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.

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.)

Heathens for Easter

I forgot to blog yesterday, thus marking the end of my most successful New Years resolution EVER. I might have slacked on a lot of other things (being neater, being more productive, and drinking more water) but I was totally on the ball where my blog was concerned. And the failure is all the more alarming because I had a totally classy topic picked out: cheese whiz.

I wanted to write about cheese whiz because I used to eat it a lot; it was the kind of thing that we never had laying around the house but that my mom always put in my Christmas stocking and care packages. Now, it’s no secret that I like cheese in general. And cheese that can be manipulated with one hand while reading is my favorite kind.

That said, I don’t eat cheese whiz too often anymore. I never made a conscious decision not to eat it; it just sort of turned out that way. I’d love to say it is because I married someone who doesn’t take kindly to eating preservatives and under his tutelage I have changed my food-sinner ways, however, in addition to making me seem like a quitter, that’s blatantly untrue. Mainly it’s just expensive and I’m cheap.

Anyway, I had some cheese whiz on Monday of this week because my mom put some in my Easter basket. (That’s right, my mom still makes me an Easter basket. Every holiday is fundamentally an excuse to give gifts in my family. Sometimes they involve beer. Heathens for Easter!) I’ve never been one for turning down some free ‘whiz, so I squirted it onto a couple crackers while scoping out my blogs. It was pretty damn amazing.

The more amazing thing, however, is the feeling of strange shame that comes from eating cheese whiz alone in your home. I’m sure that the feeling of shame would be more pronounced if you were eating it in public; however, the alone-eating shame was pretty profound. It sort of made me wish that I wasn’t reading the blog of some emotionally turbulent teenager who loves to make bland “Life is Nothing”-statements. In a certain light (a glaring artificial light that made the most of the bright orange cheesy goodness), I might have seemed creepy.

Wasting my own time

This blog is an early one because I am having trouble getting started on some projects. My brain, it would seem, is reluctant to focus today. I’m not even motivated enough to waste my time scrolling through the internet. I am merely sitting, gazing at my word processing screen, yawning and fiddling. I would jump start my brain with a Pepsi, but I’m trying to avoid drinking soda in excess and, well, 9:13 in the morning seems a little excessive.

Since I’m not going to drink a soda and I am not, apparently, going to write anything productive, I guess I will discuss another form of drinking that has been weighing heavily on my mind. I am talking about the drinking of alcohol here, so if you are under 21 please do me a solid and avert your eyes.

I am an infrequent and lackluster drinker and as such I mostly drink beer. It doesn’t even matter what kind of beer, much to the chagrin of my main squeeze when we first started dating. (At the time I was in the habit of drinking Natural Lite while he drank Sapporo. Now he drinks PBR and I drink hard ciders that taste like juice.) But beer takes a lot of drinking and it’s heavy, grainy stuff that always makes my stomach upset the next day. Well, the upset stomach is debatable; there is a slight possibility that my stomach is always upset following a beer-binge because beer always encourages me to eat lots of things, like red meat or 14 mozzarella sticks with marinara sauce, that I wouldn’t usually eat. But I elect to blame the beer because if I had to choose between beer and cheese sticks, my vote would be heavily dairy.

But what does a casual drinker drink instead of beer? I have been ruminating on this for a few weeks and when the pressure is on (i.e. the waitress is staring straight into my panicked face) I always sissy out and go for a Blue Moon or a Pyramid. It doesn’t help that I panic easily in bars; I’m not the sort that a barkeep pays attention to. (I love parenthesis today! What follows is an aside on why I have a hard time ordering in bars. First, I am not very aggressive about standing at the bar and making eye contact. Second, I think I have that disheveled bookish look that says “I will pay in cash and buy one round all night.” Third, I’m not a hot babe or the hot-babe-equivalent of a tab-opening heavy tipper.)

I don’t mean to imply by all of this that I spend a lot of time worrying about what I should drink on the weekends. I just spend a lot of time thinking about pointless things in general and my official drink receives no more or no less thought than other silly ruminations like whether I am too old to continue wearing Converse sneaks or whether I should improve my mind by compulsively re-reading modern classics or by delving into the antiquities. This, to my eternal shame, is how my silly brain works.

So cocktails and my relationship with them. Mainly my interaction with hard alcohol has been the delightful days of college when everyone had a lukewarm handle of vodka under their bed and we chased it with blue PowerAid. I remember attending these parties in apartment-style dorms where the alcohol was laid out in the vanity area of the bathrooms – shot glasses and flavored vodkas arranged beside hair brushes and deodorants. The best part of these parties was that you had to pass through this vanity area to use the toilet, and so the hallways were always crowded with confused people, struggling to differentiate between the line for the toilet and the line to use that same dirty shot glass. Now that I think about it, maybe that explains why I always drink beer…

Anyway, that is the association that I have with hard alcohol. After that frenzied freshman year I never spent much time around people who drank cocktails (these were the days when beer pong reigned supreme…is that still happening in over-priced apartments around the world?). But I have an idea about cocktails that directly contradicts all of my experiences.

You know how I always get everywhere early? (I love being excessively conversational even more than I love parenthesis today.) Well I usually spend this extra time reading in my auto, slumping and sweating when it’s sunny, shivering and hunching when it’s cold. But whenever I pull up to a curb to meet a friend for dinner and realize that I have time to kill I always imagine myself going into the bar, settling myself with a drink and reading in the comfort of a booth and climate control. I am married, but now that I think about it this is how I would want to meet someone; a fellow loner in a depressing restaurant bar, drinking something with a two-part name and reading a book by someone with a three-part name.

To return to my point, in this bar/drink/book/waiting fantasy of mine I always order something that isn’t a beer, because when you are being as suave as imaginary me is being, you don’t order a beer. Whatever it is that I am ordering I hope it involves soda water because I want an excuse to buy a seltzer bottle and a bar cart. If I can’t have soda I sure as hell want soda water in a bitchin’ bottle. (Please see below.)

Yeah, I want this. Take note.