I can’t feel my fingers: Kids Day

I woke up at 4:30 this morning. I immediately made myself some tea (because coffee tastes like liquid coal) to wake myself up. After taking an extremely long amount of time to get ready, I left for school at about 5:30 a.m.

By around 5:40 a.m., I was out in the cold, trying to sell Kids Day papers. It started pretty light. Not that many cars, not that much aggression, not even that terribly chilly.

And then it was 6 a.m. A certain student said that he was going to go on a coffee (or in my case, tea) run. Everyone except me was smart enough to bring money, so I had to go caffeine-less. The student left for Starbucks at about 6:05 a.m.

Suddenly, I started getting really crazy. Maybe it was the knowledge that I wasn’t gonna have something warm to drink for the next two hours. Maybe it was the fact that the temperature seemed to drop about 80 degrees. Maybe it was the sudden influx of cars.

Whatever it was doesn’t matter. The point is that I went completely insane. To illustrate, my main strategy at selling newspapers was complimenting people’s vehicles. For example, if a guy came by on a motorcycle, I’d yell something along the lines of, “THIS NEWSPAPER IS FOR MEN WHO LIKE MOTORCYCLES AND JASON STAHAM MOVIES, YEAH!!!!”

If the person drove away without buying anything, I would give them a little update as to how I was doing in a last ditch attempt to sell them a newspaper. This usually sounded something like, “I CAN’T FEEL MY FINGERS!”

I sold about three newspapers over the course of two and a half hours.

At 7 a.m., the student finally came back with everyone’s coffee. I don’t know why, but the smell of the coffee seemed to calm me down. Instead of shouting bizarre things at people, I would shout things like, “Kids Day paper, it’s only a dollar,” and, “It’s just $1, Kids Day.”

The moral of this story is that people like me who only drink tea should suck it up and become coffee drinkers. You just might calm down.