I'm a sensitive inner-person and I need a nap

This is going to be an exercise in brevity because I am determined to get my daily allotment of blogging done before I have to leave for work. Since this was my plan, you’d think that I would have scheduled time for writing it. Alas, I slept in. I have an excuse, however weak for sleeping in though. I didn’t sleep well last night and frankly I haven’t slept well in a couple of days. I think that it’s the stress of starting a new job (everyone knows that I hate being a door-hoverer and question-asker) and a few other random stressors. Whatever the reason, I haven’t been sleeping well and I’m the sort of lout who needs her sleep.

I use the word “lout” because I like the sound of it so early in the morning and because I am a little ashamed of being the kind of person who needs to log a solid 8 hours of sleep. I remember long ago when I was in high school I would always overhear my classmates talking about how they hadn’t started a homework assignment until 10 p.m. the night before and that they’d been up until 2 a.m. finishing; in college the situation was similar, only my classmates enjoyed bragging that they’d never been to sleep at all. It’s a rite of passage strewn with wasted time and 5-Hour Energy tubes.

At the risk of sounding like a goodie-two-shoe (WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?), I’ll admit that I never had much to contribute to the pissing contest of late nights. I’m not really much for planning and I’ve never been much for marathon studying, but somehow, I always got to sleep at a decent hour. I guess the sad thing here is that I would rather go to bed at midnight than eke out a few more percentage points on a test. And I always slept awesomely. That’s a lack of resolve right there.

I’ve written before about how I used to sleep in such an amazing way – that I used to just fall asleep on couches and bean-bag chairs and sleep uninterrupted through the night. Even when I met my main squeeze 3 years ago I was a champion sleeper; we would sleep twin bed in a room with no air conditioning and I would drool into my pillow as he laid wake.

Sometimes I try to reason out the difference between now and then. Obviously this was before and at the very beginning of my random night-time carpal tunnel pains; my perpetually tingling fingers and the splints (which I’m always determined to try sleeping without and then regret it) are probably factors. But then again I think it might be mostly stress. It’s easy for me to get stressed out, squash it all down inside of me as I traipse cheerfully through my day and have it erupt in random, tense awakenings. Stupid sensitive inner-person and stupid sleepless nights.

Alright, I should get ready for work. I hope that this proclamation to write before work doesn’t just lead to many entries on my sleeping habits. Those are bound to be worse than the many entries on my much-debated showering habits.

I'm sure pretty I've never washed a window

I am trying to write and I find myself very distracted by the idea that we might be getting a house sometime soon. It’s not for certain; in all honesty it’s not even all that likely. But it is a possibility and I’m the kind of person who finds possibilities very distracting. (As an aside I’m also having trouble coming up with something to write about that doesn’t center on houses and nostalgia; I have a hunch that I should be reflecting more on the world at large instead of thinking about chickens and escrow.)

I was writing recently about how I never expected to be the kind of person who would buy a house. First and most dramatically, I never expected to be able to afford to buy a house and without the fortuitous (ha!) explosion of the market, I never would have in this sunny state. Secondly, I figured that house buying was for squares with, like, kids and Precious Moments figurines. As I’m light-years away from anything so domestic, I didn’t think that buying a house was in the cards.

But here’s the thing: I’ve always been obsessed with houses. I have that misguided impression that the coolness of your living situation rubs off on you and you must strive to find a home that expresses your personality. This is total crap, I know; the kind of emotional sloppiness that sends droves of post-collegiate scoundrels wandering towards the east coast each year. It’s shallow (and we’ve been over my profound shallowness before) to think that your house has a bearing on your personal worth and that there can’t be perfectly decent human beings living in luxury condos. That said, I’m not in favor of settling.

I’m of the opinion that people shouldn’t settle and they shouldn’t buy houses for their alarming re-sale value. Everyone should get really teary eyed over their house; they should covet it and clean it and not foreclose on it even when that seems sensible. Obviously I’m feeling a bit scattered and emotional at the moment and I do believe that housing decisions should be made with the purest clarity of mind and the driest pragmatism. But after you’ve coolly and cleanly assessed your personal worth and your dividends and your credit score, you should probably gush a little bit. If you are using the words “starter house” and not gushing, you probably should stick to the emotionally stagnant world of renting.

A final thought on this topic and then I’ll leave it for the time being. I don’t think that I ever imagined that I would be old enough to buy a house. And believe me, I’m not old. I’m youthful and snooty bartenders in fancy restaurants card me to the point of rudeness. I suppose I’ve always thought of houses as a fixture of matriarchy – the family seat in the old South and all that nonsense. A home means legitimacy as an adult; it means buying a Christmas tree, cleaning out gutters and washing the windows. It means staying in one place for a long, long time.

It’s disconcerting to think that I might have my own family seat for my two-person-one-dog family. And by disconcerting I mean pleasant and absolutely terrifying.

I'll admit a lackluster effort and a fondness for baked goods

As you may have picked up from my posts here, I’m a very shallow person. I don’t spend a whole lot of time having deep thoughts or in self-reflection – mostly I get my jollies by bitching about the state of my immediate surroundings and pitching those thoughts into the cyber-void. But lately (and through no fault of my own) my house has been filling up with books about psychology and other voodoo practices of the same touchy-feely bent and because I’m me and they are free books, I’ve been reading them. And sometimes I even think about what I read after I read it. Things are getting hellsa Zen over here.

Alright, I may not be hellsa Zen yet, but at least I know what being hellsa Zen would look like now. And I also know that there are probably a lot of terrible evil feelings in side of my happy-go-lucky soul, feelings that can only be properly squashed and resolved through self-reflection. I haven’t decided yet whether I am willing to undergo said reflection, but I think that knowing that I should is an improvement.

I read a quote somewhere on the interwebs that said (approximately) that people never know exactly what they are doing; they don’t know how to dress or speak or spell. This seems rather related. Like, if people put a lot of thought and reflection into their actions/decisions they would know what they were doing instead of just stumbling around. This sounds very elementary, I realize, but as a certified stumbler I can definitely relate to the idea of living without a game plan. I’m not purposeful; I’m a wanderer, a guesser and a proficient time waster. And I’m married to the kind of person who buys all of his clothes from one store, so I have plenty of exposure to planners.

This has been an utterly lackluster post. I thought that if I started going off on the topic of self reflection and Zen I would drum up some good material. I wanted to say that I am feeling very proactive lately, despite the fact that I just ate two cupcakes for lunch. I guess wanting to think is a far sight better than trying not to think. Thursday obligation complete. Thoughts?

If this was AIM I would know what to title this.

I realized last night that I never sign into AIM anymore. The revelation came to me while I was chatting with an old friend – an old friend who I used to communicate with daily via AIM – using gmail chat. There is nothing wrong with gmail chat, of course, and we were chatting away as cheerfully and easily as we used to, but there was something sad about leaving AIM and that little yellow man who symbolized it behind. Sure, I don’t miss that obnoxious “door opening” noise, but there are other things.

AIM was a big chunk of my social life as an adolescent and young adult, as I wager it was for most people in my age bracket. It started in middle school when everyone had AOL as their internet provider (dating myself, again) and we all indulged in shy chat-room romances and petty instant message flirting. Instant messaging was revolutionary and liberating – crushes were discussed with reckless abandon without the threat of voices cracking and parents overhearing.

I was a little late to the party, as I am to most things, because my parents had an old computer and an even older phone line. When I finally got my own computer (purple I-Mac that I think that I’ve discussed here before – screw you I-Pad!) AIM was the first thing that I downloaded. Later, in college, AIM became a virtual lifeline. Those were the early days of my cell phone hatred – the pre-texting days – and I left my AIM up constantly. Because I lived in a series of small rooms and apartments, having my AIM window perpetually open meant that I was perpetually within hearing range of the little burble that announced a new message. I would eat dinner, study and nap with one ear open to my main social outlet.

I guess that feeling of social connectedness is the reason that I feel so nostalgic for AIM. Those were the days of constant chatting and bitchin’ away messages. (Really, I was a pro at away messages. I had hundreds of them and I often processed new information through an away message filter: what a hilarious fact or quote, perhaps a good away message? This is a level of creative preoccupation that I wish I could claim now.)

The beauty of AIM, at least for the antisocial masses, was its indirect quality. You could type something that you were afraid to say aloud; you could send someone a message without having to put on shoes. As an added bonus, you could usually tell if someone was around their computer (I used to have an away message that read “Working on a good idle”) and you could prep your message accordingly.

Sometimes you miss the glory days of the internet and on those days you can’t help but think that the only answer is posting something un-clever and biting on the FB profiles of people who profess a love for the medium. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be posting “*Unlike!*” under the photos of my enemies until AIM becomes retro-cool.

Hail to otters and others

I have been meaning to write something about what it means to be a person who has stationary (a tangent provoked by receiving a letter from a friend who has both stationary and a business card), but I had something of a revelation while checking my email a few hour ago and I am always willing to put a more immediate rant in front of one that’ll keep. I will also take this moment to note that I haven’t been posting with my usual hell-bent regularity, and to pretend that you’ve noticed. I’ve been busy; I’ve had a recent change in occupation and though I wrote a few things about it last week I decided that they were too dreary and self-reflective for this venue. This, obviously, is a fun blog. If it was a sad blog it would be on Deviant Art and have some dragon background. (Is even typing the title Deviant Art dating me? I think so.)

Anyway, it occurred to me while I was checking my email that I am the worst multitasker of all time. I’m expecting a couple of emails, and I thought (wrongly) that I could just pull up the email and shoot around a couple of messages while still working on an essay. But I couldn’t move forward with one until I was finished with the other – in this case until I had bantered back and forth with a few people, sent off a couple of link to the houses that we’ve bid on, and with the sudden realization that it had been 20 minutes, signed violently off.

This probably isn’t that surprising to those of you who know me personally to be the sort of person who becomes freakishly overwhelmed at the drop of a hat, but as usual, I was shocked. I thought of all of the time that I had spent multitasking in my life – in college when I would never shut down my AIM window, all of the reading that I’ve done while eating dinner and at stoplights, and the rude but cost-effective habit I have of reading my email while on the phone.

I realized, thinking of these instances, that in multitasking I was probably doing a really crap job at both tasks. That’s really depressing. It is depressing to think that you’ve done bad work in the name of efficiency or boredom, and to realize that you might be one of those post-internet zombies who needs two forms of input to stay happy. I hate the idea that I might be that sort of zombie, the kind of person who is always mentally reviewing other options and checking their messages under the table.

This is, of course, related to other recent discussions about the ways that prolonged internet use can really limit a person’s ability to sustain interest over time. We lose our attention-spans and we gain the ability to see a different picture of an otter every day of the year. Don’t get me wrong, fellas, I still love the internet and all of its glory. Hail to blogs and to free information and all that. Yee-haw for Twitter.

But sometimes even I get a little creeped out by the way that a person like me, a person who rarely picks up their circa-1996 cell phone, can get the idea that they are a great multitasker. Multitasking is assumed now, as a character trait and as a habit and we never stop to assess our actual aptitude for it. Fortunately (or unfortunately), I’m a unitasker, hardcoredly.

Strolling

I think I am getting into the habit of writing these things right before I leave for work in the morning and therefore giving the impression that I am always either at work or thinking long, dreary thoughts about work. And that is not the case. I often think long dreary thought about a number of topics. Currently I am thinking a couple of long dreary thoughts about buying houses. (I don’t know if I have mentioned that we are considering buying a house on here yet; if not, surprise!) It’s a shocker to find that after years of looking at tiny one-storey houses that you feel oddly seduced by a two-storey house. Woe to the real estate agent that must conduct us to a 750 square-foot house and a 1,200 square-foot house in the same day.

But I am also thinking dreary thoughts about the feeling this morning when I opened my kitchen door to let the dog out. It was about 7:40 and cool out, but the coolness had a feeling of brevity – I could feel the insane hotness looming just beyond the shade. I felt it when I opened the bathroom window this morning and when I turned on the dusty fan last night. Summer is coming in all of its sweaty, grimy, glory. And when it gets here I’m going to take off my sneakers and be cranky until it retreats.

I was thinking about summer the other day when I was sitting in my car on my lunch break. It was windy outside, but warm enough in the car and after I’d eaten my lunch I felt like taking a nap. To distract myself I watched the cars and the people trouping past my windshield. First, there were a whole lot of them (both people and cars) and they all seemed so shiny in the sun – hubcaps and steel bumpers were reflecting the glare off of reflective plastic strollers, bug-eye sunglasses, and embellished flip-flops.

It wasn’t like the many lunch breaks that I spent in my car during the winter. Since I’ve been working retail the weather has been mostly daunting; people fled from their cars to the Baby Gap overhang with newspapers and purses held over their heads. Watches were checked, lunch hours were maximized and people kept their plump calves and boney feet concealed in weather-appropriate clothing.

But last week people weren’t just shopping, they were making a g.d. day of it. They were strolling and worse yet, they were strolling with strollers. I remembered, idly, that when I was a young teenager my friends and I used to convince our parents to drop us off at the outlet mall for the sheer change of scenery. We would wander, penniless, from place to place admiring toe-socks and platform sandals. Sometimes we pooled our money and bought matching Sailor Moon shoelaces.

In light of this, I’m pretty sure that it is going to be a real ugly summer.