these guys are from england
EVERY GODDAMN DAY
I usually wake up thirty or forty minutes before my alarm. I always feel wide awake, wiggly, full of pep and ideas. Thirty more minutes is nothing! That’s not even a nap! So not worth it. I consider turning off the alarm and getting up, making a fried-egg sandwich and spending a quiet hour in front of the computer. However, whenever I do this I pay the price, namely an inability to stay up past 9:30 or so that same night, which makes me feel old and lame and is certainly a deterrent to exploring Adult Themes with my horndog husband. Also, it seems that if I let myself “naturally” wake up a half-hour before the alarm, within a week or so I will be “naturally” waking up a half-hour BEFORE THAT, and that sounds like a body-clock disaster that has ramifications beyond my sex life. Such as my continuing to hold down a normal, daytime job.
NO, I say. Of course it is possible to sleep for thirty minutes. Maybe it will make all the difference! I see myself having an energy-filled evening, reading my book and sexing my spouse and just generally behaving like a grown-up and not someone who falls asleep at what is essentially, given the season, sunset. So I get up to pee, hop back into bed, and snuggle down to make the most of my pre-alarm time. At this point I fall VERY DEEPLY ASLEEP, often with complex cinematic dreams, and thus when the alarm actually sounds its customary snippet of NPR I am groggy, exhausted, and in need of eyelid retractors. There also seems to be no nighttime benefit to my pre-alarm catnaps. HELP.
GOOD JOB!
I am not a very effusive person in general, so I typically only praise my kid when I am seriously excited about something. It seems that is right in line with current parenting-manual advice, so yay, gold fucking star for me. But now that Nora has the increased social expectations that come along with being an older kid, I have been trying to give her positive feedback on all the tricky interpersonal things like introducing oneself, eye contact, ordering in restaurants, and answering adults’ small-talk questions without looking panicked. She is definitely not shy, she just often Would Rather Not. I can certainly empathize with that (oh can I ever), but we live in this world so it is probably time to learn to prepare a face for the faces that we meet. Or something like that.
This led to me recently praising Nora for something rather odd: staying out of the way. When we have friends over for dinner there are cocktails and oh-hello-Nora-how’s-everything, and then she goes to bed. When Nora was younger the bedtime routine could not be deviated from in any way, so this meant that either me or LT had a semi-lengthy absence from the festivities. Now she hangs out, excuses herself, reads in bed, turns off the light, falls asleep. It. Is. Glorious.
She has also learned a lesson that I recall quite well from my childhood—the fact that, what with all the wine and everything, the adults can easily lose track of your bedtime as long as you are quiet and unobtrusive. One night we were in the backyard with our old neighbors, firepit a-blazing, and Nora crept upstairs to get Purple Dog, a pillow, a beach towel, and her Harry Potter book, and then just chilled there on the grass reading by firelight. I won’t tell you how late she stayed up that night, because I am not in the mood for “you suck” emails. It’s summer, right? She doesn’t exactly need to bring her intellectual A-game for rollerblading, Popsicles, and going to the pool.
ONE BILLION ORGANISMS OF LOVE
I have never liked yogurt. The stupid thing is that periodically I have tried to like yogurt. Isn’t that stupid? No one has to eat yogurt, regardless of gender. Don’t ask me why I would sometimes try to fit in with the Yogurt People. The only thing I can think of is that yogurt gets a ridiculous amount of good press, and everyone is always like blah blah so healthy probiotics blah live to be 100 etc. And some people (even people who are not acting their heads off in stupid yogurt ads) seemed genuinely excited about yogurt, like it was a special treat instead of the smegma of Satan. So throughout my life I would periodically give yogurt another chance, just in case I had been hallucinating all along and the Satan smegma was actually good.
I tried all types of yogurt. With the plain stuff, I usually wished that it had gone all the way and become cheese. With “fruit on the bottom,” I thought it was overly sweet and gooey and blah. With anything “light” or “fit” or “sugar free,” I felt as if I had dipped my tongue into a vat of cancer-causing chemicals. With soy yogurt, I felt like stabbing someone because damn, that is nasty.
Recently I made another attempt to scale Mt. Yogurt, and found this stuff. I am completely hooked on the strawberry version, although the pictures on that web page upset me greatly, because they are doing it all wrong! You don’t dump the little jam pot into the yogurt, the separate jam pot is the whole point! I like to exercise the full power of my control-freakiness by making each bite of yogurt perfect—ie, dipping the spoon in the fruit first and then into the yogurt. Jesus, if you’re just going to mix it all up then go ahead and buy the horrid fruit-on-the-bottom stuff.
Okay, that was entirely too many words about yogurt. I apologize.
IN WHICH I EMBARRASS MYSELF IN MULTIPLE WAYS
1. Is it possible for previously-effective deodorant to just stop working? Maybe it’s the summertime talking (or smelling), but there have been a few moments recently where I had this unpleasant pair of thoughts: what’s that smell/oh wait it’s me. Maybe deodorant needs to be switched up every so often, like sexual positions.
2. Tried to explain something by pointing to the screen during a web conference/conference call.
3. I was in our work conference room for a celebration lunch, with the entire department there, and while I was chatting with a coworker about something that annoyed me I did a double-handed middle-finger thing, simply to convey the sense of “Fuck You, Thing That Annoyed Me.” But of course there were people on the other side of the room who could see but not hear me. People including several deputy editors, my division director, and so on, and it looked an awful lot like I had just leaned forward and aggressively flipped them off for no reason. Well, that’s the end of my career! But only one person saw and she only looked a bit puzzled, so maybe nothing will come of it.
—mimi smartypants: misfit, yogurt-eater, and smelly dork.