In which the universe thinks I’m a dude.
[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast autumn, as I was riding through Whitman campus in the dark, an elderly gentleman spied me and hollered, “Young man! Put a light on that bicycle!”*
When I returned to the bar and told the story, it got a pretty big laugh.
Fast forward a few months. I’m sitting at the bar with two guys having a chat. One gets up to leave, says, “Goodnight, gentlemen,” bows, puts on his coat, and is at least six paces away before he turns around and says, “Oh, shit, you’re not a guy.”
In the past three weeks, I’ve discovered that Google, Hulu, and last.fm all think I’m a guy as well. Not to mention that I haven’t worn a skirt since September.
Make of all that what you will.
—
* I have, since then, put four lights on my bicycle.
In which I’ve quit smoking. Yet again.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen you get a lung infection severe enough your doctor gives you an asthma treatment five minutes after you present with what you think is just a bad cold, you pretty much quit smoking on the spot.
Quitting is pretty easy, really. You just screw up your self discipline and you ignore every single cell in your brain when it suggests a smoke. You avoid all your normal behaviors entirely. You pretend you’re someone else, someone who doesn’t smoke. Easy peasy!
For awhile.
Actually staying quit is the hard part, if you’re me, because you associate smoking with everything enjoyable: drinking, gigging, even reading. Having great conversations with friends. Road trips, coffee breaks, picnics. Good things, fun things. Happiness in general.
I can not-smoke on my lunch hour for awhile, sure. But eventually I’m so exhausted by not smoking that I just buy a damn pack already and have a cigarette. I can not-smoke at the wine bar for a few weeks, but then I just bum a few smokes off of people because it’s so much easier than constantly fighting the urge to smoke. I can not-smoke at gigs, I can not-smoke at home, I can not-smoke for months and months on end. I can not-smoke under a lot of circumstances, but it’s just so relentlessly, endlessly uncomfortable I just… give in, after awhile.
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In which there’s a trip to the clinic.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hursday night at the gig, someone asked me if I had walking pneumonia.
Today I googled it, and yeah, I have all the symptoms — but it was already Friday afternoon and I didn’t get the impression I was going to drop dead from it and sure, I should probably see a doctor but it’s not like I’ve been so sick I couldn’t work, I mean, I worked over 40 hours this week and did a gig and even went out a couple of times —
— but after spending a couple more hours coughing constantly, I called the Family Medical Center to see if there was an appointment I could have. I explained I was on Day 7 of a cold that wasn’t getting any better, that I was waking myself up at night coughing, and that my cold symptoms weren’t going away.
She scheduled me at 7 o’clock. I got off work at six after a long, busy afternoon full of weird support problems I couldn’t solve and rode my bike down Rose street to the clinic.
My nose ran and I coughed like I was dying during check-in, while sitting in the lobby, and while being led to the exam room. My nose ran and I coughed like I was dying while I sat there waiting for the nurse.
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In which I go through such absurdity with women customers sometimes.
[dropcap]P[/dropcap]hone rings.
I answer. “Tech support. May I help you?”
Woman’s voice, in full-on baby talk mode: “I have an iPhone. I can’t send mail.”
Me: “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of that. Apple seems to assume that all outgoing mail servers use SSL, but ours doesn’t. So probably you just need to disable SSL. That’s usually the issue.”
Baby talk: “Can you… like… I mean. Alright, fine.”
Me: “Sorry?”
Baby talk: “How do I do that.” She probably has me pegged as a dick-slicing lesbian because I assumed she was a human being and answered her question without talking down to her.
Me: “Well, I don’t have an iPhone myself, so I can’t give you step-by-step instructions. But I used to have an iPod Touch, so I think what you’ll be looking for is in Settings.”
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In which I think my world is weird.
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]n advertisement outside a gas station:
Image of two plastic bottles of soda. Price of $2.50 above them. Text says, “Wow!”
The image is printed in full color on cardboard that will be thrown away shortly.
The product is sugar water in plastic bottles.
The sweetener is HFCS, implicated in a myriad of health problems. The container is plastic, which is expensive to produce, expensive to recycle, and impossible to get rid of.
I have no idea if $2.50 is a good price for two bottles of soda, but I do know that you can dissolve pennies in it.
In which there are delicious tostadas.
Ingredients
4 tostada shells
1 can plain refried beans
lime taco sauce*, to taste
1/4 c. shredded Mexican cheese
1/3 c. cilantro, chopped
2 T. red onion, diced
1/4 c. tomato, diced
2 radishes, sliced
2 T. cotija**, crumbled
1/2 avocado, sliced
lime wedges
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In which apparently I am too busy.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] check my website daily to see if anything’s happening. I think some part of me seriously expects to find brilliant posts that I haven’t written enjoying all kinds of comments and traffic.
In lieu of content, this:
In which this shit really happens.
“But it worked yesterday!”
The fact that something works today does not guarantee it will work tomorrow.
Have you ever had an appliance that quit working? Computers are like that. One day it works, the next day it blows up. Shit happens.
“But everything else works fine.”
This is exactly like telling your mechanic that you can’t have a bad water pump because your electric windows still work.
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In which I bitch about my good fortune!
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] spent two years unemployed. It was — after blocking out the stress and fear of being only moderately employable during a very deep recession — freakin’ wonderful.
I didn’t have to get up five mornings a week and get my ass to work. I could avoid leaving the house for days if the weather was bad. There was no rigid schedule. I could eat whenever I wanted, sleep whenever I wanted, stay up all night if I wanted, sleep all day if I wanted (sleeping is so cool it gets mentioned twice), go for a coffee whenever I wanted. I was nearly always caught up on my household duties because I could do them whenever.
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4 random books from my Library!
