An Egg McMuffin at 4 p.m.? I just don’t know ...
I get up. I pace. I hop downstairs, open the fridge door, stare inside as if the contents will be vastly different from what they were five minutes ago.
Maybe I forgot about that magical whatever I picked up at the grocery store yesterday. Maybe that magical whatever will make my afternoon, maybe it will make me more focused, more determined, more ...
But there’s no magical whatever. So I pluck a Chips Ahoy Thins oatmeal cookie from the package, add some more boiling water to my now-lukewarm green tea, head back upstairs, annoy Small Cat snoozing on her perch, and finally settle back into my squeaky office chair that I picked up at Costco a million years ago during my last hiatus from office life. I then conduct an exhaustive (and futile) online search for a new office chair that looks exactly like that one office chair I saw in an Apartment Therapy Instagram post a few weeks back, a post I then scour the internet to find again as a shopping reference. Then I fall down several more Instagram home decor holes and pretty much repeat this entire sequence all afternoon.
This, my friends, is the Art of Procrastination. (It’s also a darned good way to rack up your
step count, for those of you who are using the Carrot app, which, as I’ve mentioned previously, is my current obsession.) And it’s also been my routine for the past two months, ever since returning to school full time.
Which is how I came to be scrolling through my Twitter feed like a hungry squirrel in a bird feeder. I knew I shouldn’t be there. I knew I had other things to do, projects to complete, exams, assignments and the like.
I knew that. I know that, OK? But it was right there, on my desktop, tempting me with its flickering lights and the siren song of a Taylor Swift hater tweet. (I mean, can she PLEASE
stop complaining about her life? Please. Seriously. Enough.)
I sometimes find it surprising that Twitter ranks as low as it does on the social media popularity scale. A recent study by the Pew Research Center in the United States ranked Twitter seventh in popularity among American adults in early 2018, behind YouTube (first), Facebook (second), Instagram (third), Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn and THEN Twitter. It’s surprising, isn’t it? Because if not for Twitter, how would I have come across this story about Kathleen McGee?
Ah, who is Kathleen McGee, you ask? Right. Well, I think she might be my new hero. The comedian
from Edmonton is most certainly a hero of McDonald’s restaurants. They even told her so. Did she rescue a bunch of trapped Chicken McNuggets who were being held hostage by a sinister villain? No. Did she improve on the Big Mac’s special sauce? (I’m not a fan but obviously many of you are, so that would be an achievement, I guess.) No again. Did she donate Hot Fudge Sundaes (still a classic in my books) to the lactose-intolerant? Nope. Well, maybe, but not that I’m aware of.
Did she get a tattoo on her arm commemorating the date (February 21, 2017) that McDonald’s launched all-day breakfast in Canada? Yes, she did. And then she tweeted a photo of it, once again proving Twitter’s worth. The tweet caught the attention of the peeps at McD’s, who then sent her a care package including McDonald’s-branded mugs, passport holders and USB sticks, plus a set of matching pillowcases featuring illustrations of Egg McMuffin sandwiches.
McGee said she got the tattoo because yes, she loves Egg McMuffin sandwiches. But being a comedian means working a lot of late nights, which means missing breakfast hours at restaurants like McDonald’s. But now that McD’s has introduced all day breakfast, she can get her Egg McMuffins whenever she likes. It’s like a fairy tale.
“‘It changed my life. This isn’t a joke at all. I’m not big into everything else at McDonald’s but I’m obsessed with their breakfast sandwiches,’” McGee said in a story in The Spec online.
Ya, I don’t know. I mean, I love me some Egg McMuffin sandwiches as much as the next person, but I still can’t wrap my head around the all-day thing. For me, it still has to happen before 10:30 a.m. or it’s over for the day. Although I suppose I could see wanting one at, say, 4 a.m., if I happened to be up that time in an airport or whatever. But for dinner? I still can’t. I’m just a traditionalist that way, I guess.
Now if an Egg McMuffin could help me focus on the rest of my work, this afternoon, I’d be all over it.