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.

I blame those sad seeming dragons

On Thursday night, as I stood in my bathroom trying to floss while reading about defeat of corrupt gods by righteous sorcerers, I realized I have been doing some fairly atrocious regressing over the last week.

Though I know it’ll sound petulant, I can honestly attest to having avoided fantasy novels for a solid couple of years. Sure, I’ve carted their familiar pastel covers with raised lettering and buckling spines from apartment to apartment, but I haven’t actually indulged in some time. It’s not entirely that I’m too ashamed these days to go around with a sci-fi book sticking out of the front pocket of my overalls (read: my adolescence), though that is a hefty portion of the reason. The other slimmer, but more legitimate, reason is that I truly do enjoy reading what might be termed as “classic literature” and as an added plus I feel as though I’ve earned my plastic-rimmed glasses and poor attitude when I’m through.

For example, when I spend the day lying on the floor chronically re-reading Willa Cather, I consider it a day well spent. When I spend the day lying on the floor reading fantasy novels, however, I feel sort of like washing my eyes out with soap and writing really mean anonymous comments on Tolkien fan fiction sites when I regain my vision. And yet, I can’t stop.

It’s terrible, actually. It all started last week when my main squeeze brought home a book rejected by the library. It was a hefty tome with a giant dragon face on the cover and an incomprehensible title; outwardly I joked about the inexplicable fondness of fantasy writers for bisecting names with apostrophes but inwardly I was mighty curious about this sad seeming dragon. My main squeeze laughingly suggested that I might want to read it, and I laughed to in a furtive sort of way.

Unfortunately, I barreled through the dragon book in a few days, and then immediately took solace in another (less commercial, if that is any more defensible) fantasy novel.

To be clear, I know that fantasy novels are crap. I even make a point of reading them quickly because I’ve fond that oftentimes the 300-page subplots about warring amongst the dwarfish people are completely irrelevant to the overarching (and it’s way overly arched) storyline. But there is something strangely endearing about them.

The problem is this: when I read lines of convoluted passages made up of the words “fate,” “empire,” and “moonstone” strung together in 20 different ways, I will snort sarcastically and roll my eyes but this doesn’t seem to deter me from continuing through that book (or its inevitable sequels).

My only hope is a resurgence of my equally unappealing George Elliot phase.

Something afoot in the Great Clips.

This morning I got the best Great Clips hair cut of my life. Well, the cut itself isn't that great, sort of a botched job of taking two inches off all the way around [Is there ever a time when you feel more ignorant about the metric system than when getting a haircut? Is an inch one hundred centimeters or ten?]. Really, I rarely bother to brush my hair, and I'm not too picky about symmetry and weird things like body, when considered in hair seems like a contradiction in terms. I have been rocking the same middle-part hairstyle in a variation of lengths for the past, let's say, 7 years and I'm widely immune to the screw ups of hair cutteries that start with Great or Super. But this morning was entirely different.

I entered the Great Clips with mixed emotions. On one hand I was feeling gleeful and self congratulatory, since I had managed while biking through the shopping center to get close enough to the Office Max to cause all 4 of their automatic doors to open as I cruised past. On the other hand (the hand that isn't so easily swayed by the good omens reliant on biking prowess and the fact that no one patronizes Office Max) my last trip to Great Clips yielded a particularly awkward experience.

During my last haircut, I was asked by my very chatty and petite [read: midget-y] hairstylist to stand up for the majority of my haircut, so that she could get an even cut. Though I was inclined to point out that my slouching posture was hardly more conducive to cutting majesty than the chair, which I was mildly certain had been designed for the cutting of hair, I tend to be very shy with protests [read: a sucker]. So I stood, and tried not to feel like Zordon from the Power Rangers movie after he gets attacked and it is revealed that when Zordon is not encased within his grandiose smoking pillar he looks like an old man with a wrinkly garbage bag on.

Alas, it gets weirder. After a few moments of tip-toeing and chit chatting around, the stylist then requested that I remove my lumpy sweater, to prevent its scruffy and uneven exterior from interfering with the precision of the cut. Again I should have protested, explaining that since I am likely to be always somewhat disheveled, that it would behoove her to just cut my hair in its normal habitat. But, because I am an utter pansy, I soon found myself feeling like quite the woman of scandal, as I presume that only a woman of scandal would choose to take her haircut standing up wearing an undershirt and a very uncomfortable expression. Hence my overall reluctance.

Today however, my hairstylist was marvelously indifferent to me. She yanked the comb through my hair without the slightest remorse and without asking whether it hurt. Instead of reminding me several times to "keep your head down, please," she simply nudged my head back into place whenever I got twitchy. And, best of all, she never asked me my major.

This is the sort of customer service that I desire. A vast, unfeeling indifference that expedites the process by removing the presumption that I want to leave feel like I've left behind both hair off my head and some emotional weight off of my shoulders. Having lived in a very small town, I always endured the chatting of haircut-ladies about my sisters and community sports and grades with a bleary eyed (I never get to wear my glasses during a haircut) good humor because I thought that chatting during a haircut was a mandatory event, like tipping or the no-charge-blow-drying that you have to brush down once you get in the car.

But today I was quite liberated from my provincial notions by stylist at station number 3, who never bothered to pretend that she cared about me, my finals, my ambiguous future, my political agenda or the shitty windy weather, in the least. And since I didn't care too much about my haircut, we got along marvelously.

[See how non-nostalgic and irrelevant I'm being? I've heard that I'm getting out of control with the weeping over old term papers and wearing my old dormitory T-shirt underneath all of my clothes. I didn't even mention that I'm getting this haircut because I fear people will try and take my picture at graduation].