Teresa told me yesterday about a friend and colleague of hers who used to be subjected to his mother’s one and only dessert recipe which involved bananas and Miracle Whip (and water and sugar).

All day, while trying to make some sense of the mess that is my office, my brain loop (and my brain is VERY loop-rific right now) keeps slinging by the banana/Miracle Whip combo. Brain loops drive me crazy. They seem to have gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. I worry sometimes that in 20 years or so I’ll only be able to think about one thing. Corn Flakes. An episode of Cheers. Poppies. While I’m not focused on any of those things right now, if you had told me 24 hours ago that one (of several) of my current obsessive brain loops would be bananas and Miracle Whip, I’d have laughed. I never know what road signs my brain will think to linger by.

I just Googled bananas and Miracle Whip and came up with a large hit total. 244,000 hits. Many of which recipe.

I loathe Miracle Whip, by the way, so I’m doubly horrified at the idea of two hundred thousand web sites that concern themselves with it vis a vis bananas.

The additional problem with this loop pattern is that it inevitably leads me down food free association roads best not traveled.

Peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches (which I have been offered on multiple occasions).

Pimento cheese.

Mushrooms.

Tomato mucus.

Goose grease French toast.

I could go on. Given the current state of my brain, I probably will internally.

Shudder

I just got this comment on my blog post about my back:

“My name is Catherine, and I am a customer service representative with Select Comfort. I am so sorry to hear that you are having issues rolling to the middle of your bed. The good news is- we are here to help! There are several low-cost or no-cost things we can try to alleviate this annoyance for you. If you are interested in working through the issue with us, please give us a call at 1-800-472-7185. Please be ready with you and your name and address, you and your sleep partner’s (if you have one) preferred Sleep Number, your approximate heights and weights, and whether or not you feel like the sides of the bed are higher than the air chambers.

We are looking forward to helping you out!

Sincerely,
Catherine

My Sleep Number is 35″

She included her sleep number!

I probably will call them. There’s just one little problem…we have the cheapest Sleep Number which comes with the “Non-Digital Firmer/Softer Remote.” So, I don’t know my sleep number. Still, the promise of low-cost and no-cost solutions to ANY problem seems worth a toll-free call, don’t you think?

Thanks Sleep Number!

I usually drink lattes when I seek Starbucks in the morning. I’ve been seeking Starbucks in the morning more often than I should, what with the demise of Coke Blak. My stash lasted until Monday. I toasted Coca-Cola with my last one and have been in mourning since.

I’m also a little bored with my Starbucks patterns. Order latte in tall or grande, add shot to number Starbucks think is appropriate. Drink. Feel a little guilty about spending $4 on coffee.

This morning I ordered a cappuccino. It was tasty. It still cost $3.25. At the end of it, I looked into the bottom of the cup and there was a lot of really pretty foam. I looked at it a while. I tipped the cup up to try to get it to come to me. Then, I looked around, a little like that shifty eyed dog in the cartoons.

I stuck my hand down in the cup and scooped out the foam. I licked each finger and my palm.

Then, as if I had done nothing untoward, I arose from my chair, went to the office kitchen, threw away the cup and washed my hands.

I spend a lot of time pretending my body doesn’t exist. Oh, sure, I know it does. I glance at on occasion. I can see parts of it as I type. As a whole, though, I’d just as soon let it travel through a slightly parallel universe. I especially hate having my attention drawn to it by forces external.

Most nights I sleep by myself in our Select Comfort bed. My honey sleeps next to me in a device that protects her very badly arthritic spinal column. The Select Comfort bed was not made for one…

The upper arrow pointing to what they’re calling “support foam” is actually pointing to something I call “the crevasse” which is an indentation between the two air chambers. When I sleep alone in the bed, I roll into the crevasse. I stay in the crevasse. The crevasse was not meant for sleeping in. And yet, night after night, I hear its siren call and into it I roll.

Saturday night I must have ensconced myself into it fundamentally because Sunday morning my lower back felt as if it had been slammed with a cricket bat.

See how flat those mofos are? Sleeping in the crevasse=getting hit by a cricket bat in the lower back. So what did we decide to do yesterday? Glad you asked; we decided to buy large things at Ikea. Large things that had to be loaded in the FJ and then unloaded in the garage.

Honey had this lovely massage thing from Brookstone I didn’t know about and we took turns spending time with it.

Meanwhile, I was riding my bike around campus today and did something to my bad knee. I’m fine sitting. But walking, no so much.

The coporeal and kinesthetic is part of my life, whether I like it or not. Still, right this minute, I might start hitting people and things with a cricket bat if something else goes wrong.   Those mofos hurt.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’m at home today because a nice fellow is outside working on our house. I’m also expecting another nice fellow to come by and talk about floors. The latter fellow has eight minutes left in the window he gave us. Contractors should say 9 when they mean 9, not “between 7 and 8″ when they mean 9. That’s true of everyone, really. I’m capable of showing up at 7pm when my class starts then. Should I choose to show up at 8:30, I should not be shocked by the absence of everyone else.

I brought work home with me to do, but, as yet, haven’t done much with it. I know there are people who work well at home. I’m not one of them. Oh sure, I’ve checked e-mail and read a little. Only a little.

I also know people who do their own home improvement work. I admire them from afar. If I get to close, they might poke out my eye with a saw or something.

I admire the fortitude these folks have in doing their things. I also always find myself feeling odd about the circumstance of having work done on my house while I wile away the day dog-sitting the two canine-type freaks Honey and I brought into our lives.

I keep telling myself that since I’ll be at home tomorrow, too, I’ll get some of what I brought home done then.

It’s a funny thing, this lack of motivation. I have lamented, in the past, my lack of time at home since I took on an administrative (rather than teaching) job at my fine institution of higher education. Honestly, though, I don’t know what I got done once upon a time. Instead, as the day has gone on, I remember some connected moments. They have not been moments of great production. Eating some pasta, reading the paper. It’s nice, I suppose. I find myself feeling at odds. Restless really.

My heart may be more restless than it used to be. I find that quite plausible. The problem, though, is how to calm the restless heart. Or at least how to get it to not beat up on itself for being restless.
The good news is that the work should be done tomorrow or Monday and we’ll have two layers of dog gates, more patio next to our side door, and functional locks on all our exterior doors and the garage. Honey has suggested we invite our handyman to move in, which I’m inclined to do, as we’re also in negotiation to have him rip out our carpeting, lay some tile, and fix us up with some fine faux wood laminate. “Only [we] will know it isn’t wood!”

As for my restless heart, I just checked in with Newton (or Ike, as I like to call him), and he reports that it’s likely to stay moving. At least for now.  So wave if you see it run by.

I have for some time suspected that the folks who have always had mobile phones interact with the world differently than I do.

When I suggested last semester, for example, that it was possible to live without a cell phone, one of my students became incensed. I mean red faced, angry, and very loud. The idea of living that way was such an anathema to him that the very idea made him enraged.

I was in line at Starbucks last week, fairly early in the morning and the young woman ahead of me said (into her phone): “I just got up. I’m at Starbucks and am going to have a frappucino.”

While there’s nothing wrong with that per se, it struck me as odd. Why not go to Starbucks and have the frappucino and JUST NOT TELL ANYONE?

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “In silence we must wrap much of our life, because it is too fine for speech, because also we cannot explain it to others, and because somewhat we cannot yet understand.” The woman in Starbucks and many of her generation believe just the opposite. Don’t wrap up lives in silence. Narrate them. Tell everyone you know everything you’re doing every moment of every day.

This afternoon, I passed a young woman on campus who said into her phone, “I’m really thirsty. Should I get something to drink?” I wanted to stop her, hold her by both shoulders and say, “Yes you should get something to drink if you’re thirsty. The more important thing, though, is to be able to make that decision on you own without your phone.”

Here’s the thing. My academic field has taught me to believe that the stories we tell have great meaning about who we are as individuals and who we are as a culture. To borrow from another academic field, I also think, in this context, about phonemes. Those are the smallest discreet sound changes that indicate shifts in meaning. Change the c in cat to an h and you have the new sound and a new meaning. Folklorists have a similar idea. One way to look at stories, is to look for something called motifs. Motifs are the plot or character elements in a story that are unique. The glass slippers in Cinderella are a motif.

These non-stories aren’t really stories at all, then. They’re non-motifs strung together to fill the silence. Is there meaning? I can’t say.

So here’s my advice to the cell phone over-users. Go forth and live. No need to narrate while doing so.

Teresa and I often refer to one another as “brave” when we don’t really mean it. Like, yesterday, I discovered that our back teevee was not working. We lost power in a thunderstorm (really! a thunderstorm in L.A.) and somehow that teevee and its connection to the dish were lost. I like to watch what we call “sports teevee” in the morning while getting ready. Anyway, I was being really pouty about it and Teresa referred to me as “brave” in the face of such adversity.

There have been times in my life when I’ve actually had to be brave, but not watching ESPN’s First Take yesterday morning (or this morning) was not one of them.

Another example of my not really needing to be brave is a loss in my life. I am, according to Teresa, probably the only person in America who likes Coke Blak. That can’t be precisely true or I would have been able to buy it at will during its short lifespan. Now, the Coca-Cola Company has announced that it will stop selling Coke Blak in the United States. They’re going to have it available as long as there are still supplies of the concentrate. I have dim hopes of deep deep wells of concentrate in underground tanks throughout Southern California.

Coke Blak, for those of you who chose to not help me keep the product alive, is a wondrous concoction of coke and coffee. I know, it sounds gross. It’s not. It’s refreshing and cool. It has a healthy amount of caffeine and 45 calories, due to a perfect blend of sugar and splenda. No weird splenda taste, no 200 calorie indulgence. Perfect! It’s best, to me at least, in the morning after fifteen minutes or so in the freezer. Ice cold and with slight bergs of blak goodness.

Sunday, Teresa and I went to Target and they had eight four packs. I bought them all. It may be that those 32 Blaks (now 30) are the last I’ll ever have. She asked, as we loaded them into the FJ whether drinking them would make me sad. I like to think, instead, that I’ll treat each one as a moment of joy in my life. 32 days with guaranteed moments of joy? Seems good to me.

For anyone NOT in Southern California, if you’ve ever been just a little curious about a magical soda coffee marriage, go find one before it’s too late. For those of you in Southern California, keep wondering. I’m going to go out and buy what there is left.

As for being brave, when the 32 days are done (which should happen 7 or 8 weeks from now, given that I have one four mornings a week, give or take), ask me how brave I feel. In the meantime, if I can get morning sports teevee back, I be better able to face each day in a world without Blak. And, who knows, I gather it will still be available in France and Canada. Maybe I can get an import hook-up.

Sigh. Being brave takes such effort. Farewell Blak. It was nice knowing you

.

This morning Teresa asked me to take a picture of her by one of our unfallen trees. As I was doing so, I saw a chicken. We live on a busy street less than a block from a busier street. In Los Angeles.

And, there, walking along the sidewalk was a chicken. I said as much to Teresa.

Then, ahem, the chicken crossed the road. Why? (Sorry)

Well, at first it seemed to just be exploring, but then it found some litter. The litter was a KFC bag. Yes, indeedy. A Kentucky Friend Chicken bag. The chicken began to explore the bag and peck at it. At one point, it pretty much got itself entirely in the bag and then used its beak to pull something out. Horrified, I was sure what it pulled out would be fried, well, um, chicken. Fortunately, it was a ketchup packet.

The lady who smokes and walks her dog didn’t know whose chicken it was. Then, one of our neighbors from the hated park-in-front-of-our-driveway house emerged.

“Do you know who around here keeps chickens?” Teresa asked.

With a sigh that can only be described as emanating from a deeply sibling based place, she said “my sister.” We both laughed as she shooed the chicken back to her sister’s house. She then got in her car and drove away.

I have been relieved all day on the chicken’s behalf for getting safely back across the road. I liked the chicken. It seemed nice. As a nice chicken, it seems to me that having a little morning ketchup is infinitely better than many of the things that might have been found in that KFC bag.

As for me,  I immediately raised my hand and said, “I get the chicken for my blog.”  Teresa, bless her heart, agreed without hesitation.

For some time now, I have had to be on birth control pills. It’s for what one of the pharmacists at my HMO referred to as “flow and cycle control.” That makes me sound like a hydraulic system. At any rate, there is something off in my reproductive system. Not devastatingly off, just off.

I keep wanting to stop taking the pills. I shouldn’t and every time I do, I lose control again. The seals are breeched and only hormones will hold them. The controlled flow and cycle are different from my normal cycle and yesterday I didn’t feel great as a result. As I said to Honey/Teresa when she proposed a visit to the dog park, “it’s not that there’s anything really wrong with me, I just don’t want to go.” We did go and Biscuit and Scout appreciated it. At least I think they did. They acted like they did and I did get a little dog water-skiing in. Dog water skiing is when you have 70-80 pounds of dog pulling in the same direction. For some reason, I find it satisfying.

Last night I thought it best to OTC pill up, combining the woosh of liquid-gel Advils and some generic knock-offs of that Tylenol miracle “Simply Sleep.”

At 12:30 or 1 in the morning, I was out. Dead to the world out. Then the dogs started barking and I struggled out of my fog. Both dogs were barking and Teresa was sitting up. I’m sure I mumbled something. Then I fell back asleep. I dreamed that Teresa and I took jobs at Target, but that we didn’t really want to work there.

When Teresa let the dogs out this morning, they immediately began to bark. I got dressed and went out to see what was wrong. The story will be better told at neurotranscendence but one thing that struck me in looking at our fallen tree was its hollow center. I expect things, in general, to continue to exist and persist in the same way they always have. I also expect them to be solid through and through. A friend of a friend of ours was involved some years ago in movie theater preservation in Los Angeles. His group thought they had gotten two movie theaters on Ventura Blvd. (one in Studio City and one in Encino) preserved. Instead, they managed to only get the façades and box offices preserved. Those two box offices are really tickets to nowhere.

I am trying to not over-generalize about things like American democracy, my reproductive system, our dead tree, or the nature of modern life, but I can’t help thinking that there isn’t much more to most of it than façade. It’s hard sometimes, but I try to remember that some things are good through and through. It can be hard on days like this.

Yesterday I returned to my car in the parking lot in the hell that is the greater Los Angeles basin right now. It was hot and I was cranky after having taught Wednesday night. Night classes are great in lots of ways. In others, they’re not. Three hours of teaching tends to make my feet and throat hurt.

Scout-the-dog has a really bad habit of waking up early. Thursday mornings are especially bad for this, as they are our neighborhood trash day. He likes barking at the trash trucks. Ok, to be honest, he just likes barking. Scout-the-honey and I call him the “barkist.” When he’s out there barking and Biscuit is churning up circles in her attempt to chase off the planes on their approach to the Burbank airport, it all seems a little mental.

Anyway, Thursday morning, he was barking and I was not sleeping and by yesterday afternoon I was close to my limit. It didn’t help that I had spent all day dealing with a rather tragic circumstance, calling offices on campus I normally don’t call. I did what I could and got things to where I wanted them to be, given everything else, but it wasn’t an unpleasant matter.

So, I decided to go home a little early.

I slogged out to the parking lot to discover that a minivan had parked within about an inch of my truck’s door. On a campus as big as ours, there was no way of finding the minivan driver. I spent a minute or two trying to piece together what office the driver might be in, based on stickers. Having a “Star Student at XXX School!” was hardly predictive of the driver’s role on campus. Nor was the affinity for soccer. What could I do, really, walk into every office in a seven building radius ad ask, “anyone here a soccer mom with an above average child?”

Here’s my FJ, for those of you who don’t remember it.

So I opened the passenger door and looked in. It seemed to me that I had two choices. First, because the back seats were folded down, I thought I might try to crawl across the expanse of rubberized interior and sort of dive into the front seat. When I though that through a second time, I realized that I didn’t so much want my head on the floor and my feet in the air.

Here’s the back view. This is not my FJ. If it were, you would see books on CD slopping around and scratches on the rubbery parts from bikes being put in the back.

Here’s what the front interior of an FJ looks like. This is also not my interior. If you use your imagination, you can picture mine. Add CDs, dog hair, Coke Blak bottles, a bike bottle, and a cute grey and yellow Timbuk2 bag.

I sat in the passenger seat for a while, then turned the car on. No need to try whatever I was going to try without AC. I started with trying to get my butt moved over first, followed by my legs. Then I remembered what that great faker, Bear Grylls said on Man v. Wild, which is that your legs are strong. So I slung my left leg into the driver’s area and then scooted my butt over with it. Now straddling the center console, I had pulled out the rubber cup holder interior, kicked the parking light indicator, changed the A/C from face to defrost and I had a cramp in my thigh.

An aside about Bear Grylls, who turns out to have stayed in hotels and tried to “tame” already tame horses. Scout-the-honey said he was a faker. I should listen to her more often.

Anywho, I managed to get my right leg into position, though more things were displaced (my bag, the other rubber insert for the other cupholder, the other Coke Blak bottle, the radio control, etc.)

I put the car in reverse and silently wished the minivan driver’s kids well for a hot soccer weekend. All’s well that ends well, I guess. I’m just glad I went with the scoot over mode rather than the dive into mode.

Happy long weekend. My all your second thoughts prove successful.

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