The font looks weird to me...

While driving home yesterday I invented a new micro-paranoia for myself: crashing my car because of temporary sneeze-related eye closure. Strange, but probably not unheard of. If I felt like validating my claims I might just look up a statistic about it, but as usual I would much rather just make irrational and unfounded statements.

This thought was brought about by two developments related to moving, the first being a new, more congested commute, and the second being a weird influx of allergies. I have had someone suggest to me recently that the allergies in this region are a form of chemical warfare perpetrated by the snooty stay-at-home yoga moms in an effort to keep anyone who doesn't have a shnaz SUV with a built in humidifier the heck out of their glistening Nugget Markets, but I must say this seems slightly far fetched.

So yesterday I was driving with my usual caution (three car lengths away from my kindred dirty cars, four car lengths away from aggressively clean cars) and I must have sneezed about 82 times. Each occurrence found me with hands locked at 10 and 2, wriggling my nose and straining to keep my eyes open.

As creepy guys on car insurance commercials are consistently telling me, it only takes one sneeze-sized second to total a person's beloved hatchback.

Pocket watch for ladies

Unsurprisingly (dare I say predictably?), I am very fond of solving all of my problems with a certain kooky-named search engine. That trusty engine failed me today, however, when all of the searches entered with a combination of the words “graduation,” “coming of age,” and “gift” fed me links of bar mitzvah DJs and L.L. Bean embroidered hand towels.

I was in the midst of a gift-giving crisis concerning the pending graduation of my littlest little sister from high school. I was torn between wanting to select a gift to convey the gravity of the situation and the contrasting suspicion that (18 year olds being the scourge of the earth that they are) she would rather me just purchase an umbrella with the Twilight guy’s face on it.

What do you give to a person graduating from high school when desire to discourage kids in high school from thinking that their lives (transported through cyberspace in a mass of fragmented texts and twits) are important? All I recall from my graduation party is wearing some weird Bugs Bunny shirt and threatening my mom with suicide if she attempted to enforce an event theme.

But let us return to the topic of gifts. Because I am melodramatic, I was leaning toward something Victorian and metallic in nature. A gold watch or a locket with a snippet of my hair inside would have suited my mood perfectly. But my main squeeze assured me that pocket watches are for men, and that since I would never afford the female equivalent (one set of sterling silver soup spoons) I decided to widen my search.

I provide below for your enjoyment a list of gifts considered and rejected for my sister’s graduation during one tour of the mall this afternoon:

• Lave lamp,
• Locket with Jesus etched on the cover (to be presented if purchased with visage pointing away from receiver , since sister is known to be very intimidated by religious symbolism and cries when forced by wayward religious relatives to attend services),
• Single soup spoon,
• McDonalds money,
• Hospital scrubs,
• Large, yet cheap, oil painting,
• Netflix subscription,
• Candles shaped like happy faces that burn lopsidedly (remember when these came briefly back?)
• Cool sneaks,
• A kimono,
• Vintage-covered copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

Wasting paper on the internet

I think that there are few things worse than journals with the word “journal” on the spine. This in inexcusable, even when the cover itself is old and leathery looking and the clasp might be made from an authentic arrowhead from the French and Indian War.

I admit to being a little emotional about paper-goods at times. This derives partially from my overwhelming and completely groundless nostalgia, and partially from my own heady and youthful desires to be a writer.

In my mind (and this is the mind that seriously considered looking up butter churns on amazon earlier) writers wrote in stern leather-bound books with ribbons for bookmarks. And no writer of my imagination was very silly enough to want the word “journal” embossed sloppily on the spine in Century Schoolbook font and so I’ve felt compelled to disdain this idea myself.

This tirade might actually have a point. So lately I have been trying to write in a more serious sense, and failing very miserably. I feel drastically unmotivated after getting home from work, and then I just have fits over not accomplishing anything. Really, it’s quite a drag. And I weirdly (okay, hypocritically) despair over how I was so productive in college, when all day long I curse college kids and their term-paper style melodrama and their Snow-Hoes and Eskimos parties.

“If only they knew,” I think to myself sitting in traffic. “When you become a working person there is no such thing as a free newspaper.”

And so I find myself being falsely motivated by the sirens of the paper world. I think to myself that maybe if there was a journal that wasn’t totally obvious about being a journal that I would buy it and become instantly more motivated and prolific as hell and my handwriting would probably be improved by sheer proximity to the thing.

But I know that if I were to find the perfect journal I would still be flakey and my handwriting would still be sloppy and the lines would start curving down and wasting expensive paper space before long. Hardbound journals are the most depressing thing in the check-out aisle of Barnes and Noble.

I blame those sad seeming dragons

On Thursday night, as I stood in my bathroom trying to floss while reading about defeat of corrupt gods by righteous sorcerers, I realized I have been doing some fairly atrocious regressing over the last week.

Though I know it’ll sound petulant, I can honestly attest to having avoided fantasy novels for a solid couple of years. Sure, I’ve carted their familiar pastel covers with raised lettering and buckling spines from apartment to apartment, but I haven’t actually indulged in some time. It’s not entirely that I’m too ashamed these days to go around with a sci-fi book sticking out of the front pocket of my overalls (read: my adolescence), though that is a hefty portion of the reason. The other slimmer, but more legitimate, reason is that I truly do enjoy reading what might be termed as “classic literature” and as an added plus I feel as though I’ve earned my plastic-rimmed glasses and poor attitude when I’m through.

For example, when I spend the day lying on the floor chronically re-reading Willa Cather, I consider it a day well spent. When I spend the day lying on the floor reading fantasy novels, however, I feel sort of like washing my eyes out with soap and writing really mean anonymous comments on Tolkien fan fiction sites when I regain my vision. And yet, I can’t stop.

It’s terrible, actually. It all started last week when my main squeeze brought home a book rejected by the library. It was a hefty tome with a giant dragon face on the cover and an incomprehensible title; outwardly I joked about the inexplicable fondness of fantasy writers for bisecting names with apostrophes but inwardly I was mighty curious about this sad seeming dragon. My main squeeze laughingly suggested that I might want to read it, and I laughed to in a furtive sort of way.

Unfortunately, I barreled through the dragon book in a few days, and then immediately took solace in another (less commercial, if that is any more defensible) fantasy novel.

To be clear, I know that fantasy novels are crap. I even make a point of reading them quickly because I’ve fond that oftentimes the 300-page subplots about warring amongst the dwarfish people are completely irrelevant to the overarching (and it’s way overly arched) storyline. But there is something strangely endearing about them.

The problem is this: when I read lines of convoluted passages made up of the words “fate,” “empire,” and “moonstone” strung together in 20 different ways, I will snort sarcastically and roll my eyes but this doesn’t seem to deter me from continuing through that book (or its inevitable sequels).

My only hope is a resurgence of my equally unappealing George Elliot phase.

The only cardinals I know are birds

A few days ago my live-in-fellow interrupted one of my fairly routine soliloquies about the detrimental effects of technology on the youth to assert a certain humbling fact.

The object of my tentative attack was the ever-more-common GPS unit, and I was pondering (vocally) that perhaps the prevalence of GPS units makes people less apt to be aware of their surroundings and to develop a sense of direction. As we pulled away from the grocery store I was really hitting my melodramatic stride, mourning cartography and suggesting passionately that maybe we should learn to navigate like sailors using stars and the mating calls of whales as reference points.

At this point my main squeeze (a google-mapper for life and quite ironically driving me around at the time) interrupted me mid-rant to remind me that I (sans GP-anything) am wretched at finding anything, even places I have been to many times before. I was aghast at his statement, but could offer no argument. I am indeed shitty at finding my way while driving; however, that fact had never distinguished itself from the many other things about driving that I am incapable of doing sufficiently to grab my attention.

I’ve been thinking about this since but try as I might, I can’t really blame myself for this appalling fact. I’ve been shamefully enabled into a very inattentive, if charming, passenger.

The foundation for my disability was laid early in life during long car rides to and from my grandparent’s ranch. I spent these car rides with my nose jammed into various cheesy tomes of historical fiction and trying to block the smooth sounds of Journey from my ears. I never attended to the scenery, most commonly I would look up bleary-eyed, surprised and somewhat disappointed whenever we arrived at our destination.

My parents are the sort who are incapable of leaving a social event before darkness has fallen, and so many of these long drives home were made in the dark, four sisters and various quadrupeds stuff into a smelly blue-and-white GMC tank. On the occasions that we drove home after dark, my dad would allow me to use a flashlight to read in the backseat, provided that I remembered not to shine it in his eyes while flipping the pages. I remember on one occasion demanding the attention of my whole family and reading a scandalous passage aloud in which a family on the Oregon Trail ate pancakes after bugs had flown into the batter; my mother craning her head around from the front seat and attentive all the while.

So if today I can’t find my way back to a restaurant that I’ve been to twice, I blame the hours of sitting in that wretched suburban and worrying about dysentery and oxen rather than bothering about the cardinal directions. Unfortunately I don’t get much time to read in the car anymore (only at long stop-lights, hella yes), so I’ve had to make due with convincing people that they enjoy driving me around, or letting me follow them.

I’m hoping that I can continue to sell myself as an endearing and helpful passenger (license-plate game, lock the doors when I see teenagers in the cross-walk) to the point where I’ll never have to invest in a GPS.