10-minute prep-time

Today didn’t start off very well. My alarm didn’t go off, there was traffic on the freeway, and through some acrobatic feat of rapid-tooth-brushing I managed to get a splodge of toothpaste on my jeans. But, on the other hand, the day didn’t start off too badly. My alarm didn’t go off, sure, but I got to work right on time, instead of doing like I usually do and getting there a few minutes early and driving the long way through the business park at 8 MPH. And a little splodge of toothpaste on your jeans is nowhere near as demoralizing as a splodge on your shirt. Yup, there was only way thing that could make or break this catastrophic but average day, and that was the investigation and evaluation of my alarm clock’s failure.

You see, today was the first day in the 12 years that I’ve had my alarm clock that it didn’t go off. It went off reliably through middle school when I had to get to the bus stop by 7:10, and in high school when I had a car and would set the alarm for 10 minutes before I had to leave. (A 10-minute prep time is perfectly possible for a teenaged girl. 1-2 minutes for pants and shirt, 1-2 minutes for teeth and hair, 3-4 minutes for finding shoes and agonizing over various zits, 1-2 for debating and deciding not to eat breakfast.) My alarm clock was a supremely reliable sort; it never failed me on early mornings when I had flights to catch, midterms to study for, or job interviews to be ever-so-slightly early for. It even indulged me for the many long years when I left the alarm on during the weekends for the pure joy of turning it off and going back to sleep.

I’m not exactly sure when I got the alarm clock, but I think it was around my 12th birthday. The clunky black plastic seems very 1998, and the sticky tape deck on the front panel matches that time period where CDs existed but cheap stereo companies were still trying to make the tape happen. Anyway, whenever it was, it was back in the time when buttons on electronics still stuck out of the main box of the item, before all of this touch-screen nonsense and the advent of inlaid, flush buttons. My alarm clock has a wire antenna that never works and an excellent sense of humor: I’ve started many hung-over mornings to the tune of Margaritaville.

I realize, in theory, that retiring an aging alarm clock might not be the worst thing. A person needs an alarm clock that can be relied upon to rouse them for work and most everyone I know has already switched to using their multi-purpose cell phone as an alarm. Finally, my alarm clock is old; the tape deck has to be pried open and there is dust between the buttons on that thing that isn’t ever coming off. It’s easy to believe that it might be giving out. Still, I feel bad getting rid of it – it was outdated practically before it came out of the box and I respect that.

Here’s to hoping that this morning was a fluke and that tomorrow will start off better --with a familiar screech from the black, dust-clogged speakers of an alarm clock that doesn’t come with a texting function.

10-minute prep-time

Today didn’t start off very well. My alarm didn’t go off, there was traffic on the freeway, and through some acrobatic feat of rapid-tooth-brushing I managed to get a splodge of toothpaste on my jeans. But, on the other hand, the day didn’t start off too badly. My alarm didn’t go off, sure, but I got to work right on time, instead of doing like I usually do and getting there a few minutes early and driving the long way through the business park at 8 MPH. And a little splodge of toothpaste on your jeans is nowhere near as demoralizing as a splodge on your shirt. Yup, there was only way thing that could make or break this catastrophic but average day, and that was the investigation and evaluation of my alarm clock’s failure.

You see, today was the first day in the 12 years that I’ve had my alarm clock that it didn’t go off. It went off reliably through middle school when I had to get to the bus stop by 7:10, and in high school when I had a car and would set the alarm for 10 minutes before I had to leave. (A 10-minute prep time is perfectly possible for a teenaged girl. 1-2 minutes for pants and shirt, 1-2 minutes for teeth and hair, 3-4 minutes for finding shoes and agonizing over various zits, 1-2 for debating and deciding not to eat breakfast.) My alarm clock was a supremely reliable sort; it never failed me on early mornings when I had flights to catch, midterms to study for, or job interviews to be ever-so-slightly early for. It even indulged me for the many long years when I left the alarm on during the weekends for the pure joy of turning it off and going back to sleep.

I’m not exactly sure when I got the alarm clock, but I think it was around my 12th birthday. The clunky black plastic seems very 1998, and the sticky tape deck on the front panel matches that time period where CDs existed but cheap stereo companies were still trying to make the tape happen. Anyway, whenever it was, it was back in the time when buttons on electronics still stuck out of the main box of the item, before all of this touch-screen nonsense and the advent of inlaid, flush buttons. My alarm clock has a wire antenna that never works and an excellent sense of humor: I’ve started many hung-over mornings to the tune of Margaritaville.

I realize, in theory, that retiring an aging alarm clock might not be the worst thing. A person needs an alarm clock that can be relied upon to rouse them for work and most everyone I know has already switched to using their multi-purpose cell phone as an alarm. Finally, my alarm clock is old; the tape deck has to be pried open and there is dust between the buttons on that thing that isn’t ever coming off. It’s easy to believe that it might be giving out. Still, I feel bad getting rid of it – it was outdated practically before it came out of the box and I respect that.

Here’s to hoping that this morning was a fluke and that tomorrow will start off better --with a familiar screech from the black, dust-clogged speakers of an alarm clock that doesn’t come with a texting function.

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.

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.

The kind of face that I've got

My face is the kind of face that makes uncomfortable exchanges occur. It is the face of a sucker, the face of a bottom-layer pyramid schemer, the face of someone who is a little afraid of the homeless and so will give them money. In short, it’s a damn inconvenient sort of face to have if you ever plan on leaving your house.

I’m used to these sorts of interactions and generally I wouldn’t think twice about the thing that happened to me in a coffee shop this afternoon. But last night I was reading a short story that put an interesting idea into my head.

The story was a very modern thing that mentioned chat rooms and Sanrio. I can go both ways on pop-culture savvy short stories. On one hand I like to feel included in the narrative, like the author had me (or rather my demographic and our collective implied demographic intelligence) in mind when he/she penned the story and now we are sharing a great literary joke as was intended. On the other hand, the mention of specific websites in novels make me feel a bit snobbish and pukey, to say nothing of my noted and dramatic reactions to starlet name-dropping in literature. However, as usual, this is all beside the point.

The protagonist of this story, through various S/M exploits with a fellow called Satan, reveals that she is dissatisfied with men because she has the sort of face that make them want to worship her. She meets these men and wants nothing more than to have brutal sexual encounters involving duct tape and flogging, but they all too soon start professing love for her and she believes that it is because of the nature of her face.

So today, when the following occurred to me in my local coffee shop I thought to myself: “Well this is the sort of face that I’ve got.”

After a mildly uncomfortable job interview I headed down to a coffee shop to try to get some writing done. I was determined to earn my weekend or I promised myself punishment in the form of typing. Plus I hadn’t been out much this week and I was feeling a little detached from the world.

So I got a coffee bev, seated myself near an outlet and was soon puttered away. Before long, a middle aged woman (bright shirt, black pants, bangles, too much hair with too much blond in it) chose the seat nearest mine and asked to use my outlet. As someone who is always far too uncomfortable to ask this question but always needs an outlet, I readily complied (though I shifted my computer a little so that she couldn’t see my Seabiscuit desktop photo). At this point I consider us comrades in computer use, but certainly not chatty.

A few more minutes passed and the woman asked me if I would “be a sister” and watch her computer while she used the bathroom. Always the enabler, I agreed, though my radar for religious nuts was tripped with the word sister. Anxious to avoid questions of conversion (and on closer examination seeing a saint’s medallion around her neck) I didn’t make eye contact when she returned and promptly got on the phone. Between the phone chatter of my new friend and the loud world music in the ship I decided to call it a day.

I noticed my friend eying me as I packed up my gear and so in an effort to be friendly I announced that the outlet was in her possession now. I got a “Bless you” and a mumbled TGIF-style sentiment for my troubles. I exited the building feeling jaunty.

I had not gotten 6 feet, however, before the Saint Lady was calling “Hey girly!” after me from the doorway. I turned around, embarrassed that I answered to ‘girly’ and thinking that I must have forgotten my keys or wallet somewhere. She wasn’t holding anything so I halted awkwardly in the entryway.

“You are so darn cute,” she announced and maintained eye contact in that weird Life-Coach-y way. I ran a mental scan. I was wearing the casual version of my professional interview ensemble (remember this outfit, oh loyal blog followers?) which involved black Dockers, Midwestern housewife hair, thick white socks that I hoped people couldn’t see when I sat down, and some no-nonsense footwear. I can only hope to aspire to cute on my best days and a sweaty post-interview me is not cute.

“Oh,” I said convincingly.

Saint Lady said that she’d like to ask me something, and I said “Oh” again. She asked if I was a student. I informed her, with a dollop of pride that surprised me, that I was a college graduate but recently unemployed. Her eyes lit up. She asked me if I would be interested in a business opportunity.

This time, all I could manage was an “Um” before she held her cell phone, which was spouting up a recording about digital technology and millions upon millions to be made, up to my personal ear.

I squirmed. I thought about how when I was in France the beggars always knew that I was American and would beg in English. I thought about how I was going to rush home and blog about this freaky experience. The recording told me that I could be making money every time someone turned on their television. I thought about how I gave two dollars to a very suspect charity in front of Trader Joes last week because I didn’t know how to say that I didn’t care about football. I thought about the sort of face that I had.

Eventually I said that I had to get going. She told me to go on her website and let Donald Trump convince me, reasserting that I was too cute to not be playing for “the big money.” I considered telling her that cuteness of the face is not the issue here, the issue is the gullible nature of the face and the gullible nature of the brain housed in it, but I didn’t want her to bless me again, so I just scuffled away.

The only way to get MORE carpal tunnel is to learn to quilt

Today I did a particularly uncharacteristic thing (only more shocking since the principal feature of my character is to resent any sort of change). The offending action was a massage, an unlikely thing because it is a frivolous expense and because I am prude unrivaled by anyone outside of the Shaker/Quaker demographic.

I went and got this massage (and hear my defenses, oh judgmental internet) not for some pansy relaxation, but because my mad carpal tunnel has been flaring up violently. Just yesterday I had my hand turn into a claw of pain when I was adjusting the quilt on the couch, and since I must have the finger mobility to pretend that I am cleaning my house, I decided to pursue some help. Of course I didn’t go to see the doctor, because I’ve been a million times since my fingers started doing their impression of heart-attack symptoms only to leave with a set of wrist splints and a heart pat on the back.

So I went and got a massage and though I was quite earnestly freaked out, I managed to calm myself by focusing on the fact that the massage person looked like gym teacher (you know, sneakers, gently balding, polo shirt). I did my best to focus on this and the periodic wild monkey calls in the soothing jungle tunes that they pipe into the rooms.

I would consider today as the most unclothed that I’ve ever been in public (note: not real public, this wasn't one of those middle-of-mall shacks that sells cellphone skins on the side). Is this admirable? Or does it just make me feel worse about my voodoo backsliding?

No answers here. I will admit to be writing this mainly as a distraction. A certain human of my personal acquaintance is making his radio debut and listening to it is giving me a alarming surrogate stage fright.