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.

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.

I use so many hyphens when I'm sleepy

Writing from the perch of sleeplessness at 5:30 on a Sunday morning, I am appalled at my lack of interesting commentary. If I ever had this scenario outlined to me (as people are apt to outline blogging scenarios in casual conversation) I would have assumed that I had a juicy, nerve-wracking reason for being awake at such an hour and would be thus amply supplied with blogging materials. Unfortunately, I just cannot sleep.

This is shocking to peeps of my acquaintance, surely, because I have never been one to have trouble sleeping. Usually I am far too fond of sleeping. Not that I am one of those marathon sleepers (I’m usually up around 9 on the weekends), but rather one of those people who is irreparably bitchy when I don’t get the daily recommended dosage of snoozes. But getting that sleep was never a problem for me before approx. 1.5 years ago, after which the cycle of job searching and (ironically) the subsequent employment encouraged my natural anxiousness to encroach upon my scheduled sleep-time.

And so I am awake. And I am thinking about Gossip Girl. And that’s rather depressing.

Why is a rational person like me thinking about Gossip Girl? It so happens that just before going to sleep last night I watched an episode of the show. (It was my first, but maybe a season finale? I don’t know; I streamed it online.) I watched the show out of a morbid curiosity provoked by my mother discussing over dinner how scary (actual death-scary, not just this-is-our-culture-scary) teen vampire shows can be.

As she spoke it occurred to me that I had never seen any of these supposedly over-sexed teen dramas. In the three years since I’ve had a TV, I have rarely had occasion to regret my sparse and selective internet streaming habits…except when I realize that I am missing something excruciatingly bad.

I hate to miss bad things: I relish bad movies, bad TV programs, bad haircuts, bad tattoos, and especially bad personal anecdotes. In light of this, I decided that I needed to investigate this new generation of crap TV. And because I am about 2 years behind the cultural learning curve, I decided to watch Gossip Girl.

With the exception of the voice-over, the show didn’t differ from the teen dramas of my youth enough to scandalize me. The conflicts and goals were fairly similar (poetic break-down of social castes, overemphasis on graduation as an epic event, sexual fraternization between shockingly attractive teenagers who are hella, hella, hella in love). But there was one similarity that I was surprised to see made the cut: parental subplots.

If I may wax indignant on the subject of hour-long teen dramas, I must say that this is their most abhorrent feature. While I am trying to focus on the boyfriend stealing and substance abuse of these rich and attractive teens, the action keeps being interrupted by the romantic and financial intrigues of their rich and far-less attractive parents. Is this done to fill in the hour? Or do people actually enjoy these plodding subplots about the parents of adolescent lovers becoming lovers (substitute becoming an alcoholic, going bankrupt, or getting the capital ‘D,’ Divorce) themselves?

Come on, the CW, I don’t care about these people. They aren’t in high school and thus their lives aren’t relevant to mine.

The only cardinals I know are birds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Botony Monotony

Having been admonished, I suppose I should update. As you can see, I’m awfully good at following directions, and that especially pertains to direction in cap-locks.

At my work-place today they served free BBQ sandwiches, and since I love things covered in sauce (BBQ sauce, free sauce) I stuffed my face, commenting between bites how entirely strange it is to serve BBQ in the workplace. We are often being reminded to present a clean and somewhat approachable face to the public and to this end BBQ grub seemed entirely illogical. But I wouldn’t look a gift-BBQ sandwich in the mouth. [I didn’t even bother to find out what kind of meat it was, so I wouldn’t know what sort of animal to find this proverbial mouth on, anyway.]

Fittingly, this tremendous meal backfired overwhelmingly, because I’ve catapulted downward into a post-lunch slump. I feel ever so much like a nap and I’ve adopted a distinct desk-slouch. I’m highlighting so slowly that the freaky and prolonged highlighter squeak is really maddening.

Such is my dreary fate on a Friday afternoon. But there is an exciting anecdote to follow.

A certain manager in my workplace gave us reception types some fake flowers in a silly vase for our desk. Now, these flowers were a really outrageous color and showed up somewhat dramatically against the boring flagstone decor of my desk. With eerie regularity, patients have taken to approaching the desk, often even stopping cold in the hallway to stare beforehand, and fingering these fake flowers. Really, there were several gawkers everyday. After a few moments they would invariably comment on the color and ask if they were real.

I’ll admit it; at first I didn’t know if they were fake or real (I, after all, had not spent the last few moments petting them) and I would express this as politely as possible. But over a few months their unwavering brightness assured me of their immortality and I grew annoyed with the interruptions.

For the last few weeks I have struggled against a desire to ignore people asking about the plant. I wanted very much to instruct the curious parties to poke their fingers into the soil and feel the lifeless Styrofoam heart of the plant and to see for themselves that it was no agricultural marvel. Nothing more remarkable than a little corporate schmoozing.

But I’m too much of a pansy for such direct confrontation, so I took the flowers and disposed of them. It was very satisfying. And this blog is hopefully sufficiently satisfying to requesters.

Rags to rich-ish

I went this weekend, being much overcome by issues pertaining to the search of employment and, having three days off of work with which to tarry as I pleased, with my boyfriend to the illustrious casinos in proximity to Lake Tahoe.

Our way was beset with many delays; our straining climb to the glorious summit that doth overlook the more minutiae mountains and less ambitious peaks was plagued by a determined stretch of road labor and we found ourselves often halted, having to content our eager feasting eyes upon the glossy rear bumpers of many a SUV. Finally, without a little labor, we reached the summit and descended with the grace of gravity so often gifted to weary travelers, our tumulus emotions soothed by the lilting tones of the Beach Boys.

Upon arriving in our destination we embarked immediately (though a trifle delayed by a whimsical pause on the sandy beach, standing fully dressed betwixt persons in various states of disrobe) upon a tour of the various residences in order to find the one most suiting to travelers of our station and means. One residence in particular, which I shall not stoop to grace with a mention by name, though most shall know it by reputation and sheer size of facilities, was dismissed on the grounds of a prevailing odor so offensive to our sensibilities and yet so common to facilities employed in the business of gambling in states beyond our own.

Following a prodigious debate we elected to patronize a residence of middling size but exemplary cleanliness and agreeably situated in relation to the casinos. The room possessed a television and charmed me with the delicately folded towels prominently displayed; however, my boyfriend heartily lamented the softness of the bed as detrimental to the alignment of the spine and various other maladies of the back. He was appeased only by the presence of a spa, which we concluded, when used in conjuncture with overly forgiving bedding, would do a suitable job in counteracting, or at the very least minimizing, pain procured by sleeping.

At the casino we were an admirable success. Having indulged overmuch at the buffet, not surprisingly considering my own indisputable fondness for pizza and potatoes, we entered the casino with our funds depleted shamefully to the effect of 3 dollars between us. Despite our humble store of cash we triumphed both in games of skill and by placing ourselves strategically to result in the receipt of beverages free of charge, and saw ourselves richer by 35 dollars when the Beatles tribute band of much renown heralded the end of the evening by conceding to be photographed with the humble likes of myself.

For sooth, in my experience I have found vacationing to be the cure for all ills incurred in daily existence of the mundane kind.