giggle, or wink. Straight-faced, truthful, there-is-no-tooth-fairy-so-be-happy-with-the-50-cents-you-got kind of look on her face.

So, off I went to the University of Illinois and the wonderful dorm food that no college student could ever complain about. But, instead of going for the decked out salad and sandwich bar, the fifty kinds of cereal or - at the specialty restaurants - the cannolis, the just bbqed steaks, or cookies as big as your head...you guessed it, I went for the jello. All the time. Every time. Why, my friends would ask, do you always eat jello? Well, I would reply, I don't have the time to make jello, so if the cooks here spend all that energy making it, I'll take advantage of it. Wait...what are you talking about? If jello is too hard for my mom to make, I certainly can't do it.

No, I wasn't joking. I really believed making jello was a gift bestowed on the more fortunate. I once made a pan of bread pudding...from scratch...at a Boy Scout camp...using only a box oven (take a cardboard box, cover the inside with foil, place cans inside and put a grill on top). Jello, I had been convinced since infancy, was too hard to make.

One summer, I had an entire free weekend and decided to dedicate the entire 48 hours to conquer my fears. I was 21 and it was time I passed into manhood and just make the damn jello. I was prepared to skip all my monday classes and possibly the tuesday ones in case I needed the extra time. I was living in the fraternity house and we had no usable kitchen, but I had procured the use of one of my friend's apartments to...conquer jello. I called mom to ask for some advice, but she wasn't home so I left a message. I went to Meijer and picked up four large boxes of jello mix. Four boxes because I figured I would probably mess it up at least once and I wasn't going to use that as an excuse to quit. I read the back of the box several times, trying to make sense of why there were only two ingredients. Maybe this wasn't really jello. Slightly suspicious, I headed back.

In the kitchen, I took a moment to focus, breathe and meditate. I turned the box over again, and read the instructions. Hmmm....that can't be right. I went online and looked for other jello recipes. Still...that can't be right. I returned to the boxes. Well, here goes. I dropped the powder into a glass bowl, wondering if I had to wait for the water to boil before opening the package. I knew from high school science that here is a metal that, when exposed to oxygen, spontaneously combusts. I didn't want to set my friend's kitchen on fire in case this had the same effect. I stared at the powder and heard the water pot whistling. I carefully measured out the water and immediately began stirring. Needless to say, just as I practically yelled into my parent's answering machine, the hardest thing about jello was finding a container and a place in the refrigerator to make it. So, it was 9 am on Saturday morning and I had........figured out that mom had lied to me so convincingly for 21 years.