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.

red-flag jerk vocab

I was driving home in the early (the earliest: 12:30) hours of the morning this morning, rocking out to my trademark early-70s jams and it occurred to me that I haven’t been out driving that late in a long while. Okay, well that is not strictly true. I have been out after midnight plenty of times lately, but only when in the glamorous role of designated driver and never by my lonesome. The empty freeway and the Billy Joel reminded me of the fact that once, not so long ago, driving somewhere alone at night would have been notable – I am miraculously antisocial, don’t forget – but wouldn’t have been cause for reflection.

So, I have a couple of notes on this topic and I’m sorry if one of them requires me to say “post-collegiate” and the other one requires me to say “co-dependent,” but I am going to muddle through despite any red-flag asshole vocab. When I was driving last night I was thinking about how I am really passive in the social sense (and the professional/economic/picking-what-to-eat sense) and since moving into the soul-suck suburbs to pursue my soul-suck (ex)career I haven’t been making much of an effort to be social. Part of this has to do with the fact that there isn’t much of a youthful professional demographic here, and that the existing youthful professionals are a little perplexed by a person who quit their professional job to be a shoe salesman.

It also has to do with my strange hatred for my cell phone that developed at some point, causing me to detest using or answering it. But mainly I think the problem is not being a socially proactive person partially because I live an hour away from everyone I know, and also because I live with a person who is very convenient receptacle for all of my socializing needs.

Life, I think, is very hard for post-collegiate co-dependent sorts.

I fall into the bipedal train wreck category

Anyone who knows me is aware that I have certain masochistic tendencies when it comes to movies and television. I only like things that are either absolutely fantastic or incredibly, heart-wrenchingly bad. I am completely indifferent to things that are so-so; I could live without shows that are mildly touching or occasionally funny and movies that worldly but so boring that people actually notice the soundtrack. My tastes are suited for either a masterpiece or a train wreck and nothing in between. (As a personal note, I also apply this philosophy to my friends and associates. Now look within your heart and decide whether you fall into the category of sublime humanity or bipedal train accident.)

The above paragraph, like most of things that I say on this blog, is really just a fanciful disclaimer for what I am about to reveal. Over the last week I have watched – somewhat regularly but always while multitasking, I assure you – a time travel period piece that did a serious molestation job on Pride and Prejudice.

I know, I know. I take any chance that I can get to make jokes about Austen acolytes and here I am hypocritically streaming an off-brand miniseries. Give me a break, it’s not like I’m reading those saucy P&P continuation books, the main purpose of which is to explore the sexual inclinations of the dynamic duo. Actually, I just searched for some of these sequels on Amazon to make sure that I was right about the saucy thing and I discovered one called The Darcys and the Bingleys: The Tale of Two Gentlemen’s Marriages to Two Most Devoted Sisters in which Darcy gives Bingley a copy of The Kama Sutra. Win to me.

In spite of this saucy Austen gunk, no one with a fondness for awful period pieces could have turned down something listed as “Lost in Austen.” Add time travel complicated by the fact that the travel is transporting the character into a fictional realm (another favorite convention of mine) and I couldn’t stop myself.

I guess that’s enough quibbling. I watched the damn thing and it was a marvelous, horrible experience that touched the evilest parts of my soul. The main chick, let’s call her Present-day Austenite, is in love with the fictional Darcy and her strong emotional connection with the novel opens a portal in her bathroom into the world of the novel. (Yes, this is explanation that is given. No pseudo-science or mysticism. Just pure, icky, emotions.)

Things only got more awesome. Present-day chick and Elizabeth Bennet switch places and Present-day chick is able to live out her fantasy of being in love with Darcy. There is an erroneous marriage (resolved eventually through a mysterious lack of consummation) and the obligatory time-travel recovery scene, where the Present-day chick finally becomes acclimated to the time period and learns to use a fan properly. [Fans are the go-to social barrier for time travel movies. Is there a male equivalent for this? Is it sword fighting?] Darcy then travels to modern times, where he is confused by television and anyone who isn’t white!

I won’t gush anymore about the hideousness of the entire affair but I will spoil the ending. The Present-day chick stays with Darcy and the movie closes on a time travel make-out scene (exactly identical to her frequently-referenced fantasies) in front of a mansion. Bam! Time travel neatly concluded, with no discussion of how the alternate reality came to exist or whether she should return to her own time and family.

I can only think of one way that this miniseries could have ended better. If the make-out scene turned into a woodcut illustration and the camera zoomed out to reveal that the woodcut was actually a page in P&P, I would have wept with joy. You can just imagine the rest; the pages would flip in some imaginary breeze and the cover would slam closed on the greatest time travel/alternate reality, low budget period piece ever told.

Wishing that "drang" was a word

It may not come as a surprise, but I am definitely lame enough to make New Years resolutions. (I am realizing, belatedly, that I will be posting this directly above the “Best of” list, a sure indicator that I both think of, and geek out over, the end of a year.) My resolution this year was to be more productive, especially in my writing, but also in my overall lifestyle. And until today, I was doing alright.

I won’t jump out onto any limbs here and say that I was doing awesomely but I was doing alright. I was getting things done, waking up on time, and writing my required 1000 words a day. I was even endeavoring to read about grammar in the evenings. I wasn’t proud of myself, mainly because no one should be proud of themselves for achieving the basic thresholds of productivity, but I also didn’t want to punch myself in the face. And then I woke up this morning.

This morning I got out of bed, felt no usual fatigue or hunger and sat down at my computer with good intentions and the remainder of the burrito that I had for dinner last night. But despite my aforementioned good intentions, the words wouldn’t come out properly. This can be attributed in part to my lack of forethought; I like to know what I am going to write about the night before so that I can give it a good subconscious mulling over. But once I had settled on a mildly promising topic I couldn’t get more than 500 words down. My brain felt absolutely gluey and I conceded that today would be the day that I felt less-than-dandy about the results of my resolution. The words came slowly; the came sentences incompletely, and the corrections seemed insurmountable.

I know that these problems are always problems of perspective and not actually insurmountable, but it’s still a substantial drag. And like most drags (as in outmoded slang for “lame” not dressing in drag), this one stresses me out. Not accomplishing enough during the week stresses me out because without doing so I do not feel entitled to my weekend, and lacking that feeling of entitlement, I can’t relax outside of the burning glare of my own…um…glare. And stress makes me worry that I will soon get grey hair. (Really: I almost thought that I saw some the other day. Thankfully it was discovered to be stray sour cream.)

Moving away from melodramatic exclamations and toward our usual fare of uninteresting personal tidbits, I was considering whether I should write this post as a sort of grateful farewell to the holidays, which to my dismay having rather taken center stage around here lately, for yet another year. Of course I decided against that in my eagerness to air my discomfort regarding my New Years resolution, but it was a strong contender.

I suppose it makes me finally a full-fledged adult to admit that the holidays are stressful and not just a blur of fun and sticky peppermint fingers. But now they are over and we can retire our company smiles, our tinsel, and our special seasonal ulcers for another year.

As a note of general interest, I have written 532 words in the above paragraphs, only slight more than I would have needed to write earlier in order to fulfill my dream of being a semi-productive member of society. What, I repeat, a g.d. drag.

Tales from the Cryptic

I'm ashamed to post two short entries in a row, but I'm a busy lady and blog posts are time consuming. (Or, at the very least, I pretend to be a busy lady and pretending to be too busy to blog is an important part of the illusion.)

Today I wanted to walk my dog and as it was a little chilly I went into the coat closet to grab a jacket. I couldn't find my usual chilly-but-not-cold jacket (blue, nylon/cloth, fake elbow patches of the same color and material) so I grabbed an old corduroy jacket that I used to wear quite often in college. I preceded to I walk my dog and we had various small adventures that were thrilling but not relevant to the story so shall be ignored.

When I got home I emptied the pockets of the corduroy jacket (so that I wouldn't end up with my keys hidden in the closet inside of a jacket that I rarely wear) and found a receipt dated 11/22/2008, which is exactly a year and a day ago.

The receipt is from Original Pete's Pizza. It lists 1 pint of Midtown Ale, 1 pint of Bud Light, and some tax, all equaling the sum of 7.50. I apparently paid with a 20, suggesting that I had more available cash at the time and received 12.50 in change. I pro'lly paid 3 dollars in tip.

All of these calculations are not important but I enjoyed writing them down so I'll keep them. The point is this: a year and a day ago I had more cash on hand. I also had just gotten engaged, lived in an apartment in a different city where I often walked to pizzerias and drank pints of Bud Light, and definitely never had to think of the consequences of putting my keys away in a coat closet because I didn't have a coat closet.

I didn't have a coat closet but I had a 20, a new car, and (apparently) a Bud Light. I had just landed the job that I quit two months ago.

Lots of things are crazy, but mainly time (the passage of and ect.).

Longs probably isn't a place you think about a lot

Today I ate my first vegetarian burrito.

Actually I don't think that that is strictly accurate, since I used to only eat vegetarian burritos of the bean-and-cheese variety. But when I was about 18, after learning that chinese food is delicious despite the off-putting color of sweet and sour chicken, I decided to make more mature eating choices. To give you a general idea of my culinary sophistication, these mature eating choices included putting chicken in my burritos and putting fewer giant hamburgers into my mouth. What I am trying to say (so valiantly, I think you'll note) is that today I ordered a burrito that was specifically called a vegetarian burrito.

And this shouldn't be overly surprising, given that I am hardly carnivorous and live with someone who eats about 12 veggie burritos a week. Still I thought it was of note.

Also of note: today while eating our matching veggie burritos my boyfriend-person and I discussed nostalgia over businesses as ideas. He is nostalgic over banks and deposit slips. I'm sappy about department and drug stores (to say nothing of general stores, but that is another topic altogether).

I was thinking about drug stores today as I walked past one on my lunch break. I have been told repeatedly by people that I should buy my toiletries at Target (a mere stone's throw away from the Longs Drugs) but for some reason I keep going back to Longs. And it's not even really a big-box issue; Longs is hardly ma and pop status, and I've been known to buy my over-sized (I'll avoid say 'big' again) box of decaf tea at the dread Walmart. I just like the idea of Longs.

I'll offer two reasons for this particular nostalgia.

The first is that I used to live in a dormitory that was within walking distance to a Rite-Aid. Everyone I knew bought all of their needs (shampoo, razors and ect) and their un-needs (water guns, giant sodas) there. I recall feeling very accomplished in my senior year of college when I moved back into that same neighborhood and would ride my bike (oh beloved bike, side baskets and bell) down to the same Rite-Aid. I felt very mature and purposeful in returning there, because now I was a native with a bicycle bell, who knew the exact toiletry needs of a single person with a limited income.

The second reason for feeling affectionate towards drug stores is cold cream. I don't know what it is or when people use it, but I feel fondly towards it. And I bet people buy it exclusively at drug stores.

Not a stained-glass cinderblock

People often tell me that when they see me driving about town I have a very intense (some venture to say, however abstractly, "uncool") look about me...or at least it seems that way as they zoom past me at a more "reasonable" speed. I usually take these observations in stride, because it allows me opportunity to gloat about how unfailingly prompt I am.

I would categorize being punctual as one of my more positive personal features. Of course it can be a little awkward to be on time, especially since I have a romantic affiliation with an equal punctual person and thus we are always the people browsing the dollar-store next to a restaurant when we arrive 15 minutes before they start serving lunch, but mostly I find it very satisfying. At several teenage-era employments punctuality was lauded as my most redeeming quality (not surprisingly, since I spent most of my time at various office jobs building catapults out of rubber bands and binder clips). And to this day I try to be on time to work, mainly because there seems something moral about it. Obviously this is a secular morality, since I claim possession of the same spirituality inherent in a cinderblock, provided that the block is of a shape and quality in no way suggestive of the facial features of certain saviors and/or key biblical babes.

A mere glimpse of my secular moral code is included below:

1. Be on time to work.

2. Don't comment when you think someone is wearing a new shirt. People in new shirts are nervous enough without you bringing it up.

3. Do not, even under the most tempting of situations, read another person's e-mail or text messages.

4. Don't yell at people in service positions, even when they deserve nothing more than to be strangled by their lanyard and left in a shopping cart to die.

5. Never drink enough that you are unable to wait until you get home to puke.

6. Give people rides in your car and never ask for gas money.

Cheesy chips with stealth

When I was driving home, I planned on blogging about my discomfort with the gobs of pop culture references in novels these days. The concept was already in my mind, since I had gulped down a new release for nefarious purposes over the weekend and was been rendered unable to shut up about the topic since. But now, having been molified by a burrito dinner, I don't feel quite the need for such carrying on. Furthermore, I suspect that it might have come off a little hoity-toity, especially since I was, with careful phrasing to spare my feelings, told just yesterday evening by the the sole reader of this blog that I was being pretentious.

And here I'll stand my ground: though it may seem pretentious to want a little purity in the novel, or to write a blog post about how people should never reference YouTube in an attempt to ground a story [the internet, as its sole determining feature is intangibility, should be ignored as a method of defining characters or space, and here I'll stop as I'm sprouting undergraduate bullshit], but I am not pretentious.

Worshiping the novel is a not a symptom of snobbery, though it can be a reaction to it. As a note of interest, worshiping the novel also does not mean that you recycle, love the homeless, and eat hummus with the cat that you've named Chaucer. And so, because I love lists and I love talking about myself, I offer to you the list of reasons that I can talk relentlessly about the allure of literature without being pretentious:

• I have on occasion been forced to wipe my cheesy fingers on my socks while secretly eating cheesy-chips at work
• I have a messenger bag that I'm too embarrassed to use it in cities where I know even one person.
• I have lately been accused of loving sitcoms.
• I have lately affirmed that accusation by ordered one on netflixs.
• I once ate McDonalds while very drunk in London (a classically American move).
• I am whole-heartedly a spaz-ish person and pretension requires a certain poise.

Wasting paper on the internet

I think that there are few things worse than journals with the word “journal” on the spine. This in inexcusable, even when the cover itself is old and leathery looking and the clasp might be made from an authentic arrowhead from the French and Indian War.

I admit to being a little emotional about paper-goods at times. This derives partially from my overwhelming and completely groundless nostalgia, and partially from my own heady and youthful desires to be a writer.

In my mind (and this is the mind that seriously considered looking up butter churns on amazon earlier) writers wrote in stern leather-bound books with ribbons for bookmarks. And no writer of my imagination was very silly enough to want the word “journal” embossed sloppily on the spine in Century Schoolbook font and so I’ve felt compelled to disdain this idea myself.

This tirade might actually have a point. So lately I have been trying to write in a more serious sense, and failing very miserably. I feel drastically unmotivated after getting home from work, and then I just have fits over not accomplishing anything. Really, it’s quite a drag. And I weirdly (okay, hypocritically) despair over how I was so productive in college, when all day long I curse college kids and their term-paper style melodrama and their Snow-Hoes and Eskimos parties.

“If only they knew,” I think to myself sitting in traffic. “When you become a working person there is no such thing as a free newspaper.”

And so I find myself being falsely motivated by the sirens of the paper world. I think to myself that maybe if there was a journal that wasn’t totally obvious about being a journal that I would buy it and become instantly more motivated and prolific as hell and my handwriting would probably be improved by sheer proximity to the thing.

But I know that if I were to find the perfect journal I would still be flakey and my handwriting would still be sloppy and the lines would start curving down and wasting expensive paper space before long. Hardbound journals are the most depressing thing in the check-out aisle of Barnes and Noble.

Freddy P. is always captain of something

For someone who loves chatting, I’ve been having my fair share of telephone issues lately. And not even the sort of phone issues that I am accustomed to having because I am at heart a spazzy and destructive person who decimates cell-phone civilizations with a single searing glance (read: I often drop my phone out of two story windows, or into toilets) but a more emotional variety of phone distress.

In my new place of living we’ve actually got a telephone hooked up to the landline and I am consistently being startled and mildly creeped out by its ring. To be clear, I haven’t lived with a phone that didn’t ring to the tune of the Ghostbuster’s theme and sport a camera feature for a number of years and so my confusion is to some extent only natural. However I did have a phone (a phone heavily abused by a chatty family) for my whole upbringing, and for this reason I can explain away the startling feeling but not the vaguely spooky feeling of sitting still and listening to it ring its way loudly through the whole cycle in the spare room.

In my defense, we haven’t given our phone number to anyone, so in some ways its creepy because it’s definitely a complete stranger ringing up. In my further defense , I’m a pansy and I like to live my life this way, so I won’t hear anything about the supposedly redeeming rewards of being brave.

To my way of thinking (which I wouldn’t dare press on anyone else, but I’m just yakking here), I’ve been so long away from the landline telephone as a social tool that it has been reduced in my mind to its strictly commercial-media representation.

As I’m a no longer a spring chicken, I’ll refrain from detailing my age exactly, but I’ll tell you that I when I was coming of age in the nineties, and in the nineties telephones in the movies meant only one thing: horror flicks.

I know what you are thinking, “This chick has finally come off of the rocker that she was so precariously perched upon.” But stay with me, I’m mildly getting to a point.

See, in the horror movies of my teenage years (I don’t watch them anymore, being altogether too squeamish and freed from that teenage desire to prove otherwise) there was always some young babe who was for whatever reason being pursued by the evil fellow in the mask/rain-coat/demonic permanent facial scarring. In these movies there would inevitable be a scene in which the girl has fled her attacker, and feels that she is secure in the home of a friend, usually some Freddy Prince Jr. who is laughing off her fears.

She pleads with him “Please Freddy P., that evil guy will kill us both for reasons not yet clear.” And he will laugh, secure in his position as captain of the varsity something.

SUDDENLY THE PHONE RINGS. But Freddy is not expecting any calls.

And we all know that it is definitely the freako with the knife. The hot babe and Freddy P. look up, the camera focuses on the phone and because of the generally bad dialog of these movies, the director decides that it will be much scarier to just focus on the steadily ringing phone for a good five minutes.

And that scene, when you know that Freddy's dreamboat face is going to get slashed with a pig slaughtering knife, epitomizes why I get the wiggins every time my unlisted telephone rings. It also epitomizes the reason that I compulsively lock my car doors when passing surly men in raincoats.

I almost used an exclamation mark in this sucker

Sometimes I am a bit overwhelmed by my general resistance to change. Don’t worry, I’m not about to go plowing through what laugh-tracked sitcoms might call my “issues;” I just wanted to revel in my dogged love of re-reading crappy books.

I just finished reading Under the Volcano by M. Lowry, which was a challenge, since I usually tend to zone out during swirly, multi-consciousness passages that lack quotation marks. I have been disappointed several times by my inability to stomach stream-of-consciousness modernist writing. Generally I start to waiver and then rebuke myself with a stern slap of pretentiousness. Surely the book isn’t boring, pointless, or a crack dream. It’s obviously art, and I’m obviously a moron.

To return to my point, if I can indeed claim to have one, I read Under the Volcano for two reasons. One is that amazon told me that I might like it. The second is that it is referenced rather frequently in another book, Second Hand that I somewhat regularly re-read. I like Second Hand; it’s obvious and pop-y and the main chap wears tweed pants and suffers from “emotional hang-overs” after embarrassing events, which is certainly something I can relate to.

I liked Under the Volcano slightly less. I like things to be conclusive, and although it ended with plenty of carnage, I didn’t get the feeling of any real catharsis. I like things neatly concluded (tragically or not), which is perhaps why I spent yesterday afternoon holed up in my apartment watching It’s a Wonderful Life and eating spaghetti from a Tupperware. Now that is a firmly concluded story.

Speaking of things referenced, one of my favorite bits of Under the Volcano was when the brother laments being served tea as a sailor because he had read Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. I read The Sea Wolf recently (during my London phase, closely documented on THIS VERY BLOG) and it was a real naturalist ringer. Full of stabbings and hard-tack and people who try to burn the boat down after they’ve been presumed in a coma because they are plumb crazy atheist sailors with hands like shanks of meat.

Friday is chip day.

On Monday I was all set to write a blog about some silly lady-oriented thing when I was interrupted by a most distracting statement spoken by a co-worker.

Then on Wednesday I plotted to write out the story of the distracting statement, and came up with a much better opening line than the above one, but I got too busy with work to finish it. And because I am a bashful and paranoid person, I deleted it without saving it, and so that really killer opening line is completely lost to posterity.

Yesterday I was too busy googling various combinations of the words “money” “chevy?” “check engine light” and “whirling noise” to be bothered with wasting keystrokes on a blog entry.

So today is Friday, and it is overcast. And since the pretentious builders of my current work station decided that overblown windows are more earthy and art-y than glaring artificial lighting (however will I photosynthesize?) it’s pretty dark and dreary in here. As a result I am yearning madly for either a nap or a soda. (Inconsequently I am forbidden from having either at my desk, but one is more harshly policed than the other, so I suspect that the afternoon will pass with me pounding my keyboard with the dread sugar fingers.)

Speaking of things both dread and dreary, I got a job rejection e-mail this very day and since I find that I can be excessively chatty when both chipper and enraged but am quite tight-lipped when glum, I will settle with giving the cliffnotes (does anyone remember when people were using that website called Pink Monkey to cheat at school) of the aforementioned events.

“I have some pictures of fairies that I’d like to show you.”

That was the alarming statement made to me by a co-worker on Monday afternoon. To my discredit, my first reaction was neither wariness nor disbelief but instead a distracted, knowing nod. Only last week this same co-worker seized my hand and while I squirmed nervously (sugar fingers, remember?) informed me that I had a shoddy life line and that my “money line” was all scrambled (like I needed telling).

You see, people are always picking me out as an interested listener to their sci-fi uber dork tales. [GIANT, GLEAMING NOTE: I love uber dorks and their tales.] I’m not at all an unwilling listener. It’s just disconcerting to me that people always know that they can relate their stories about fan-fic editing and learning to speak elvish.

How can they tell? I don’t wear my Sailor Jupiter t-shirt in public and I sold all of those Buffy novels on E-bay years ago. Maybe it’s a glandular thing.

I just discovered that the highly commercialized short story anthology that I’m reading has a story by Arthur Miller, so I’m going to go attend to that.

I considered buying denim online today.

I feel very ashamed for not having written in awhile. (There it is! I’ve said the thing that I pledged never to say. Farewell to whatever small fragmented amount of self respect remains to a person after they forfeit the larger portion to become a blog-person).

Awhile ago I commented that I was striving for consistency in writing, so that I might never have to make that awkward apology (blogology?) for not writing. My first motivation for this is so that I might separate myself from the throng of other internet-creepers who are making vague excuses into the abyss about finals, patchy internet or losing their space-bar finger to cheese-graters, followed by feverish promises to do better next time.

My other motivation was a wholly less offensive one. I had been hoping that I would be so inflamed with the joy of blogging that I would not lapse into breaks and that the very act of blog-having would transform me from my previous lazy identity into a more motivated person.

Quite apparently, that was not the case.

A more secret motivation was that I was hoping that writing more regularly here would motivate me to do other forms of writing more enthusiastically, or rather, with a more clinical regularity. To this end I am an absolute failure at prioritizing. If you’ll allow me to wax a bit melodramatic (the beauty is that you can’t stop me, I’m going to wax that shit on and off like the Karate Kid on crack), I’ll amble on a bit about my largely imagined problems.

As it stands now, my waking life is divided into five main segments of activity: A) working B) various social ventures C) reading D) eating and E) writing. [To say nothing of looking for a job, one that will enable me to afford the means of B through E in a more permanent fashion, as that is much too dreary an issue].

Two of these things (eating and working) are inescapable to some degree and therefore might be regarded as hostile, but both are mitigated by an ability to combine with other more pleasant factors. Para example, at work I sometimes socialize or read and I daily consume food between the hours of 11 30 and noon in the break room. Similarly, eating is very often combined with socializing and when it is not, I elect to read while eating. (I have perfected a great strategy for not getting Cheetos dust on the pages of a borrowed book. It involves agility and an affinity for white socks. Trade secret).

Because of its inherent solidarity as an activity, writing comes in at the bottom of the pile. And it’s not that I don’t enjoy writing, it’s that I have an amazing ability to make excuses against doing it. I’m doing it right now.

But on the upside, I can post this blog and pretend like I was productive today.

Musings a la Monte Carlo

Things I was considering today while driving to work…

1) I should think that the very worst job would be to work in an airport restaurant. Just consider it. Everyday you would get up and put on your uniform and special no-grease shoes and head off to work. Your commute would consist of a daily battle against airport style traffic with no rewarding little peanut pack (or vacation, whatever) to sustain your goodwill. All of this followed by a whole day of dealing with grumpy travelers and skeezy business fellows, clipping your shins with their rolling suitcases and drinking whatever a “highball” is. [Note: Probably I will have this job soon, since I have proved to be hideously unemployable in the post-collegiate sense.]

2) I forgot my cell phone but remembered Brideshead Revisited, because I am a lady of impeccable priorities.

3) I really hate it when people in the work place refer to a certain f-starting explicative as the “f-bomb.” I’m relatively certain they aren’t aware of how silly this appears in the middle of an otherwise civilized situation. Since we’re all adult-sized people, I should like to see people either manning-up and just saying it, or thinking of an alternative phrase meaning “well, this situation has gone to all sorts of hell” that you aren’t too chicken to utter. I personally love to curse; it’s a shortcut when explaining your feelings.

4) Today I saw a personalized license plate holder that said “Janis Joplin: I Miss You.”

Series of mildly related thoughts.

While plodding away at work this morning I succumbed to a fit of procrastination and took the opportunity to examine my water bottle from all sides. I always give my water bottle labels a thorough peeling, so it's not often that I get to gaze on the exciting line-drawings of mountains and streams name-plates. I was thus occupied when I realized something disturbing: water is a total show-off.

To preface, I love tap water. People are always gabbing on and on about how the water in Davis is distasteful (too liberal?) and whenever I’m not too busy guzzling water straight from the hose I take the time to disagree with this. It tastes perfectly acceptable to me.

My boyfriend and I are in the formative stages of a plan that requires drinking several dozen bottles full of sparkling lemonade, with the intent of filling them with marvelous tap water and stockpiling them in the fridge, thereby enabling us to constantly be lumbering about swigging from a chilled bottle held by the neck. [To be clear, that last sentence is both the longest in my blog thus far and a blatant digression.] Obviously, I am no anti-water freak with an ugly rock lawn.

And yet, the unbridled liquid ego of bottled water rankles me. There is no need for a Nutrition Facts panel when the answer for every value is 0 percent (based on a 2000-calorie daily diet). If you need to include it, you might as well mention things like 0 % water snake particulate matter, or 0 % crawdads disease, both of which concern me more than the fact that water lacks carbs. So you have no sodium, no calories and no sugar. Stop showing off. You also have no color. And I think that Sierra Mist, semi-transparent N-64 game systems and albinos can attest that having no color is bad news.

So, while reflecting on water I was reminded of the Willa Cather documentary that I watched last night (because I’m that kind of crazy party kid). In addition to revealing Willa Cather’s suspect sex life and history of the risky hair decisions, the documentary featured several melodramatic voice-over excerpts from her novels against a visual of casually wind-swept prairie.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I like about documentaries, the low-budget reenactment feeling. I’m quite fond of long dramatic shots featuring someone’s hand writing with a feather quill while a lilting voice reads the Gettysburg address or the personal correspondence of some hella religious corn farmer. I’m also keen on panning shots of cannons and flags with the noise of bullets whizzing and swords clanging. I even like a repetitive circling of a gallows accompanied by a noisy courtroom soundtrack, complete with audience shuffling and pounding gavel.

Anyway, in this Willa Cather documentary featured one such reenactment. A man and his packhorse were picture from the knee-down roaming listlessly in the desert in search of water. The narrator was reading from the novel Death Comes for the Archbishop and explained that the priest was following his pack animal, hoping that the mule might sense water. There's some nonsense about a cactus casting the shadow of a cross, and maybe some metaphor about needing God almost (but not quite) as much as you need water. Eventually the super-star mule leads the priest to water.

It occurs to me that a water company might do much better to detail this story on the side of the bottle instead of including a Nutrition Facts panel.

PS, I'm reading The Way of All Flesh by S. Butler, which is very slow going, but offers important insights about the valuing your offspring. Por exemplo:

“His money was never naughty; his money never made noise or litter, and it did not spill things on the tablecloth at mealtimes or leave the door open when it went out. His dividends did not quarrel amongst themselves, nor was he under any uneasiness lest his mortgages become extravagant upon reaching manhood and run him up debts which sooner or later he would have to pay.”