It may be a sign of getting old, but I find myself increasingly unable to sleep through the night. Honey has always maintained that I am truly amazing in my ability to get to sleep in the first place.

Lately, I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night. For a while, I wrote it off to pee needs. Go ahead, I’d tell myself, pee and the you’ll drop right back off to sleep.

I really don’t want to get too reliant on non prescription sleeping pills. Drugs are bad. Nancy Reagan said so.

Truth is, though, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I become acutely aware of discomfort. My ears hurt from the ear plugs I wear because of the dogs. My arms hurt because I tend to fall asleep with them underneath me. My brain comes alive with it’s weird loopy patterns. Song lyrics have dominated lately. I rarely get back to sleep.

I still haven’t solved the sleep number crevasse problem. (And before anyone asks, no I didn’t call them back, despite their offer to help. I don’t have the information she asked for and can’t really get it–given that we have the “cheap ass sleep number” (or CASN).

So, for now, it’s going to have to be Advil PM or Simply Sleep. I’d blame this all on my recent transition to my fifth decade, but since it predates that, I’ll just assume it’s some kind of karmic punishment for, well, bad karma.

Point of post, for those who like such summations:

WHINE

Thank you, that is all.

Last week, I took our extra microwave out to the garage. We had acquired it through abandonment, along with an immovable hutch from the estate of the previous owner of our house. We didn’t actually need two microwaves. This one had begun to make odd noises and it needed to be abandoned by us. (Shouldn’t twice abandoned appliances simply vaporize?)

It’s former space is now occupied by two coffee burr grinders and Honey’s coffee pot. We’re such coffee geeks. She’s been drinking decaf since her brain went a little jazzy on her in our visit to the fiftieth state. I acquired a second burr grinder for us, so our coffee consumption can continue unabated. To be clear, in addition to the burr grinders, we also have a filtered water drip coffee maker (for her) and a espresso pot and the magical wonder that is the aerolatte for me.

I thought about our coffee as substance this morning, when I received from the fine institution I work for the updated campus guide to a drug free workplace. I dutifully clicked through and was greeted by our policy and a list of the substances in question that might be abused. They also provided, quite handily, a chart of their nom de narcotics. For example:

COCAINE/CRACK (Blow, bump, C, candy, Charlie, flake, rock, snow)

or

ALCOHOL (Beer, wine, liquor, malt liquor, booze, juice, sauce, hooch)

They also listed the effects of these substances on the user. Back to cocaine, or as I now think of it, bump:

Irritability and depression

Impaired decision-making

Insomnia

I excerpted but have all three of those things. Hmm.

On Wednesday, I was home a little early, impaired, apparently, by my use of Charlie, though I don’t recall actually encountering it. I heard a ruckus outside. I went out to find that some kids had been playing with some safety glass that had been left deposited outside our fence. Sigh. I love our neighbors so. Anyway, the kids had moved the safety glass into our driveway. However “safe” it was, I didn’t want to leave it there for my Honey to drive over when she got home. I fetched our broom and dustpan and began to sweep it up. Seemingly out of nowhere a woman appeared.

She seemed pleasant and said she had seen the kids playing with the glass. I mumbled something about the joys of our neighborhood. She offered to hold the dustpan for me. I tried to demur, but was unsuccessful. When I looked up at her, I noticed she was crying.

It turned out that she was on her first day as a door to door salesperson for a cleaning product. “No one cares,” she said to me.

She wanted very badly to demo the product for me, which she claimed to “clean anything” including our picket fence. Why in the world would I want to clean our picket fence? Answer: I wouldn’t.

I have a long history of feeling bad for people like this and she was throwing the works at me. She said something about how tired she was, how lonely she was, that she had tried to quit at lunch, and then there was that “no one cares” mantra. The product, she said, was environmentally friendly. I asked what was in it. She didn’t know, but said it was biodegradable.

I tried valiantly to extract myself. She said her supervisor was picking her up at 7pm. She would just wait for him and smoke a cigarette. If I wanted to check out the ingredients of the product online, I could decide what I wanted to do. She asked for a match or a lighter. When I said I didn’t have one, she cried a little more and said she wouldn’t smoke the cigarette after all.

I went inside. Let the dogs into the house. I looked up the product. No ingredients listed on their website either. It had SUCH a generic name, it was practically ungoogleable. My choices? Stay inside and feel bad for her. Go back outside, give her a check for $64 for a gallon of crap I didn’t want, need, or know the make-up of. (Did I mention that the product was SIXTY FOUR DOLLARS?!) I thought some more. When faced with either/or choices, I like to try to think if there is another choice. I remembered that we had been given a lighter in our Advocate 40th Anniversary gift bag. I had proposed throwing it away. Honey, in her wisdom, had urged keeping it. I found it (it was gift boxed!) and went outside. I gave it to the saleswoman and wished her luck.

So, despite my current seeming abuse of some substance or another (if symptoms are any indicator), I was pleased to have a moment of clarity. Now, if I can just figure out what drugs to take to counter-act all these other symptoms…

I cried more than usual last week. I’m not a big crier, but sometimes things get to a stress level that my usual calm exterior breaks down.

Stress? Me stressed?

My tenure file was due on Friday. This event can cause stress for even the most sanguine academics. My effort was made more complicated by a number of factors.

To wit:

+This was my first file of this type. Normally people submit what’s called a “retention file” first. I didn’t have to because I just got my job permanently summer before last and because you don’t have to submit a file your first year.

+My file qualifies as weird. Most faculty teach. I do too, but my day-to-day effort focuses more on administration.

+If I don’t get tenure, I lose my job.

No pressure. None at all.

The mofo required a 5 inch notebook. Priced one of those lately? They’re not cheap. $30 not cheap.

Also, Avery needs to try a lot harder. Don’t sell 12-tab dividers when the template doesn’t work with Word for Mac. I managed to find some 5-tab dividers in the office. Someone had left a sheet in the box that had all the labels pulled off. I formatted carefully, printed and discovered that I had printed on a used, no-label sheet. Um-Hmm. Would you put a used-up sheet back into the label box? Neither would I. Did we have any more 5-tab labels? Nope. Did I need to reformat for 8-tab labels? Yep. Total time making, printing and applying the labels? Well over two hours.

If Avery lodged itself firmly on my office product shit list, Swingline became my office product hero. How? Well, they make this wondrous thing:

Behold the bit of magnificence, friends and neighbors, that is Swingline’s electric three hole punch. A friend secreted it away from a neighboring department. After using it to punch for a while (and having several co-workers come by to try it), I asked our office folks to order us one. I heart Swingline. Honey asked, when I was raving about it, “who punches holes any more?” I do and think my office deserves the brilliance and efficiency of the Swingline 525.

Here’s the completed product:

Thick, huh?

Look at those labels. They look nice, despite Avery’s stupidity, inanity.

My normal bag didn’t seem even close to capable of holding the five inches of hole-punched me for delivery to the dean’s office. Fortunately, I had gotten a bag for travel that was up to the task.

My green bean machine was ready to carry me for the delivery.

I won’t know anything until the end of the semester.

The thing is called a PIF. That’s sort of how I feel now that it lives in the dean’s office. Like all the air’s been released.

piffffffff

The crying, thankfully, has subsided somewhat.

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.

So Honey mentioned to me yesterday that our faithful laptop was conking out a few times a day. I named the laptop “pretty” when I got it. Shall we take a brief tour of my computers? Sure. Why not? It’s my blog after all.

My first computer was a PC. Not a real IBM one, but an Epson with a Hercules paperwhite monitor. It served me fairly well. I upgraded it at some point and it functioned like DOS based PCs did. Well. Then Windows cam along and I lost faith.

In graduate school, I had a class that introduced me to the wonders of that magical place called Cupertino. Hypercard prefigured and guessed at the beginnings of the web. I used the internet then–e-mail and netnews–but hadn’t yet seen a graphical interface. Hypercard changed that. I promptly got myself a Mac. A laptop.

Color and everything! It weighed a ton, but I was delighted to have a system that worked.

Taking a page from my Honey… to keep you going. There are baby animals here!

Anyway, we entered into the bright phase when Apple did. An original bondi iMac was complemented by the famous (from Sex and the City) iBook. We called the iBook “clam.”

Swivelhead came next. I sent him packing this summer when his disc drive went out. That and he wouldn’t play Sims2.

Need another baby animal picture? Honey uses them to help deal with tough stuff. I’m compensating for boring stuff. Not the same thing, really.

Pretty and Swivelhead lived together. Pretty has served us well. Even when Biscuit broke her powercord input, she bravely went to the Apple store and got fixed.

She welcomed Flathead when he came home this summer to replace Swivelhead. She chirped merrily along, all the while communicating with the spaceship (our Airport wireless router).

When Honey told me about Pretty’s problems, I was worried. Pretty was nearing the end of her life, it seemed. Was it her screen? Was it her motherboard? Either way, she isn’t worth fixing. She’s a G4 Mac in an Intel CoreDuo world.

Honey and I discussed, looked online, and talked some about it. She’s very careful, my Honey. I am a rushing-in kind of fool. Here’s one thing we agreed on, though. Apple needed to stop introducing white computers and then making the non-white ones cost more. Flathead was purchased JUST before the new silver and black iMacs came out. Flathead costs $200 less than his silver and black brethern do now. $200. Remember that number.

The new MacBooks are available in white and black.

Here’s the thing, though… The white ones are cheaper.

$200 cheaper.

Oh, sure the black one gets you a better hard drive. But it’s so little better that it’s not worth talking about.

At one point, Honey said exactly what I was feeling, “I don’t want to spend $1000 on something that LOOKS exactly like what we already have.” Look again, gentle reader. See the resemblance? The current MacBook and Pretty are so closely related in looks that they shouldn’t be allowed to marry. They’d produce warped little white plastic babies. What? Oh, ok, fine. More baby animals…

The dolphin isn’t white or deformed or anything. Happy?

Apple knows us. We both REALLY wanted the black one. It was matte black, it was smaller than Pretty. It was faster than Pretty or Flathead. I have a big presentation next week for a major nonprofit in a faraway city. Ok, it’s Denver, so it’s not that far away, but it is a major nonprofit. Dating back to the 19th century major.

Both of our iPods are black. It costs more. We really liked it better. It had a bigger hard drive. It costs more. $200 more. Apple knows us. $300 more? We’d have a white one. $200, we stand in the Apple Store and discuss.

It was hard to justify. We did it, though. We made it work in our brains and now own “Jelly.”

Call us shallow. Go ahead. Here’s the thing about Apple. They’re gotten 100% on the Human Rights Campaign survey of good places for GLBT folks to work for six years. $200. 6 years of good GLBT relations. Black. $200. White.

They know us.

Jelly is a fine looking machine.

And thus endeth the story. Can I get an amen?

Thanks.

When Honey got home last night, she saw the box in the garage. “Don’t I get to say goodbye to it?” I tried not to cry.

A year ago my life changed and I became a permanent member of the faculty at a fine institution. The weekend after I interviewed and before I got the job, Honey and I went to NorCal and I bought a bicycle. It was an impulsive decision.

Since then, I have ridden it, but not very much. I am, as some of you know, not an insubstantial person size-wise. In my brain, both consciously and subconsciously, I always kind of thought I might break the damn thing. It didn’t help that the reviews of it on Roadbikereview cited a tendency for the carbon on the seat stay (that’s the tube that runs at an angle from the bottom of the seat to the rear wheel) to break for no really good reason. And there I was giving it a reason to break.

I finally, with some help from Honey, who is wiser about me than I am, realized that my ongoing tweaking of the bike (saddles, stems, seatpost, etc.) was really a way to make myself feel better about the bike. I loved it, but I did not trust it. So, I strayed. I bought an all steel urban assault machine. No carbon weenie parts to break, no worries. That thing is a tank compared to the old one. Here it is. The color is called “bean green.”

Last week, I listed the NorCal bike on ebay and it sold yesterday. I got less than I wanted (really, I kinda got hosed), but when I got home, I packed it up right away and had the box taped shut and ready to go before Honey got home.

No, she didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. This morning I took it to UPS and sent it to its new home. Ironically, the buyer lives on NorCal, fairly close to where I bought it.

It’s just an object really. A pretty one, but an object nonetheless. Why, then, am I sad?

The new bike hangs where the old one did on my bike rack. It’s a blast to ride and on Sunday, I found myself jumping off little curbs on my tour de ducks. (Where I ride has a pond with ducks and geese at a great take-a-break point). I’ll fall for the new one. I like it a lot already. I’ll miss the idea of the old one. I hope its new owner loves it and rides it the way I never could.

I am not a particularly graceful person. I often sport bruises attesting to my lack of deftness at things. Every time I get on my mountain bike, now repainted a lovely pearly white (with blue undertones), I see the small splotches of green on the crank and the front tire from where I tried to touch up its previous paint color and failed. I tried to keep my hand and mind steady and clear.

While we were at the beach last week, I got my shoelace caught in a bike chain and down I went. As I was falling, I slowed the bike with the brakes and tried to will myself to put my left foot down first. (I always put my right foot down first in normal cycling contexts). “Left foot!” my conscious mind screamed, but my kinesthetic responses weren’t there. I have the scrapes and bruises (on my right knee) to prove it.

I try to be graceful. I try to be coordinated. I can catch a ball in a glove and hit one reasonably well with a bat, but ask me to do any higher order movement and I will fail.

Today, I was presented with a problem. It was more annoying than anything. I learned about the issue at noon. It took four phone calls and some persuading on my part, but I solved the problem by 4pm in such a way that everyone was happy and contented. No cross words were uttered. I was apologized to (by the creator of the problem) twice, thanked five or six times (by all involved) and am feeling satisfied.

Truth be told, it was a graceful.

I was just reading a piece my honey wrote about em dashes. It was a less boob titled version of this post from her blog. The grace with which she wrote this piece (and many other things) was really amazing.

It’s nice, I think, to occasionally rediscover small pleasures in life. Grace, it seems to me, comes in a variety of ways. When it comes, I want to spend a little more time appreciating it, if only for a moment.

If only my knees didn’t have to suffer my lack of grace otherwise.

Today I drove home a different way because I had to stop by my HMO’s pharmacy to get my birth control pills (don’t ask). As I was driving down one of my least favorites streets in the vague region they call SoCal, I noticed professionally printed yard signs on a number of yards that read “Puppies” and had arrows.

Then I see a yard with lots of the signs and a large wire crate and people milling about and sure enough the puppies are there and the signs seemed to have worked.

Now, I don’t claim to have made all the best dog decisions ever. On the contrary, I acquired Biscuit less than a week after Red died. And Scout’s attempt to get a dog resulted in a trip to “urgent care” for me. (Right across the street from the pharmacy near the puppy signs!) Still and all, though the yard sign technique seemed to be working, I can’t help but think that people looking at those puppies may make a decision they’ll not be happy with long term.

Biscuit and Scout were happy to see me when I got home and even obliged for a little picture taking moment.

*Picture behavior achieved through bribes of cookies

I suppose I shouldn’t judge, because however we acquire our animal companions (aka pets), they love us. But professionally printed puppy signs? I’m not so sure.

I’m not much of a cryer. Oh sure, I’ll cry when I’m supposed to. Folks I love die. Animals I love die. I have a bad fight with my Honey (never! us fight? no way, man!). Sure, I cry, but not much. I used to even pride myself on not crying. My therapist and I are working on that.

In fact, I think we’ve been working on it too much. Because I’m crying more. Eight Dogs Below more. That’s not what it’s called. Eight Below. There you go. Honey and I called it Eight Dogs Out wherein the huskies get left behind and banished from baseball. Anyway, I cried during that movie. I cried when Starbuck died on Battlestar Galactica. I even cried again when Adama cried in the next episode.

I’m not just crying at pop culture. In the car. Whenever. I’m careful about it, mind you. No one’s going to see me cry unless they’re:

1) My Honey
2) At a funeral
3) My therapist

I’ve begun to suspect that my crying problem(s) (that is, the lack of before and the excess of currently) are less than noble views into my psyche.

Seeming random segue time:

Honey and I have given up on American Idol. I know, it’s good this year and all. But we just have too much teevee and only one Tifaux. Last night I flipped to it between watching tifauxed episodes of Rome and The Dog Whisperer.

I was subjected, unfortunately, to the performance of the kid with the pretty hair. Sanjaya or whatever. That also meant I got to see crying girl.

The camera was as interested in her emotions as I. She was overcome. Deeply moved. Ok, maybe a little hysterical. Histrionic? Over Sanjaya’s rendition of a Kinks song. Which was awful. Ears fall off awful.

It’s had me thinking all day, dear readers. Would I have been better off in my life had I been able to give over to emotion like that at 13? Is there a way for me to check in with her in 26 years and find out?

Somebody get somebody a kleenex.

When I bend down, I see my navel. It’s not all that exciting, but I am in one of those moods. This morning I listened to several folks I work with discussing making more appealing and attractive adult diapers. The idea seemed to really appeal to them. They discussed it at length. I, from the safety of my office, was a little horrified. While I’m all for embracing my age and station in life, I don’t need to look forward to incontinence.

The diaper discussion produced a sense of nostalgia. I don’t know why. So this afternoon I was googling people. Some were old friends, some were newer, some were people I was just curious about. Then I remembered my navel. I’ve always maintained that I’m not googleable. I decided to persist in paging through the result for my name (first and last, no middle in quotes). I appear first on page 4 and again on page 7, both for a recent article I wrote in an online academic journal. Page 4 was my bio from the ‘contributors” page and Page 7 was the article itself.

The depth of my gazing was, well, deep. I paged through many, many pages. Hockey stats and Revolutionary war letters, lawyers, photographers. I might have gone to Yale or Cornell or Harvard or Lander (wherever that is). Oh, and my gravestone might be found in any number of states across the continent or indeed in England or Australia (mine is a very WASPy name). I could be a psychic or a “zoo parent.”

After page 20 or so I despaired. Sure, my middle initial, name, research interests, where I actually went to school, etc. will all get you “me” more directly. Using my middle initial revealed that someone who shares my name is a child molester. On the upside, using my middle name helped me discover that a university library (besides the place I got my degree) ordered my dissertation and has is sitting on their library shelves. Bless their hearts. I may go visit it. Still and all not finding me for page after page was disturbing.

I occur again on Page 75 for a project I worked on in graduate school and then again (alarming quickly, it seemed at the time) on Page 78 for an online ‘zine I contributed to some years ago. On Page 79 a course I helped develop is mentioned. A book review I did last year pops up on Page 82. I must be a 70s and 80s kind of gal. Google stopped on Page 84. I was going to go to Page 100.

I was weirdly grateful to not find myself in the Google image search. The Google image search disturbed me in its pictures of people with my name and not my face staring back at me. Best to look navel-ward.

So, blog-friends…

How googleable are you?

Do you google yourself?

Others?

How googleable do you want to be?

« Previous entries