Counting minutes; Counting pointlessly

Bad audio things come in pairs.

Today I heard:

1) Two people independently describe the rock-path at my workplace as “the yellow brick road” of Dorothy fame.

2) Two Alanis Morissette songs during one 30 minute drive.

Smoothies aren't worth it.

The desire for a smoothie today got me into a very unpleasant situation.

I know what you are thinking: smoothies are like a healthier milkshake and therefore above reproach. And I agree, there is nothing unpleasant about a smoothie. However, faulty planning can mar even the most perfect of fruit beverages. You see, I decided to go and get smoothies for myself and a few of my work-time compatriots during my break at 3 p.m* and 3 p.m.** is the worst possible time to go anywhere in a small town.

[*,** Note to build suspense and over-all word count: I have recently had occasion to brush up on the AP standards. As a result I know all sorts of things, like that one should write “Calif.” instead of C.A, and that my use of ** is rampantly inappropriate. Also, when you have occasion to say “goddamn” in a newspaper it is disrespectful to slap a capital “G” on there. Now I can “who vs whom” with the best of them.]

3 p.m. is the worst time to go anywhere in a small town for one simple reason: it roughly coincides with the moment that high schools roll back their pearly gates and free their frenzied denizens. And it would so happen that the smoothie joint of my choice (I’ll give you a hint, it involves two J's, and is the Starbucks for pseudo-hippies) was located at an unfortunate proximity to the high school. And the parking lot of the shopping center where the double “J” is housed provided many of these teenyboppers with parking.

As I halted before the crosswalk choked with teens, cursing the Jansport-ing masses, I tried to distract myself by reflecting whimsically on how freaky-weird the high-school thing is. Where else can you see people walking around eating straight from a bag of Doritos? People who aren’t homeless, I mean.

Far be it for me to say anything that might be construed as nice about the youth, but these kids looked damn elated to be released from school. I guess that daily joy is a mass-mentality thing that people forget about due to the sporadic nature of college socializing and classes, but I vaguely remember what it was like.

When I was in high school and before I had my driver’s license, I used hang out around the bus stop after school everyday with some kids who I assumed were socially adventurous, but in fact were just lax in hygiene. I really envied these kids (who walked home from school after my bus retrieved me) because I thought that walking seemed like the ultimate social event; the antithesis of a stifling bus ride home reading ahead in my English books. After I got my license I would troop everyday to the corner where most of “I read The Onion during computer lab, aren’t I clever” set parked their cars so that I might drive the four grueling blocks to work.

Sitting in my boiling hot car today in Jamba Juice gridlock, I tried to summon sympathy by recalling my love for my first car. It was a Chevy Blazer in a faded black, called “Tux-y” by my friend Amanda for reasons too geeky to relate. I was so proud if my car, with the hairbrush on the shelf below the dash, and a backseat full of strategically showy sci-fi novels (bad early- 80s stuff with faded yellow covers). I was particularly proud of the CD player (as I would later be strangely proud of the desk-top background on my computer) and I played unlabeled Beatles CDs and weird burned SKA (always an all-caps word for me) mixes that I kept in one of those CD folders on the sunshade.

When the masses vacated and I finally got to a parking spot this afternoon, I clambered out of my car and attempted to cross the street. Some lady in a grande “sand-colored” SUV braked to let me pass and added a haughty eye-roll to her hurry-up wave. Although mildly embarrassed, I understood completely.

With my short stature and my shitty car, she undoubtedly took me for one of the enemy. I am however a completely different breed of youthful blight: the under-worked post-collegiate secretary desiring a smoothie.

Lista? Listo.

Things that I am currently giving a chance:
1)Books by Charlotte Bronte other than Jane Eyre.
2)Bobby pins, in the service of harnessing my multitude of small-bangs.
3)The frequent rate that people are pick-pocketed in Disneyland, despite commercials and mottos implying general felicity.
4)Kettle-Korn.
5)Curtailing my internet reading habits: the news keeps getting more depressing.

Bonus footage---

Today I received an email from my sister containing only the following text:

“this week is weak ahahaha...i crack myself up”

Listless list

List of things that I’m currently refusing to give a chance:
1) Books by that guy who wrote The Notebook.
2) Rats as pets.
3) Buying the 2 liter of milk, even though we are using two one-liters a week.
4) Free live streaming of Olympics footage online, because although it is instantaneous it is silent: no commentary or human-interest bios.
5) Crucifixion art.

Machines: both laundry and vending.

Today I wasted the best handwriting of my life on the word “laundry.”

Usually my handwriting is terrible, with r-looking n’s and overly upright f’s and b’s. But today when I casually decided to make a list on the back of a window envelope with the company logo emblazoned on it, I spontaneously achieved flawlessly casual cursive.

And I am pissed (understandably, I warrant). If I had this one beautiful handwriting sample deep within the bowels of my fingers, why would I waste it on the word ‘laundry’? In my glee I tried to immediately continue my list with hopes to achieve the same penned majesty, but every other item came out in my typically spacey writing. I’m certain it’s gone forever.

Speaking of things that anger me unreasonably, I’m going to dabble in a little economic theory for a moment. I’ve always been one for chaffing my nose on the proverbial grindstone, and so I go to work everyday and make some small packet of monies. And with this money I buy goods and gas and lament like everyone else that prices are rising and especially that the job market is shitty, given my particular circumstance of job-searching.

“Yes,” I think to myself as I cruise along in my lumbering vehicle, listening to every moronic radio commercial blaring the word CRISIS into my ear. “Gas is hideously expensive.”

I absorb this daily and reaching back into the recesses of my brain I remind myself of what inflation means, and what a widget is, and how that the invisible hand is not just another creepy Kevin Bacon movie.

And yet, when I went yesterday to the vending machine at my work place to buy a Milky Way, I was enraged to find that it cost 90 cents. Vending machine inflation is the worst of all. I don’t want to hear any more pansies whining about gas prices; we should just thank our lucky stars that our cars don’t run on delightful caramel.

I would like to say that paying ninety cents for a Milky Way is the worst vending machine experience that I’ve ever had, but unfortunately I have a long history of ugly vending machine encounters. I’m thinking specifically of an instance in during last spring quarter when I was refused my Skittles by a vending machine in a crowded section of Wellman hall. [Characteristic comment on spell checking: Skittles is a word? Really?] I decided to forgo the generally futile and noisy attack on said vending machine, and consoled myself by muttering profanities and slinking away into a nearby lecture hall.

A few minutes later I was seated in the lecture and reading the newspaper (I miss you, free news-print and terrible comics), when a girl silently approached me with a package of Skittles held in front of her. In confusion, I reached out my hand to receive them, wondering frantically if I should have any idea who this chick was. And here is the most mysterious bit of all: after handing me the Skittles, she didn’t offer any explanation or even giggle nervously as I would have, but walked straight back out the door. Just like a guardian angel of artificial fruit flavoring.

That, my friends, is a truly freakish vending machine experience.
As a final point: I’ve been working my way through A Passage to India, (motivated by my love for A Room with a View) and feel a great suspense. It has morphed into one of those court-dramas that hinges on racism, and I always find those sorts of plots most distressing. A similar weakness hinders my reading of slave narratives and led to my refusal of all war tales and holocaust memoirs for cheeky comedies of manners.

I considered buying denim online today.

I feel very ashamed for not having written in awhile. (There it is! I’ve said the thing that I pledged never to say. Farewell to whatever small fragmented amount of self respect remains to a person after they forfeit the larger portion to become a blog-person).

Awhile ago I commented that I was striving for consistency in writing, so that I might never have to make that awkward apology (blogology?) for not writing. My first motivation for this is so that I might separate myself from the throng of other internet-creepers who are making vague excuses into the abyss about finals, patchy internet or losing their space-bar finger to cheese-graters, followed by feverish promises to do better next time.

My other motivation was a wholly less offensive one. I had been hoping that I would be so inflamed with the joy of blogging that I would not lapse into breaks and that the very act of blog-having would transform me from my previous lazy identity into a more motivated person.

Quite apparently, that was not the case.

A more secret motivation was that I was hoping that writing more regularly here would motivate me to do other forms of writing more enthusiastically, or rather, with a more clinical regularity. To this end I am an absolute failure at prioritizing. If you’ll allow me to wax a bit melodramatic (the beauty is that you can’t stop me, I’m going to wax that shit on and off like the Karate Kid on crack), I’ll amble on a bit about my largely imagined problems.

As it stands now, my waking life is divided into five main segments of activity: A) working B) various social ventures C) reading D) eating and E) writing. [To say nothing of looking for a job, one that will enable me to afford the means of B through E in a more permanent fashion, as that is much too dreary an issue].

Two of these things (eating and working) are inescapable to some degree and therefore might be regarded as hostile, but both are mitigated by an ability to combine with other more pleasant factors. Para example, at work I sometimes socialize or read and I daily consume food between the hours of 11 30 and noon in the break room. Similarly, eating is very often combined with socializing and when it is not, I elect to read while eating. (I have perfected a great strategy for not getting Cheetos dust on the pages of a borrowed book. It involves agility and an affinity for white socks. Trade secret).

Because of its inherent solidarity as an activity, writing comes in at the bottom of the pile. And it’s not that I don’t enjoy writing, it’s that I have an amazing ability to make excuses against doing it. I’m doing it right now.

But on the upside, I can post this blog and pretend like I was productive today.