Breaking cleanly from the starting gate

Everyone who is anyone knows that I’ve been reading books about horse racing lately; therefore, I feel it is worth a blog post to advertise the fact that I’m stopping. I know that it’s shocking and that I’ve devoted miles and miles of cyberspace to praising horse books, but I think I finally managed to OD on horse-related non-fiction. At least, that’s what I was thinking when I woke up repeatedly last night from horse-related nightmares.

Now, to be fair not all of my nightmares last night were about horse racing. Some of them were about work and some of them were about some asshole stealing both of the bumpers off of my car. Most of them, however, were about horse racing. I’m not even exactly sure how they were about horse racing; I only know that I kept waking up in a panic, concerned over paddock boots and “break clean” from the starter gate. To make matters worse I was in that hazy intermediate state of coherence and kept having to reassure my soggy mind that there was no part of my life that resembled a horse race.

The terrible thing is that I was on such a g.d. roll with reading horse books. In the last two weeks I’d swept through three, one on Secretariat, one on Seabiscuit, and another on Ruffian. I started a book on Man o’ War last night and I fell asleep reading it. In hindsight I think it was the book on Ruffian that really did me in though…There was a lot about riding towards the light with shattered ankle bones toward the end.

Anyway, this has developed into a very belated and boring post so I’ll stop while I’m still ahead (or at least not that far behind). I’m going to retire with some very tame literature this evening – I’m thinking something about the prairie at about the 5th grade reading level. Any book that mentions the use of sunbonnets to preserve a racially-charged paleness of the skin is like a sedative to me.

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'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?

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.

Friendly failure

Today I tried to type 16 pages and only wrote 7. That is a really crap result to what might turn out to be a very useful experiment. It is also the reason that this post is going to be so enormously boring, since that is about 4 times my daily average in word count.

Lessons learned today in this attempt:

1. My average daily work count might be too low. Only letting this mess sit and then examining it will tell.

2. Inside of people, at the point passed 2,000 words without a set fictional topic, there is only sadness. And ironically, I find this very depressing. I would like to think that deep in side of me there is resilience and a secret store of ass-kicking awesomeness, but I am pretty sure there is just a wealth of sadness. Stupid g.d. emo predisposition.

3. At some point I thought to myself that I would like to write a bunch of profiles on the freaks that I have known. Not the honest-to-goodness freaks that end up institutionalized or living off the government but the everyday subtle freaks. Because it seems to me that I know a lot of hilarious disturbed characters. Unfortunately, I think that that falls under libel or something so don’t look forward to seeing a brilliant expose of coworkers, ex-roommates and my favorite waitress at Applebee’s here.

4. Finally, I want to note that this brain exhaustion is very welcome. I worry a lot that because I am not really tired that I haven’t done anything all day. And this day, which went by in a blur, I don’t have to worry about that.

Now to find out whether 7 single-spaced pages can be pushed to16 pages with double spacing. (P.S.: I know that it can’t. I did college and all of that crap.)

No grab-ass, college boy.

The title of this blog has very little to do with the content, even in the abstract fashion that anything in this blog manages to relate to anything along the borders/sidebar. Some guy said it in the movie that I watched last night (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) and it was the only thing that made me giggle during a 2-hour tour of bug-eyed women and sailors in short shorts having heart attacks. The whole thing convinced me that my life is just an endless dance marathon of doom and that if someone rips your last silk stocking you should ask them to shoot you with a petite handgun and, provided they are a gentleman, they will oblige you.

Unfortunately, the above rant pretty well summarizes my feelings on the film, and as that paragraph is a fairly crummy blog even by my (admittedly slack) standards, we’ll have to leave the topic and continue onward.

Everyone who is anyone knows that I’m obsessed with email. When my main squeeze and I returned from our vacation last night we both crouched in front of the computer for an emergency email evaluation. We aren’t much into taking turns, so together we scrolled though my mess of job-site spam and Facebook comments, and then sorted through his digital pile of Amazon ads and real estate correspondence. Nothing was determined to be pressing, and we left the usual junk to be dealt with individually. Now, you could argue that the real estate stuff pertained to me and that the Facebook comments that I receive are often directed at my FB-free pal. But, however I phrase it, we still checked our email together. And that’s a little freaky.

There are a couple of truths that I learned from reading lady magazines that I hold to be completely self evident. One is that you shouldn’t steal anything that someone might recognize (a boyfriend, a hair style, a hundred dollar bill) from your lady friends. The second is that checking someone else’s email means that you are a super scumbag. This motto extends to cell-phone messages, instant message records and works for family and friends, but especially for gf/bf combos. I frequently tell my main squeeze (never an offender of this rule) that reading your spouse’s email means that you are a sleazebag and will eventually get a divorce.

I’m not trying to be a stickler, completely. Obviously I discuss the contents of my email with just about who will listen and especially with my spousal person. And I see the temptation of checking on someone’s email and the ways that you could write it off as your computer/your property/complete honesty ect. But I do think that having private routes of communication are important.

Here’s another angle. Our house is full of notebooks and none of them are joint-custody. When one party encounters a notebook that doesn’t belong to them, they politely decline reading it. This means seeing temptation and having to move the temptation from the kitchen table before you can sit down to enjoy your meal. This strife is particularly keen for my husband, since I have a bad habit of seizing the back of a grocery list or receipt in the drive-thru to record my sudden whims and feelings. Spousal person reported last week picking up a seemingly empty stack of sticky notes only to find on note 3 the beginning of an impassioned rant of mine from the summer of 2007. I’m not a very discrete person.

Is the whole point here that people curb their commutations to fit a certain audience? Or is it that people know when they look into something that wasn’t intended for them that they will find something that they don’t want to find? To be vaguer yet and more melodramatic, nosiness can seem almost self destructive.

I don’t know really. Mainly I was just thinking about the weirdness of joint [email] checking, private journals in plain sight and life being an evil dance party of horse-themed doom. That’s it, I guess. I don’t have much more to say on the topic – thought when I envisioned writing this while showering this morning it was a lot more poignant.

Showering, sharing

I had a hard time getting up this morning. I probably need to go to bed earlier but the evenings go so quickly and I am taunted by people who are always mentioning that they go to bed in the early hours of the morning. I wish that I was the kind of person a) capable of entertaining myself in an un-internet related way until the dark of the night and b) could exist cheerfully on little sleep. But I’m a person who needs sleep. When I don’t get enough sleep I am grumpy and I feel twitchy and sweaty, no matter how many showers I take.

(More boring news on my personal routine: For the last couple of days I have been showering in the morning. This is a catastrophic change for me, a life-time night-time showerer with long hair. I thought that morning showering would help me to wake up more easily but it usually just makes me want to crawl back in bed.)

Part of the reason that I was up “late” last night, beyond the fact that I didn’t get home from work until 7-ish, is that I have been trying to read this book about Secretariat. I’m not really one for reading nonfiction, but I do try to write nonfiction and that seems to be a horrible disconnect. In some weird writing book (I read a lot of those) the author talked about writing what you want to read, and while I am partial to short nonfiction and essays, I consume novels at a gluttonous pace. Ergo, me and Secretariat.

I know that I don’t talk about horses or horse racing ever on this blog, but as a youngin’ I was sufficiently obsessed with horses to leave a residue of obsession in my older, wiser, and Seabiscuit-desktop-background years. I grew up around horses, ridden Western with long spilt-reins of colorful nylon; always brown, always safe, always plodding, reliable and friendly.

Teenagers typically get some bee in their bonnet about rebelling, but I was a sissy and a predestined sap of the liberal arts, so I kept my rebellions sly and symbolic. As a teenager I was surrounded by faux-Western culture, therefore I wanted to be a fancy-pants rider with white jodhpurs and a red hunting jacket. English riding is about a lot of qualities that I can’t claim (calm, good posture, level eyes, neatness of appearance, and measured movements) and therein was the allure. Riding was a challenging thing for me, but the form in which I obsessed over it was definitely a classist preoccupation. Brainwashed by hundreds of girl-and-her-horse books, I wanted Thoroughbreds, white cotton saddle pads, and white picket paddocks; to me these things implied poise and stability.

I’m not nearly so silly now, but I still get a bit excited over Thoroughbred racing. I like to read about it, to hear the newscasters inevitably referring to the insurmountable “heart” of the horses, to see the pictures of these million dollar-athletes being hosed down. Plus, it’s a good time of year to be excited over it. Last year my main squeeze and I contemplated holding a Kentucky Derby party (hella Mint Juleps and big hats) but our plans were foiled. Provided that I don’t have to work on that Saturday, maybe this year I’ll have an occasion for wearing my over-sized sunhat. I need to practice my swoon.

Hours without email: 3 and counting

I am going on vacation in a few weeks and I can’t resist reporting this any more than I can resist picking at the little “Intel Pentium Inside” sticker on my laptop. I understand the risk of raising the bar too high by constant discussion of the trip, just as I understand the risk of the sticky residue that will remain in the sticker’s absence to catch at my shirtsleeves. But I’m taking both of those risks today.

I am going on vacation to celebrate a year of being ball-and-chained to some guy I know (grudgingly I am allowing his attendance) and I am supremely excited because neither of us has been on a vacation for a couple of years, unless you count impromptu sleepovers at family events when the alcohol has been served too liberally. I won’t play the sympathy card – everyone knows that my wackadoodle employment status is a bed of my own choosing – so I’ll just say that the dude I live with deserves a vacation, whereas I just like going on vacation.

Because I don’t like admitting my own faults and because I can make rampant justifications here, I will excuse my lazy-man’s love of vacations by calling it a hereditary curse. My parents raised us to love vacations by taking us on plenty of them with little regard to cost or compulsory schooling. In my formative years I was always confused traveling with friends whose parents packed lunches and got up at 4 a.m. to drive to Tahoe. In my own family eating out on vacation was a given and my sisters and I never shared a hotel room with our parents after our youngest sister was potty trained. Oh yes, we were spoiled, though I like to temper that realization with the knowledge that my parents elected to vacation constantly instead of installing modern conveniences like air conditioning, a dishwasher or cable TV to our home.

These days my parents continue their vacationing cycle, though somewhat subdued by the general shit-show that is the economy, while my sisters and I languish outside of their special universe. We can’t afford to vacation with the frequency or in the fashion that my parents so foolishly led us to believe was the norm.

But I am going on vacation soon and it ignites all of my dormant vacationing genes. I’ve already thought about packing. (I know what you are thinking; didn’t I just go off about packing? I did recently, and don’t worry, I won’t do it again.)

So here’s the thing that I meant to get around to in this discussion of vacationing: the place that we are going is devoid of cell phone service because it is so close to the ocean. That means 3 days phone-free and I am irrationally excited about this despite the fact that I rarely use my phone. I think that the excitement about being without cell coverage is symbolic of a larger need to unplug from the world – specifically from my laptop. I suspect that my creative process has been hampered lately by my constant internet-use and email-refreshing. As a test I didn’t check my email at all yesterday until 9 p.m. and it was more of a struggle than I’d like to admit. (Especially when my only emails when I signed in were from Facebook or my mother; ego = destroyed.)

Occasionally we all need a break from our Bloglines…a very small break.

P.S., The Intel sticker is off and the result is a sticky mess. Why do they put these stupid stickers where they bubble up at the corners and taunt you? Worse idea ever.

just-for-show guy

I know that I have been writing a lot about work lately but, regrettably, I haven’t been doing much else and I have no intention of straining my brain over possible topics. I have considered just joining some Twitter-list of handy daily free-write topics and just stealing the hell out of those, but I have something of a soul left in me. And to prove it I will delight you get again with a tail from my working days that I found v. amusing. (Other things I find amusing: using “v.” as a replacement for “very.”)

So a few nights ago I was working the evening shift at work and it was fairly dead. Because of this relative deadness, I was able to pay close and special attention to a couple that came in and caught my (admittedly roving) eye. The couple consisted of an older woman in her 50s, dressed snappily in a pants suit and a weird just-for-show kind of scarf, with her glasses dangling from a fake-gold chain around her neck, and Some Guy. This incredibly regular guy was in his late-20s or eary-30s, wore cargo shorts and a striped polo and had a slight comb-over and some douchey hemp bracelet.

I should note that this couple caught my eye for two reasons. The first is that I have began making a study of the way middle-aged ladies dress because my job requires me to cater to them in a clothing sense, and because I see a wide range of classiness. I’m a plain jane sort, but I have noticed that plain jane middle-aged ladies have a real haggard look about them – it’s a strange combo of no make up, yoga-pants-and-fleece-pullovers, and low ponytails. I worry that when I’m wandering an outlet mall in my 40s, sipping water from a Starbucks cup, I’m going to look just as weary. So I stare at them.

The second reason that I took to this couple was that their relationship was so ambiguous. The man seemed too old to be shopping with his mom (lie!) and too young to be romantically involved with her, but they were obviously very comfortable together. She was holding clothes up to his neck, which is familiar and gross in the extreme.

Anyway, the couple picked out a few things and eventually made their way to the register. I went to ring them up and the lady started chatting.

“It is his birthday,” she said, indicating the man beside her. “And if I don’t take him shopping then he won’t buy any new clothes.”

I knew from the way the man blanched, which was not in the oh-wife-you-are-so-chatty-with-sales-girls way but in acute embarrassment, that this must be his mom. Only a mom can bring so much distress to an individual with such a short statement. I took her credit card and nodded blandly to disguise my delight.

The receipts rolled out of the machine and the man refused to meet my eye as I gave the coupon spiel. His mom stopped for a moment and discussed them. Where, she wondered, could she pick up something nice for herself? I pointed out a likely store on a map.

“I’ve been shopping for this one all day,” she said pointing at her son and throwing an exaggerated wink over her shoulder. She made her way towards the door and the man followed slowly behind with the bags.

“You have a good birthday,” I called and watched him hunch further. This guy obviously wanted to sink straight into the multi-colored tile of the outlet mall courtyard. What an undignified way to go.

The whole thing made my g.d. day.

Friar-Tucking around

This post is on posture and it won’t be amazing or uplifting because posture, like all other things, is shitty. That’s my POV today and I won’t take any flak for it, or for my use of obnoxious abbreviations to communicate “point of view.”

You may notice that I frequently describe my actions here as “hunching around.” That is because I have terrible, slouching posture and I tend to hunch over with the least provocation – tiny keyboard, little hatchback, boring book with small print or a candy bar dropped below my desk. Hunching is bad for you, in that it doesn’t shape your spine in the way your spine wants to be shaped, but it is also natural. I don’t see well, so I naturally bend at my mid-spine too scope out the interesting developments on my computer screen.

So I’ve been thinking about trying to improve my posture, first because it would make me seem a little less like Friar Tuck, but also because good posture makes people want to give you jobs. Posture makes people trust you more quickly than having a Golden Retriever.

But I feel that there is an alternate stigma against having good posture, as though good posture is indicative of being a real WASP-y son-of-a-bitch. I was reading a story by Dorothy Parker last night and the frigid woman in it lives in envy of her richer friend and has cocktails with her to flatter her into giving gifts. Anyway, this frigid, poor lady with the bad clothes and the pug-face had good posture and sat without her back touching the chair.

Well, with one slur against Golden Retrievers, another against WASPs and a final blow against the pug-faced populace, I consider my work here done. Oh, Thursday.