No More Naps For Me, Thanks.

This is the first job I've had in...oh, six years or so where I haven't been encouraged to work a whole lot of overtime for free. I'm hourly here, as is everyone else, which means that when my 40 hours is up, it's up, and home I go, jiggety-jog. It's kind of great in a way, since I typically work 40 hours by about noon on Thursday. It's also kind of great because after working where I did for two years, where my boss regularly called on the weekends and in the evenings without regard for the fact that I had already worked sixty hours that week...yeah, this is better.

For this story to be funny, you need to know a little about the layout of our living room and its furniture. If our living room were a clock, which it isn't because, you know, it's a room, not a clock, and also, it's not round, but go with me here; if it were a clock, the fireplace would be at 12, the kitchen would be at 3, the window facing our deck would be at 6, and the front door would be at about 10:30. Our couch would be the hour hand and it would be 6 o'clock--so basically, the couch stretches along the wall between the deck window and the front door.

Got it? No? Doesn't matter really.

I was lying on the couch with my head towards the window (in other words, facing toward the door, which was down by my left foot.) I was watching "The West Wing" on DVD on my laptop, which I like to do when I'm reading the entire internet, because I don't have to focus on two different things at two different distances, which makes my eyes tired and also makes me throw up.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I fell asleep with my laptop balanced on top of my pregnant belly, "West Wing" still playing. Less than an hour later, the cat made some kind of a vaguely human-sounding noise somewhere in the house, which woke me up. I know it was less than an hour later, because "West Wing" was still on the same episode. The scene that I happened to wake up to featured Josh and Toby standing opposite the President's desk, both wearing dark suits.

I was asleep long enough to be exceedingly stupid when I woke up. You know that kind of deep and extremely restful sleep (it seems to be particular to the second trimester of pregnancy) when you wake up and you're not sure where you are or what's happening and you don't, in fact, register the fact that you've been asleep at all? Yeah, it was that kind of a thing.

The first thing I saw was Josh and Toby standing in front of me in dark suits--on the laptop screen of course, but in my head they were right there in front of me. In my peripheral vision, I registered my living room, with the front door by my feet. And literally, this is what I thought:

Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff are in my living room! Why are Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff in my living room? Did I leave the door unlocked and now they're just standing by my feet at the end of the couch, talking? Where did they come from? What the hell is going on?

And I jumped about a mile before I realized that there was no conceivable logical way that Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff had committed a B&E mid-morning at my house, dressed in costume from "West Wing," and reciting dialogue from the show while standing next to my feet at the end of my couch. But that split second was probably one of the weirdest of my entire life.