PSA: You can tell you're overcaffeinated when...

It's fifteen hours past your normal bedtime, and you're still up.

Infomercials seem intensely interesting. "Show me the spray-on hair again!" *

You're so strung out you've looped back around to tired.

The jitters make everything blur.

You find yourself responding to all questions with a bizarre combination of over-enthusiasm and apathy. "Yes! I'll agree to do that because I just don't care."

Everything else is moving really, really slowly, and it's Pissing. You. Off.

You've forgotten how to tie your shoelaces -- or, alternatively, feel an absurd and inexplicable relief at having on loafers or flip-flops.

You're convinced you've invented some sort of new microchip out of the pieces of the old typewriter gathering dust in your living room -- and it will make you rich.

You start making a bullet-point list of ways to spend the money you'll get from your new invention but get distracted at number two, probably by an infomercial.

Your friends keep saying "Wow, are you overcaffeinated" or "Get down off that building, but don't jump down" or "Maybe you should try a glass of warm milk, or eat something."

You see patterns in public bathroom tile.

You keep telling yourself that you won't go down without a fight.

You know for sure that this is the year. This. One. Right. Now. And no one can convince you otherwise. Or get you to explain what you're talking about.


*This affliction, interestomercialitis -- or the sense that informercials are, in fact, interesting, despite all evidence and human feeling -- is a serious form of mental derangement. If you or a loved one suffer from interestomercialitis, please seek medical attention. It most often afflicts the elderly, the insomniac, the drugged or the lonely.