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.

scantron sanity and misplaced quasi-political rants

I dreamed last night, or rather this morning sometime between 4:15 this morning when I woke up to use the bathroom and 6:35 when alarms started going off, that I was late to class. And this isn’t the first time that I’ve had this dream in the almost 2 years since I graduated from college. Oh, no. I have this dream a lot. And I think it’s pretty weird.

Well, I don’t think that it is ‘weird’ as in unusual, because I know plenty of ex-classmates who also experience this dream on a regular basis. I think that our brains were simply wired for so long to anticipate class-related stresses that when we don’t get that stimulus in the form of a sassy blue-and-white scantron form our brains get a little wonky. But when it comes to my specific dream, I tend to think that it’s a little weird.

First, I don’t like to think of myself as someone whose life stopped when I stopped being able to ride the campus buses for free. In fact, I’m starting to think that people put altogether too much emphasis on college, as both a requirement for future successes and as a transcendental epoch of total personal awesomeness. Obviously I think that going to college is a worthwhile educational experience and a must-have if you love school for the very schoolness of it, like I do. And a degree is, undoubtedly, something that you have for life. But it also sets you up for unrealistic expectations ($$$) and completely fails to set you up (in the liberal arts, particularly) for the harsh unfriendliness of a market flooded with young folks who can do a close-reading of Chaucer but are best suited for answering telephones and making schnazzy spreadsheets.

Don’t get me wrong. College = good. I might even go back to school. But especially with the fee increases (32% this year at my old stomping grounds) I think that it is becoming a very hard thing to justify without insuring a 32% increase in class availability, relevance, and (let’s face it) making it about 32% more challenging to get a B.A.. If it was me, I would want my money’s worth and in the case of college that means 32% more knowledge and 32% less sleep during finals. Somehow, especially in the candy-coated UC system, I don’t see that happening.

It may sound a little materialistic (yipes!) to note, but as the only member of my family with a B.A. I make far-and-away the least amount of money. And I don’t mean since I quit my corporate job; they made more than me when I was pushing paper all about.

Money isn’t the only measure of worth and it sure isn’t the best one, but I think that the UC system would do well to shift a little of the focus away from soul-bending experiences and educational enlightenment via sun-dappled Frisbee games and towards the real financial situation. For one thing, they are inflating the students’ ideas of how quickly they can pay off their loans and credit cards as easily as they are inflating the fees.

So, enough ranting brought on by watching footage of the student protests here in sunny California. My dream went like this: I was late for a class where I had to turn in a paper and my bike had two flat tires. While I was trying to borrow someone’s bike I realized that I hadn’t attended this class once all quarter (this is a common theme in these dreams) and I began to berate myself for my negligence. I finally took off running toward the building where I somehow knew that the class would be meeting, leaving my bike hidden behind a tree. Before I got there, I woke up in a mild panic.

I know that I could push it here, make some reference to dreams of the literal sense and the quickly evaporating possibility of the lower-middle class to achieve collegiate dreams, but I won’t. That would be way too liberal arts-ish.

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.

The holidays make me cranky

I am starting off this particular post with a fair forewarning: I plan to be awfully negative so people sensitive to that sort of shenanigans would do well to shield their eyes. Actually they would do well to click along elsewhere; the internet is boundless. Go ahead and click that alluring “Next Blog” button at the top of the screen. We don’t need any positive people here, anyway.

I am full of writing rage today (not unrelated but not identical to my frequent bouts of retail rage) and I plan to make full use of it here. I am having a hard time getting anything done despite vast improvements in my internet dependency. (I lightly compressed the small internet button on my keyboard and disabled the whole scenario.) Also, what is with my apparent overwhelming love for parenthesis today? I could expand this to talk about how I am thinking in small asides instead of in strong narrative threads and therefore being unproductive, but since that would probably require several snide asides (detailing my extensive love of metaphor, undoubtedly) it seems absolutely counterproductive.

Without further (or parenthetical) ado, here is a list of things besides writing that are pissing me off this morning:

• People/media outlets making their list of “Best of _____” for 2009. I know this is the easy and obvious piece to write but I’m quite tired of reading lists of albums, movies, books, and celeb scandals. Let’s try, for the sake of reflection and variety, to limit these lists to every other year, or every other obvious category. *
• People in my neighborhood who have those huge inflatable Christmas things. What’s wrong with lights? Lights are classy. Snowmen on sailboats with Santa hats are just damn ridiculous. And ugly. And probably a phenomenal waste of electricity. (See I told you: I am pissed off AND I love parenthesis today.)
• Finally, I hate how people are so perplexed by the fact that a person might want a decaf coffee beverage. Some of us can’t handle the caffeine, you know. If we had caffeine we’d be twice as rowdy as I am being on this blog.

* I offer full amnesty to the Whitney-and-Kevin Best Person of 2009 contest. The current favorite to take the title is Lisa from Fun Cuts, the crazy masseuse who once charged me half price because I was short and can only identify me as part of “that cute couple.” The winner for 2008 was either PJ from the T-Mobile Store or the hostess at Applebee’s whose perfect first date ends with a platonic game of Twister…I can’t recall.

I'm intimidated by all kinds of bikers

Please be amazed, devoted followers, I’m about to write something in (and about) a coffee shop. I know that I have harped on about this topic too often and that I have – on several occasions, I think – vowed to never do it again. But I can lie as often as I want; this is my blog and I do as I please here.

I’ve been writing for the last two days in the biker bar of all coffee shops…biker as in 10-speed. After months of Starbucks mothers and indignant hippies at the Coffee Republic, I have finally found a coffee shop frequented by mobile people, none of whom want to stick around inside the shop. That’s where I come in. It’s true, I am a little ashamed since I haven’t been on my bike in months and when I did bike it was in the stately commuter way, not the hardcore/spandex fashion.

Regardless, it is quiet here and although there is Christmas music playing it isn’t too loud and the employees seem annoyed by it as well. The chairs aren’t all that comfortable but the internet is free.

Mostly the people who frequent this place make me wish that I was more into nature than I am. They are all talking about how many miles they’ve ridden and they drink the regular drip coffee. Last night while at work I contemplated buying some hiking boots (they were a good deal and I was cold) and then I forced myself to stop and contemplate when I was likely to wear them.

Sure, I could wear them stomping around town, leaving large muddy tracks all around the grocery store. But it was unlikely that I would be out in nature with them, hiking around and getting them properly broken in. It is also not likely that I will ever ride a bike for several miles...but I don't mind stealing wifi like I will someday.

No automated cursor here.

If there is one thing that I enjoy more than obsessively reading the blogs of emotionally stagnant teens (Please, no more white backgrounds and personalized cursors, you dreary little punks), it’s reading the same material in a vaguely early-modern format.

I recently finished reading The Coquette after having put it off for some time because of an irrational fear that someone might think I was reading a saucy novel in my cube on my lunch break. However, I have lately whittled down the unread portion of my main squeeze’s collection to only novels with compromising names (current furtive cubicle read: Sons and Lovers) and so after a few suspicious glances at the cursive-handwriting font of the title, I started in on The Coquette.

It saddens me to even make this comparison, but the periodic letter format full of romantic drama and parental reprimands was delightfully similar to the electronic epistles of some of my favorite teenie-bloggers. Get it? It’s like teenie-bopper. I’ve just made it up, but mark my words, that media-savvy new president of ours is going to be dropping “teenie-bloggers” before long to prove his groovy vocab.

So where was I? Yes, indeed. The Coquette was what a teen blogger would write, if teen bloggers where clever and well-spoken. Also, it was what a misery-blog would be if blogs had morals, which perhaps they should.

To prove my point and show my earnestness, I’ll tack the same moral onto this one as was slightly more obviously tacked onto The Coquette.

Don’t go around rejecting pleasant clergymen just because you are charming and used to be engaged to an old fellow. Relishing autonomy and sexual freedom will only end in one way: dying in a shabby roadhouse birthing your illegitimate baby while your mother and god-fearing friends sob into embroidered handkerchiefs in parlors across the eastern seaboard.

How Strange

In the past 48 hours I have received two free [yes, free] Squirts, heard the words "addled," "persnickety" and "babe-o-rama" used in complete sentences, and encountered two women named Wilma.

Those are very strange occurrences.

Comments.

Holiday-oriented scrub tops for medical personnel...what an industry.

Also, did you realize that Jack London did time in the penitentiary for vagrancy? He also thinks that hobo-ing is the best way to advance one's writing chops. So maybe I'll take to the rails soon, since I am reading The Road and learning all of the appropriate hobo terminology.

Apparently "to kip" means to sleep.

Smoothies aren't worth it.

The desire for a smoothie today got me into a very unpleasant situation.

I know what you are thinking: smoothies are like a healthier milkshake and therefore above reproach. And I agree, there is nothing unpleasant about a smoothie. However, faulty planning can mar even the most perfect of fruit beverages. You see, I decided to go and get smoothies for myself and a few of my work-time compatriots during my break at 3 p.m* and 3 p.m.** is the worst possible time to go anywhere in a small town.

[*,** Note to build suspense and over-all word count: I have recently had occasion to brush up on the AP standards. As a result I know all sorts of things, like that one should write “Calif.” instead of C.A, and that my use of ** is rampantly inappropriate. Also, when you have occasion to say “goddamn” in a newspaper it is disrespectful to slap a capital “G” on there. Now I can “who vs whom” with the best of them.]

3 p.m. is the worst time to go anywhere in a small town for one simple reason: it roughly coincides with the moment that high schools roll back their pearly gates and free their frenzied denizens. And it would so happen that the smoothie joint of my choice (I’ll give you a hint, it involves two J's, and is the Starbucks for pseudo-hippies) was located at an unfortunate proximity to the high school. And the parking lot of the shopping center where the double “J” is housed provided many of these teenyboppers with parking.

As I halted before the crosswalk choked with teens, cursing the Jansport-ing masses, I tried to distract myself by reflecting whimsically on how freaky-weird the high-school thing is. Where else can you see people walking around eating straight from a bag of Doritos? People who aren’t homeless, I mean.

Far be it for me to say anything that might be construed as nice about the youth, but these kids looked damn elated to be released from school. I guess that daily joy is a mass-mentality thing that people forget about due to the sporadic nature of college socializing and classes, but I vaguely remember what it was like.

When I was in high school and before I had my driver’s license, I used hang out around the bus stop after school everyday with some kids who I assumed were socially adventurous, but in fact were just lax in hygiene. I really envied these kids (who walked home from school after my bus retrieved me) because I thought that walking seemed like the ultimate social event; the antithesis of a stifling bus ride home reading ahead in my English books. After I got my license I would troop everyday to the corner where most of “I read The Onion during computer lab, aren’t I clever” set parked their cars so that I might drive the four grueling blocks to work.

Sitting in my boiling hot car today in Jamba Juice gridlock, I tried to summon sympathy by recalling my love for my first car. It was a Chevy Blazer in a faded black, called “Tux-y” by my friend Amanda for reasons too geeky to relate. I was so proud if my car, with the hairbrush on the shelf below the dash, and a backseat full of strategically showy sci-fi novels (bad early- 80s stuff with faded yellow covers). I was particularly proud of the CD player (as I would later be strangely proud of the desk-top background on my computer) and I played unlabeled Beatles CDs and weird burned SKA (always an all-caps word for me) mixes that I kept in one of those CD folders on the sunshade.

When the masses vacated and I finally got to a parking spot this afternoon, I clambered out of my car and attempted to cross the street. Some lady in a grande “sand-colored” SUV braked to let me pass and added a haughty eye-roll to her hurry-up wave. Although mildly embarrassed, I understood completely.

With my short stature and my shitty car, she undoubtedly took me for one of the enemy. I am however a completely different breed of youthful blight: the under-worked post-collegiate secretary desiring a smoothie.

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].

A series of unfortunate facts.

A. Safeway is no longer serving its generic Safeway Select brand of soda in flats.

I have never bought a flat of soda, but I appreciate the concept. If you wanted to mix and match 6-packs of blackberry, "cola," and grapefruit flavors, the flat was the only unit of purchase where you could do so with relative ease. The cardboard rim encompassed an infinite realm of sugartastic possibilities. Now the sodas are only available in dreary uniform 12 packs adorned with the new "arty" flavor differentiations [a picture of the fruit surrounded by parenthesis]. I'm going to think twice before I go on my next grapefruit soda run, because although I'm okay with the cashier knowing that I'm the sort of person who drinks a 6 pack of grapefruit soda while reading a novel with the word "mage" in the title, I don't know if I can handle the stigma of being the sort of person who drinks a 12 pack of grapefruit soda while pursuing the same activity.

B. 1652 is the estimated date of the first coffee house opening in England.

Gee, thanks 1652.

C. My school steals my money to buy water-wings for drunk chicks.

It has so happened lately, with graduation swiftly swooping down upon me, that the value/meaning of a college education has been under discussion at many gatherings. In these debates I usually take a very moderate stance: college is good for some people, but for others (America Studies?) it is simply a method of prolonging the inevitable job-having lifestyle. But in general I have defended the University system, pounding my UC Davis nalgene like a gavel against the table-top. How wrong I have been.

This morning I was reading the newspaper and on the front page there was this article about the tradition of Davis students taking houseboats out on Shasta Lake for Memorial Day weekend. This is no surprise to me, as I'm well aware of this floating keg-fest having had several friends attend in the past and with my own roommate preparing to leave tomorrow. What did surprise me was to learn that the student government (ASUCD) this year sanctioned 3,500 dollars to ensure that there will be a Safeboat with a host of medical supplies and personnel and 2,000 condoms available to the students at this recreational event unaffiliated with the school. This after the school called and solicited me for 20.08 (get it?) dollars in donations to commemorate my graduation. Pssh, I'm not going to donate money so that some damn kids can make a raft out of inflated free condoms held together by free Scooby Doo bandaids so they can row after a can of Keystone Light that floated away down the river.

On a re-read it would appear that I am stalwartly anti-fun. This is usually not the case.

Because I should be writing a paper...

Last week in my sociology class (how I abhor you, G.E. left until my last quarter, full of freshman sporting their ID cards in lanyard pouches about their necks) we watched this documentary called Merchants of Cool. The documentary wasn't really shocking, it simply detailed that the entertainment industry is ruled by giant conglomerates who are busy You-Got-Mailing their way into our brain-cases. It also described how these empires employ special baby-faced professionals (Andy Milonakis?!) who seek out "cool" kids and infiltrate their sub-cultures with the intent of popularizing it for evil capitalist gains. Now, I know I'm being trite, but I thought that the concept of cool deserved a little meditation.


My interest in the documentary was focused almost entirely on the choice of wording. The phrase "cool" seems to have become vaguely immortal. It transcends the harsh realities that ground up trends like "savage" and "sweet" (yes, sweet is over). Parental types utter it all the time when figuring out how to play BeJeweled on their Blackberry. Although my personal tastes tend more toward "bitchin," I am not immune to saying cool when confronted with say, someone doing a kickflip on their skateboard in a halfpipe built of boxes behind the Safeway. I looked it up on Urban Dictionary [Long aside: Not a usual reference point for me, but some guy I know IM-ed me yesterday and said that he was "sprung" and then followed up with a link to the word on Urban Dictionary. After clicking around for awhile I learned that the meaning of the phrase "drink champagne on a beer bottle budget" and advice on how to leave your girl if she is acting "klingy"]. Anyway, the entry on Urban Dictionary for "cool" implies that it is relaxed and never goes out of style and (most importantly) no one will ever laugh at you for saying it. Apparently cool is the safest verbal road away from embarrassment.


So, in the spirit of the immortality of the phrase, and because my boyfriend said that my blog needed more lists, what follows is a list of the things that come to my head immediately as being cool.

1) Melodramatic and poorly edited literary magazines full of melodramatic poetry and thinly concealed politics.

2) Professors who write their lecture outlines on the board.

3) Soothing prose about early America. [I never eat pancakes without thinking: "Then sit down he did, as they urged him, and lifting the blanket cake on the untouched pile, he slipped from under it a section of the stack of hot, syrupy pancakes. Royal forked a brown slice of ham from the frying pan...and Alamanzo filled up his coffee cup."]*

4) Zealous internet fan communities.

5) Hour-long teen dramas from the late-nineties.

6) High school newspapers.

7)Boring BBC adaptations of boring British novels.

8)Unpopular eateries.

9) N. Baker's The Mezzanine. [I'm going through a revival phase. After gifting it to someone last week I re-read it, and am re-enamored. People are lucky that I don't block-quote the hell out of that thing all over the interweb.]


*That's The Long Winter; I don't want the internet police knocking on my cyber-door with their virtual mag-lites.