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.

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.

Worse than construction/landscaping noises

I want to write about sleep today, but not because Kevin overslept and I got up heavy-eyed and yawning after a solid 8 hours nestled atop my Sleep Number. The idea of sleep, or rather the idea that I should put some thought into sleeping, occurred to me on Saturday when I woke up at 9:30 and gave going back to sleep my best effort. I wasn’t able to – my brain became too alert on my trip to the bathroom, rushed though it was to preserve that sleepy state – and I was a little depressed. It wasn’t that I was amazingly tired; I just wanted to be able to sleep the prolonged, joyous sleep of a teenager again.

The sleep of a teenager is blissful. I don’t claim to understand it (something about the exhaustion of growing or utter laziness) or to be an expert on it, since my latest sleep-ins pale before the more serious exploits of my 1 or 2 p.m. friends. For me it was usually a solid 10 or 11 a.m. and while that is not particularly impressive, I still remember the wrenching feeling of waking up, the reluctance to roll over and face the sunshine. I also remember the way that my meddling parents would open my door and let my dog in to wake me up if I slept too late. The strategy of turning best pals against each other (or me against her, she wasn’t phased by my wallowing her with a pillow) is rivaled only by the frustration of waking up to construction/landscaping noises.

I’m not exactly sure what I miss about teenage sleeping. I don’t think that it is the sleeping in – I have come far in valuing my weekends since my school days. I think it is the way of sleeping more than the length of the sleep. As a teenager and in my earliest years of college I always went to sleep right away and slept all through the night with my mouth slack and drool pooling on my pillow. I think that the reluctance to get up has more to do with that state of extreme relaxation than with laziness or growing pains.

Last night, for example, I went to bed rather early (11:15) and slept fine until 4. After waking up at 4 I spent the next three hours in the state of semi-awareness that is frustrating and simultaneously pleasant; waking up every few minutes and glancing at the clock always assures you that you have so much time left to sleep but the waking up so often makes the sleep pointless. It's always a little unnerving, like staying awake too long after taking cold medicine. My dreams during those brief patches are almost always about work; I used to have the most stressful dreams about scrolling through Word.

I never experienced the half-awake state when I was sleeping the drenching sleep of a teenager. My brain never buzzed with worries about work and fragments of songs left in my head. I just slept and my first thought on waking up was always when I would have time to take a nap.

Safe as houses

Today I had a Jamba Juice for the first time in approximately 6 months (see my previous posts about attempting to buy a J.J. in a shopping mall near a high school – worst idea ever) and it was still amazing. I justified the expense by reminding myself that an immunity boost is cheaper and probably more effective than a swine flu vaccine but mainly I was just craving some squashed fruit mixed with gallons of sugar water.

A slight aside on my favorite topic, “things that I used to order from restaurants all the time but are now no longer listed on the menu.” My favorite smoothie was called a Strawberry Tsunami, but a few years ago the word tsunami became too offensive and they changed the name to Strawberry Surf-rider. In the early days of this transition I would order the Strawberry Tsunami out of misplaced loyalty (just as I order the unlisted two cheese burger meal at McDonalds) but today I said it purely by accident. The girl behind the counter affected ignorance and I had to excuse, and then correct, myself.

Speaking of girls behind counters, I have some commentary about being one. On Sunday I suffered my first bout of retail rage, which considering how people love to throw tissue paper on the floor, took an awfully long time to sink in. The story is actually very short: I was supposed to be folding and straightening sweaters and people kept touching them with no intention of buying them. For some reason, though I touch all manner of crap that I have no intention of buying, this seemed unforgiveable.

I think this was one of those learning moments and I suddenly sympathized with people who always over-tip the waitress because they once worked in food service. I am never going to go rooting through a pile of sweaters that I don’t really want ever again. Nor will I ditch something on a random shelf that I’ve carried all the way around the store twice and am too lazy to return. Well, maybe in really big stores that you aren’t allowed to go backward in…like IKEA or a Walmart Super Center.

And in unrelated news, I would like to start using the abbreviation “g.d.” instead of “goddamn” when typing. I would also like to integrate the phrase “safe as houses” into my vocabulary.

Vic, of Vic's Market

I got out of work a couple of hours early today and so I am doing what any reasonable person would do. I am making brownies and thinking about food in a pensive way.

I know what this seems like, and it is true: I didn't eat lunch and I'm waiting for my co-habitator to return before I eat dinner. General hunger, however, is not the root on this pondering. Sadly, just as I often think about hairbrushes and linens, I have a tendency to over-think food, or more specifically, the food in the home and the implications of hospitality. (That last sentence could have been an essay title. Food in the Home and the Implications of Hospitality. I've still got it, alright.)

I suppose that my time would be better used explaining than tooting my own ex-literary horn. I'll explain, as best as I'm able, the origins of these excessive thoughts. You see, whenever I get the yen to eat some brownies (or other baked good of your choice), I have to actually make a trip to the store to get the supplies. Today's last minute trip to Vic's Market (11.00, Vic is such a scumbag) was for eggs and vegetable oil and, inevitably, brownie mix. And every time I have to make this fateful trip, I wonder to myself why I don't have these very mundane items at my house. Or better yet, why I can't prevail upon my miserly self to buy more than one brownie mix, or a slightly larger serving bottle of vegetable oil, to prevent this very trip in the future.

I guess I'm just not much of a preventative shopper. I make one weekly trip to Trader Joes (I hate people who plug TJ's almost as much as I hate how TJ's doesn't have any ketchup, so bear with me as I make a point) and gather the essential items for weekly eating: bread, lunch meat, strawberries, lettuce, cheese, pizza dough and sauce, milk and cleverly-named fibertastic cereal. I never venture into anything more adventurous.

All of this is very economic (again, Vic is a scumbag), but often leaves me with a sense of unease and no refried beans on the occasion of a spontaneous burrito. My unease derives from the fact that I was raised in a house where culinary hospitality was one the the cardinal virtues; the sort of place that never (ever) ran out of family-sized cans of refried beans. Thus my impulse a few months ago on the eve of a visit from my mom to buy two bottles of wine. Not just one to serve her with pretended aplomb but two, in case another wine drinking event ever occurred. (This is momentous, since we generally don't have an alchy around the house beyond a few stray Bud Lights in a box in the garage and a conspiciously aging and untouched bottle of whiskey in the freezer.) When I bought that extra bottle of wine, I felt prepared for any wine-related situation.

Whenever I get thinking about this sort of business I tend to recall this short story that I read a few years ago. A young couple is featured in this story and the wife is always purchasing fresh food and stockpiling/preserving it for the spontaneous guest or event. Over the course of the story the couple gets pregnant and the baby is still-born. Afterwards the wife never cooks anymore but they eat all of the stuff that she has stored up for a whole year until she leaves the husband. (Note: If this sounds like your short story, sorry about the smashing butcher job I did on the synopsis.)

I know that this story is probably about things that you can't prepare for (death) and can't preserve (certain ill-fate marriages) but I like to think about it when I think about food. What a nice and reassuring thing to be prepared at a moment's notice to turn out a bitchin' spread.

Not fables, but gory stuff

I won't pretend that I don't enjoy some moralizing literature every once and a while. There is certainly something to be said about books where the willful sinners get the dramatic and allegorical death and the simply foolish ones mostly commit suicide or sacrifice themselves for the betterment of society.

I once suggested to a friend back in my english-ing days that we should amass all of the books about English girls who are awfully fond of nature as a metaphor for their loose morals and then die in childbirth, usually cursing their own weakness and asking for the nature-baby to be baptized. I wanted to try and get 70s and 80s movie adaptations for these novels and compare them (all of them tend to have dramatic hair and lots of saxiphone), perferrably in a marathon format.

Currently I am reading Far From the Maddening Crowd which I chose based on the name, thinking that perhaps it would contain excellent passages on how annoying people are that I could use while cursing people on the freeway. It is actually about some sassy young farm chica who is pursued by three men/metaphors. Thus far the able-bodied, prudent, and wise shepherd is pitted against the sulky and obsessive baron and the flippant soldier for the love of the fickle damsel.

Being a bit of a sap for shepherds I'm pulling for him, but I'm not entirely sure he'll pull it off. The solider is a classic rendition of 18th century, smooth-talking, first-name-callin' sleeze, so I'm not worried about him. He's already damned himself by impregnating a servant and then running off briefly to become a professor of gymnastics. However, the old fellow does pose a threat. 18th Century writers love to put the sassy young woman with the sulky rich fellow, when they aren't setting them up for a martyrs death against a backdrop of smooth jazz.

Humbuggery

Again I will dabble delightedly in clichés.

Boy do I hate Christmas music on the radio while I am driving around. Which is not to say that I hate Christmas music all together; I don’t mind it in the least when I’m trying to listen to it. But I like to groove in my car, and oftentimes the Christmas jams are too sanctimonious for grooving.

All of this whining does have a point, albeit a stupid one. Last night I was driving home and I turned on the radio, only to hear I Want to Wish You a Merry Christmas done by some sappy oldie-goldie beboppers. For years my go-to Christmas song has been Little Drummer Boy (so sue me; I like repetition). But I found myself awfully uplifted by this Merry Christmas song.

I’m awash in confusion; I don’t even know what Christmas means to me anymore. Probably it means something about egg-nog, but I’ve never had any of that.

Free Stuff...Fair.

I know that it's almost summer, but I feel that this level of sunny, muggy tomfoolery is utterly uncalled for. I am determined to respond to the next person who tells me about the perfect weather of California by pulling out a metal seatbelt clasp (prepared by constant sunning and polishing) and give them a good scalding.

Also, today I was sitting behind this guy in my sociology class and his shirt said "A Global Revolution, ddr_freak.com" and I was entirely contented despite the glaring sun.

I have to dash off very shortly to this exposition of local businesses where my job-people have a booth that I must justly man. I suspect to spend the majority of my time passing out free Blow-Pops with little "Get an X Ray" ribbons tied around the stem...that is when I am not whining about the heat. However, I wanted to note a small thought that I was having today, as I ran out the door with slight deodorant markings on my shirt (more heat = more deodorant, and I'm serious about my deodorant).

Presumably when I graduate from college next month, I will be freed from the oppressive clasp of homework and lowered into the yawning jaws of full-time gainful employment, which I feel yields a good deal more leisure time. This begs the question: what will I be doing with myself when I'm not always cursing at my ugly footnotes and rushing through The Beggar's Opera? I may seem well rounded, but my only hobby is sticking my tongues out at children in the supermarket in hopes that their parents will whack them for being rowdy. I'm not overly motivated, so I'm probably not going to start my own business (learn paper mache, make tons of Sponge Bob pinatas and sell them out of my car?) or go to the gym (my school as a gym megaplex, I have never been inside except for the time I went in to watch a drunken dodge ball game).

Other things that you might suspect that I would want to do as a young professional type, but would be horribly wrong in doing so:
-caring about politics, discussing it at length
-directing middle school musicals in my hometown
-learning to drink wine, discussing it at length, making art with corks
-getting one of those hard-to-maintain haircuts where your side-bangs just barely skirt your glasses
-washing out my nalgene more than once a month

El Fin

In which I do the unthinkable and quote a poem

I wish that I could manage to write with music on. It seems like it would be so nice to write while listening to some thematically relevant jams, but whenever I try the words from the music get mixed up with the words that I'm thinking and everything gets all lyrical and muddled. I sometimes can't even think too well with music on, to the point that I have to turn my radio (perpetually set to a loud and jangly classic rock station) while driving my car if I am having serious thoughts. I suppose that it's a dramatic exaggeration to say that I can't write with any music on; as long as the music has no words, or in the case that those words aren't in English or very slow phonetically pronounced Spanish, I'm fine. The trouble is finding thematically relevant jams that meet that standard of inscrutability.

I meant to post yesterday because I was feeling very nervous about certain maladies, and I felt that a good ramble would be a suitable remedy but because I got busy at work I had to postpone this venture. I was planning on talking about people that are totally mega-spazzy on the medieval times, because I had been reading this blog by a medievalist, and it suddenly occurred to me that I have read many (perhaps at least two) blogs by medievalist in my time scamming about on the interweb.

This realization combined with several factors. Firstly, I'm a retired scifi enthusiast, and I have a keen knowledge of "Ren Faire" culture. Secondly I had read several--admittedly early modern--Swift poems that morning and was considering 18th century cleanliness ("When he beheld and smelt the towels/ Begummed, bemattered, and beslimed/ With dirt, and sweat, and earwax grimed"). This sort of vivid imagery clashes with the general corset-heavy medieval conception and created for me a general state of unrest. People: the medieval times were not romantic, they were pretty damn icky.

I know what you think, I saw the Paul Walker classic Timeline too. We'd all like to think that if we were charming archaeologists sucked backward in time that we'd fall in love with a French heiress/revoluntioneer and be awesome at sword fighting and use our "magic" boom boxes to subdue the friendly (if misguided) natives. You, me, and a giant turkey leg in 1344.

However, on further contemplation, I have decided that it might not be quite so pleasant as all that. (And not just because I visited France over the summer and saw a dead homeless guy, though that is a factor). The medieval times were rife with plagues, various household molds, and plenty of people pissing on tapestries. I'm none too sanitary a person myself (currently I'm sporting jeans besmeared with Flaming Hot Cheeto dust and a rip in the crotchal region for the second day in a row), but even I'm baffled by the medieval concept of toiletries, which I assume is a crucifix and a few leeches.

Oh-- consider this my first aborted blog. I've got to go off and eat, so my rant is arrested here.