Yo Amo NY

Today is the first day of my tentatively amped up blogging schedule and I would like to note that I am dressed in a way that completely undercuts any attempt to make that sound like an ambitious statement. I know that I don’t usually discuss my writing attire here (it only accents how I will never will my secret dream of being a photo-a-day blogger) but it’s Sunday and as mentioned previously, I am notoriously lazy on the weekends. So, space cadets, to my attire and beyond.

I am seated at my computer desk in a pair of flannel pants, an oversized shirt that reads “Yo Amo NY,” a robe and some slippies. This is not what I usually wear when I blog, or for that matter, what I am usually wearing at 6: 45 on a Sunday night. But tonight is a strange night because today was a strange day; I attended and overdressed for a livestock show today and this, coupled with having a hurried meal at an Applebee’s off of the freeway in Lodi, made me eager to shower.

I stand fully behind the logic of my fashion choice for the evening, but the fact that blogging in my slippies requires mention unearths an entirely different issue. Slippers and blogging go together like biskits and gravy, no? Perhaps for your normal well-adjusted blogger (haha….ha), pj-bloggin’ is a fact of life. That is not, however, the case for me.

I read an essay by Sarah Vowell earlier this week in which she defended her decision not to drive a car by saying that her joy as a journalist didn’t often require her to wear shoes, let alone drive. This passage stuck in my mind because it so keenly contradicted all of the self-help-y stuff that I have read about writing in the last six months – most of the Dear Abbys in the world instruct getting fully dressed everyday to secure productivity, and some of the more romantic suggest that you are getting dressed to honor the art form that you practice; thus I pull on my jeans, socks, and sneakers everyday to honor pounding in frustration at my keyboard. I brush my hair to honor peeks sneaked at my email and I iron my blouses because I don’t want these blog posts to know that they are hours stolen from the golden gauntlet of billable projects.

I am going to shore this sucker up because I have a lot of work to get done tonight, whatever my wardrobe might be suggesting about me. I just caught a glimpse of myself in the yellow-framed mirror hung opposite my desk; I was shuffling back into the office with a water bottle, hair wet and slippers fuzzy, the tails of my robe dragging on the carpet behind me. Although this is probably the last time that I will ever blog thus, I encourage you to picture me writing every blog in this exact fashion.

Ode to Oats

It may shock you to find that I sometimes jot down ideas in my pretentious personal notebook regarding what I am going to blog about. This isn’t so much a strategy of ensuring that I have quality topics to write about – the proof is in the pudding on that one – but rather a strategy to remind me to write about random things that occur to me while I am otherwise occupied. (Hint: most of my best ideas come to me while I am driving with the radio off; screw showering, my brain works best under stress not relaxation.)

So this morning when I flung open my notebook to check something and saw, scrawled along the right-hand page the words, “blog = cereal, ode to” and I remembered how earlier this week while writing about something completely removed I found myself drifting towards a discussion of cereal. This discussion, which I had to rein in for the sake of sanity/continuity in my other piece, left me feeling so elated that I absolutely knew that I would get a wonderful kick out of writing a blog about it. Unfortunately, that feeling of grain-based bliss is long gone. And I even just had a bowl of Trader Joe’s cereal, sweet and crunchy with a few of those misshapen brown O’s clinging to the side of the bowl, but I feel indifferent to the meal.

I must chalk this indifference up to being in a bad mood, because there is no one in my youthful age bracket that feels indifference towards cereal. Young people love cereal. It is all of the best parts of eating without any of the preparation, and in a circumstance when you can’t muster even the minimalist preparation, it is still delicious dry. Cereal is the best of both worlds – it is chips plus sugar and ice cream with crunch.

In my life I have loved different cereals for different reasons. I loved Rice Crispies because it was so much fun to upend my mother’s heavy grey sugar-mill over the bowl, zigzagging madly and leaving a puddle of milk and soggy sugar in the bowl when I was done. I loved Fruity Pebbles purely for the taste and the texture, and the way that they conformed excellently when eaten from a mug. When I was in college I briefly loved Honey Bunches of Oats; the tall, slim boxes would lay fallow in my assigned cupboards, the bags open and the weird grains getting stale and sweeter by the day. In my last days of college I loved pouring a bowl of Raisin Bran and letting it sog up for a few minutes before eating it.

There is another reason, beyond nostalgia, taste and texture that I love cereal. I love cereal because it is such a universal topic for discussion in the 18-28 age bracket. In classrooms and bus stops all around the world young people are breaking the ice by mentioning how much they are looking forward to their bowl of cereal. And other people are responding, remarking on what they want for lunch, naming their favorite cereal and recounting the harrow tale of the time that they ate 4 bowls of Cookie Crisp (still around?).

I once had a 15 minute conversation with a complete stranger in a supermarket about Cinnamon Toast Crunch – so delicious if you can manage to eat it within the first 3 minutes of pouring it.

Why would you spell "biscuit" like 'biskit"?

Two points today, one is sort of somber and the other is the usual frivolous tomfoolery that I have convinced the internet to indulge me in. I should probably be devoting a greater part of this post to somber concerns since I spent the better chunk of the weekend at a memorial service, but that would smack of chronological relevance and I certain can’t have that.

One comment about memorial services though, before I forget and move along to equally irrelevant discussions. On the drive home my main squeeze and I stopped for dinner at a brew house and discussed our respective funerals. We both decided that people would be hard-pressed to think of nice things to say about us and that we didn’t want to put anyone to the trouble of fiction; ergo, we probably shouldn’t have funerals.

Admitting the attractiveness of not having a funeral is a funny thing when you take into account how popular the funeral fantasy is among teenaged girls. I know it seems crazy at first-glance, but it isn’t actually that morbid. I did this, and while I don’t paint myself as the model of mental health, most of my friends did this also. You merely imagine the reaction to your great tragedy and enjoy the professions of affection that are heaped on your coffin/hospital bed. If you can manage it, feel free to throw in a plot twist that means your death secures your revenge on that chick from second period.

Honestly, I’m not making this up. Most teenaged girls think more about what would happen at their funeral (or better yet, if they were hospitalized in some serious but attractive way) than they do about Twilight, and that’s saying something.

I am going to move along to discuss what I intended to discuss today, first the somber thing and then the cheerful thing so that everyone leaves on a high note. The somber discussion is a another reflection on the class that I’m taking. Yesterday we all had to rewrite a boring story and then read it aloud to the class so that we could understand how personal voice/detail make an essay. I liked this exercise in theory, but I hate reading aloud with a fiery passion, so the whole process made me glum.

For the first few minutes of the read-along I couldn’t listen because I was too busy being nervous and later I was distracted by my profound relief, but I eventually started listening to people reading their stories. I’m glad that I did because listening to other people read their work always reminds me that putting words into sentences isn’t a particularly difficult task – not nearly as difficult as I make it out to be. I putter and struggle with words and sentences and (above all) having the motivation to sit still and focus without succumbing to the many temptations of the internet. (Today I am doing fairly well. Or I was. I am running out of self control.)

Anyway, it is always humbling and motivating to know that putting ideas together is an easy thing.

So here is the joyful thing that I promised to bring this whole situation to a cheerful close. My question for people who make popsicles for a living: Why do you bother to put jokes on the sticks with the answer embedded in the frozen juice? Do you think that kids need more motivation for eating popsicles? You are just throwing away incentives on kids who love nothing more than a drippy dessert. Save your jokes for something that people hate, like the bottom of a box of Chicken in a Biskit.

Same goes for you, Mr. Cracker Jack.

As a point of interest I might be changing my blog quota to 3 X a week, throwing Sunday in the mix. I hate doing actual work on Sundays but I always find writing on Mondays so shocking that I figure that I shouldn't late my brain completely atrophy over the weekend anymore. I know what you are thinking and yes, I do think that this blog helps rather than accelerates the degradation of my brain. If not the writing then trying to remember how to keep this sucker for being double spaced and ragged-right....all ragged-right alignment is a blight on humanity.

The delayed "hella" is totally a better adjective

I don’t want to come out and say that I believe in omens, because most of the time I lump them in the crap pile with fate, destiny, karma and all of that other Buddhism-ala-It’s a Wonderful Life mumbo jumbo that assures nice people that being nice is the best way to be. But I’m only a weakly human and I was raised in a very superstitious family, so yesterday when I heard Billy Joel on the radio on my hurried drive to work (lost track of time, garage door opener wouldn’t work, daily caffeine had not been consumed) I suspected that it might be a good omen. Turns out that it wasn’t and I came home to some unpleasant news in my inbox, but it’s not a complete loss – Billy is good driving jams.

Since I have been trying to do this writing thing more earnestly, I think that I have started to get used to the rejection. It’s all part of the process and I realize that, just like I realize that having a super awkward day job is also part of the process. But if you take into the account the fact that a year ago I didn’t let anyone look at my work, perhaps you can understand the discomfort of waiting for acceptance/rejection for me. Pretty much I’m like a girl at the prom that has to wear headgear all the time and came with her best gal-pal as a date.

The whole thing is very ridiculous and to prove that I’m not taking myself and my sorrows too seriously I’ll tell you exactly why. I am by nature and by incredibly bad habit a compulsive email checker. Checking my email is the first thing I do when I get up in the morning (after deodorant, another compulsive habit) and the last thing I do before I go to bed. I am dependent on it as a source of communication and every empty inbox is a stark personal insult. Shouldn’t someone that I didn’t like in high school be FB-friending me right now?

The weird thing about making email submissions is that it completely shuts down this process. It’s not that I am dreading rejection, exactly; it is more that I have lost the aching curiosity to know what someone else might be telling me. It is very entertaining for my main squeeze, who is used to me leaning over mid-movie to minimize the window, click my gmail icon and hit “enter” twice in the manner of impatient people with saved passwords.

Last night when I got home we were sitting in the kitchen talking over the events our day (me: mean old chick that called me “young lady”; him: new John Muir obsession) and he asked me if I wanted to go and check my email. I declined; he inquired and I relented out of embarrassment. As I mentioned earlier the results of that swift double “enter” were unsavory, but my email reluctance was banished immediately.

Turns out that Billy Joel wasn’t an omen of creative triumph; he was an omen of triumphant bad habits. Today I’m going to be checking my email, hella.

The Emotional Opposite of a Loafer

No one likes to read about someone else’s workplace adventures. Although humanity suffers from the delusion that their workplace drama is enthralling, we also suffer from the equal and opposite prejudice against the copy-machine woes of others. But as previously mentioned in many a blog post, I have conquered this small (read: free) chunk of internet for discussing things that will interest no one. And so I, the most deluded of the delusional masses, will talk about something Awesome that happened to me at work yesterday.

First and foremost, I will dispel any concerns that I might have my days mixed up by assuring you that I did have to work on whatever federal holiday occurred yesterday; if the people won’t stop shopping to honor presidents then I must be there to bring them shoes and explain the sales. And it was busy yesterday, which is another point for my theory that nothing makes a person want to invest in sturdy leather footwear like our founding fathers. The phrase “founding fathers,” in addition to showcasing my inaccurate understanding of President’s Day is an excellent segue into my story.

I was standing around yesterday afternoon in the men’s footwear section trying to look approachable when a middle aged man and his young son motioned to me from the penny loafer row. I trotted over and explained the sale – a three-for-the-price-of-one jobbie that I wouldn’t mention here unless it was integral to the story, for fear of being branded a good employee. The man, a well dressed sort with a thick Spanish accent, pointed out two burgundy loafers, asked for size 10 ½, and stood nearby talking about his abhorrence for rubber-soled shoes while I searched for them.

Usually this sort of imperious behavior really annoys and embarrasses me (I have the sort of disposition that crumbles under the weight of one “shoo” motion), but I was irrationally fond of this snooty man for the sake of his son, who was wearing an oversized t-shirt and sporting a fruit-punch mouth. I found the sizes that I wanted and set them down before asking what third style he would like. The man didn’t answer straight away but grabbed a plain black loafer (a starter loafer?) from the display, turned to his son and asked him if he would like to get a pair of leather shoes. The son, who was sporting a pair of age-appropriate converse sneakers, nearly pissed his pants with joy.

I spent the next ten minutes helping the duo select and size a pair of loafers for the young man. His first impulse was to try on a pair of laced black leather shoes, the kind that I can only imagine that he imagined James Bond (Jason Bourne?) to wear. His father, however, gently reminded him that he wasn’t very good at keeping his laces tied and when the boy got embarrassed, he assured him that loafers were a superior choice. The boy finally settled on the black starter loafer in a 7 ½.

I carried the whole pile of shoes to the register and tallied the total. While the credit card was processing, the father mused to his son about how the boy had gone up another shoe size and how expensive it was going to be now that he was old enough to start wearing leather shoes when at church or helping out at work. The boy, rather than being cowed by the reference to his expense stood with his fruit-punch mouth beaming and offered to carry the bags to the car.

I am in a constant struggle against my evil, cynical mild to keep my interpretation of this exchange pleasant. I try not to consider how obnoxious this overbearing father with his leather-soled shoes and old-world manners will seem to this boy when he is a teenager. My mind, sick with pessimism and a lifetime of Lifetime Original Movies, flashes forward to the inevitable scene where the boy turns to his father and tells him that he wants to live his own life and that he doesn’t even like loafers; he is a man who likes slippers or duck boots or whatever the emotional opposite of loafers might be.

I am trying to keep it in my mind as merely what it was: a father who bought his excited son a pair of black loafers and assured him that even people who can’t remember to tie their shoes properly can be adults.

red-flag jerk vocab

I was driving home in the early (the earliest: 12:30) hours of the morning this morning, rocking out to my trademark early-70s jams and it occurred to me that I haven’t been out driving that late in a long while. Okay, well that is not strictly true. I have been out after midnight plenty of times lately, but only when in the glamorous role of designated driver and never by my lonesome. The empty freeway and the Billy Joel reminded me of the fact that once, not so long ago, driving somewhere alone at night would have been notable – I am miraculously antisocial, don’t forget – but wouldn’t have been cause for reflection.

So, I have a couple of notes on this topic and I’m sorry if one of them requires me to say “post-collegiate” and the other one requires me to say “co-dependent,” but I am going to muddle through despite any red-flag asshole vocab. When I was driving last night I was thinking about how I am really passive in the social sense (and the professional/economic/picking-what-to-eat sense) and since moving into the soul-suck suburbs to pursue my soul-suck (ex)career I haven’t been making much of an effort to be social. Part of this has to do with the fact that there isn’t much of a youthful professional demographic here, and that the existing youthful professionals are a little perplexed by a person who quit their professional job to be a shoe salesman.

It also has to do with my strange hatred for my cell phone that developed at some point, causing me to detest using or answering it. But mainly I think the problem is not being a socially proactive person partially because I live an hour away from everyone I know, and also because I live with a person who is very convenient receptacle for all of my socializing needs.

Life, I think, is very hard for post-collegiate co-dependent sorts.

A More Terrible Metaphorical Monstrosity

I know that it is silly for a person who usually only works five hours a day to make any claim of being rushed, but I felt distinctly rushed last night. I got off of work at 5 p.m. (after that arduous and aforementioned five hours of work) and after wasting a hefty chunk of the afternoon chatting, lanyard-free, in the foyer of my workplace, I made my way home. Once there I ate two hastily constructed burritos, slung my messenger bag over my shoulder and moseyed to class.

No one is surprised, I’m sure, at the length and detail that I employing in describing my evening, but those impatient sorts should be heartened because I am about to reach my point. When I got to class I dropped into my seat, brushed a few mysterious capsules (pills? breath mints?!) off of my desk and felt a very familiar feeling settle over me. The moment that my ass hit that spinning chair, an internal timer blinking “3 hours” instantly assumed the foreground of my mind; the count down to dismissal had begun.

This isn’t a particularly deep revelation, I know. The countdown mentality is no rarity in our society of mulitaskery and especially in my personal demographic of cubicle peons. Who hasn’t sat at their desk imagining the giant timer, ticking off seconds? (The timer, of course, never reflects actual time as we know it. It moves with terrible speed or deliberate slowness and probably reflects our eventual mortality.) When we have too much to do we race against a clock that seems to be ticking away minutes out of spite and we begrudge any task that can’t be completed in that allotted time; by contrast, when we want to go home every minute takes hours for the timer to shed.

So, okay, I’m rehashing all of the problems of the modern workplace and though I enjoy that topic immensely, I’m going to jump ship. My intent in writing this was not to open fire on society, but rather to discuss my reasons for voluntarily taking a class (and paying a hefty amount for the book) and waiting with bated breath for it to end. I don’t have any degree hanging in the balance and my mom is never going to find out if I skip.

I think that this might just be the way that I have learned to attend class. I was an enthusiastic student, an eager beaver in academic waters, but I was never afflicted with a desire for a class to go on longer than its allotted time. I liked learning, the chairs were pretty comfy and I didn’t have anywhere else to be but still I wanted to be dismissed. I sat and waited to leave, my senses dulled by the noisy air conditioned breezes universal to classrooms, in the exact same fashion that I did last night. Canceled classes are still beautiful things and I’m looking forward to having President’s Day off next week.

I don’t know if it is a strange manifestation of rebelliousness or some larger and more terrible metaphorical monstrosity, but the countdown to the end of class is back. Whether or not I have actually missed going to school is going to be measured by the pace of its imaginary ticking because there is no other constant where classes are concerned.

lax scandal

Today is my scheduled day for posting on my blog and even though I was torturously brief last time around I suspect that I am going to do the same today. In addition to predicting brevity, I am going to open with a confession: since I didn’t plot out a topic today and because my day has been oddly uneventful, or full of events that I don’t fancy discussing here, I am going to completely wing it with regard to topic and pacing. As you can guess from the convoluted sentence preceding this one, things are likely going to be quite ugly. And yet, onward we go.

I am writing this blog from my office, a room called such because it holds all of my old furniture from my alone-living days. Really, this place is practically a re-creation of the room I had two apartments ago: the bed is along one wall, the bookcase is in the corner and the bulletin board is balanced precariously above the same ugly desk. I am writing in here today because I am making an effort to use this room, having previously been distracted by the wonders of the front room and recently tethered in here in order to use the internet. It is a nice room, although it takes to be much colder than the rest of the house, and I should use the space. We are scandalously lax about using spacing, since we are only two people living in a three-bedroom house.

Between this paragraph and the above one there was a break of several minutes while I tried to figure out for to send a picture from my phone to the computer. Those are two devices that I use everyday that continue to elude me. I was going to upload a picture that I have been meaning to get off of my phone, one of my dog’s stuffed beaver wearing sunglasses, and put it on here to cap off this lackluster post. And since a Google search of "beaver in sunglasses" yielded nothing entertaining, it looks like we only get a lackluster description to cap this sucker off!

blog ain't blog

Back in the job search saddle again. [An aside (already!): Speaking of saddles, I wish that I could get a job as a cow poke or a sheep herder or something low key (provided there isn’t a stampede or a blizzard) and reflective like that.] Don’t fear careful readers, I am still employed. I’m just exploring my options as I delicately explore the empty terrain of my wallet.

But this post isn’t about looking for jobs; it is about the things that we do to avoid looking for jobs. For me that includes the usual run of internet habits (instant messaging, looking at horses for sale on craigslist, blog reading), whining and recreational eating. But it also includes a giant time-suck that I don’t think that I have had occasion to mention yet on this here blogaroni. When I am procrastinating, I like to get on Etsy.com and search “prairie” without setting any parameters.

I could go on for hours about the sort of things that I consider buying in this procrasti-state but I don’t think you are interested in how I spent a few hours taking my dress measurements and wondering when one wears lace-and-calico arm sleeves. Instead I’ll just make this short and say that these fits of browsing assure me of several things.

First, they remind me how much I love the prairie, people of the prairie, and anything gingham. Secondly, they remind me that there are other people out there thinking about the prairie with a nostalgic glint in their eye and a sewing needle in their silly little hands. My new resolve is to meet these people. With any luck they won’t be some hardcore historical reenactors; they’ll just be a bunch of folks into drinking well water that comes in a bucket. And we’ll be best friends.

Prairie enthusiasts interested in forming a commune of houses that are not period-accurate but are crammed full of butter churns, enamel wash pans and tenement-style clotheslines can apply in the comment area below.