Meme
Papersurfer tagged me for a meme, which kinda made me want to laugh and then cry at the same time. For about the last month, I’ve been considering shutting this blog down for a variety of reasons including:
1. Time.
2. I want a site redesign, but I suck at it and now I have a mess.
3. Some (more) people I know in my real life have found me, including The Boy – and I’ve started to censor myself regarding topics. Something I thought I'd never do. Not like this, anyway.
But a meme – a meme I can do.
“Recycle a post that helps to sum up you and your history for a first-time reader.”
This may be a cop-out, but the link “
Just in case you were wondering” under the sidebar heading “The girl behind the whale” still sums up most of my history even though I wrote it almost three years ago. And for lack of anything better to offer, that’s my meme and I’m sticking to it.
Thanks,
Papersurfer, for the tag. And in the true spirit of a meme, I’m tagging
Rootie,
Trace, and
RenEv.
Because I'm curious.
And to blatantly filch a line from Papersurfer: Please feel free to ignore this meme.
Today’s Shuffle:
“Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd
“Good Times Roll” by Cars
“Milkshake” by Kelis
“Lascia Ch’io Pianga” by Charlotte Church
“Things Can Only Get Better” by Howard Jones
“Charlotte’s in North Carolina” by Keith Whitley
“Superstar” by Saliva
“Hit That” by The Offspring
“Crackerman” by Stone Temple Pilots
Labels: meme
Coffee
I take my caffeine cold and carbonated, preferably in the form of Diet Coke, but just a week or two ago, the office where I sometimes land during the course of a week installed a new water filtration system that included a new coffee maker. It uses the filtered water and brews coffee right into air pots that keep the coffee hot all day long.
“Cool – but – whatever,” I remember thinking.
Then someone brewed a batch of that crack – I mean coffee – Monday morning.
Holy hell, if I wasn’t time-warped back to my first attempt at college. I wasn’t really making much progress at school and had “taken a semester off” in order to pursue wisdom, not in the pages of dusty books and boring lecture halls, but the mysterious knowledge that only lived at the bottom of Southern Comfort bottles.
That coffee smelled exactly like the coffee my college roommate used to make every day at the butt-crack of dawn. To say the “crack of dawn” might be a little bit of an exaggeration. More like the crack of noon – often leaning dangerously toward three pm. Considering I was bartending to make rent, my workday didn’t start until three or four in the afternoon and 16 hours later, I’d roll back in having managed to work ten hours and the balance was spent – well, pursuing that elusive – um – knowledge.
That coffee, combined with a Camel bummed from the roommate, was the only thing that woke me up enough to start the process all over again. And when that same college roommate joined Gold’s Gym and shamed me into joining with him, then “butt-crack of dawn” applied more accurately. But the cycle was modified to include a nap and more drinking to compensate for the deep-muscle pain I was in because of a weight trainer named Biff or Tad or something. I never did look at his nametag. My bloodshot eyes were distracted by his abs. Yeah. That’s right. I worked out hung-over five days a week. I’m not sure how I broke that cycle, but now that I think about it, I’m sure my liver had something to do with it.
I needed that coffee then. And – I’m finding that I need that coffee now, but for altogether different reasons.
Today's Shuffle:
[paused]
Labels: random
Blind
Mother of God, I’m going blind. And I don’t mean to pick on blind people, so don’t go there with me – as I am sight impaired, myself, and wear contacts. In fact, were my contacts any thicker (meaning stronger) I could pop them out and use them as coasters. People with normal vision could look through my contact lenses and see the broccoli stuck in the teeth of the Man on the Moon.
Tonight, when I got back to my office after a wild Monday and Tuesday on the road (holy hell, my life), I turned on my lovely office lamps, being partial to “diffused/indirect lighting” – hating with every ounce of my overweight self the overhead fluorescent lighting that gives me a migraine just thinking about – and I could NOT SEE what was on my laptop screen.
I pushed “fn+f10” until the bugger maxed out, but I could not get my screen any brighter. I even ventured into the Control Panel and managed to fuck up something that turned my screen black and the font into “size 72” and it took me about 10 minutes I could have spent reading email to fix it back.
Then I pushed “ctrl+” in Firefox until the words on the screen were HUGE – and that just felt like you all (meaning your blogs) were screaming at me through Google Feed-whateverthehell. So I gave up and now I’m sitting here writing this magnified to 150% under goddamn fluorescent lighting and feeling damn OLD.
Ugh. I’ll turn up the music. That’ll help.
Today’s Shuffle:
“Don’t Close Your Eyes” by Alan Jackson
“Dance, Dance, Dance” by Steve Miller Band
“She’ll Leave You with a Smile” by George Strait
“What Am I to You?” by Norah Jones
“Fight for All the Wrong Reasons” by Nickelback
“Mudshovel” by Staind
Labels: rage
Muffin
About 9:30 or so last night, Muffin came wandering into my room wearing jammies and carrying a blanket. Standing at the door, rubbing her eyes and yawning, she asked if she could crawl in with me.
“Sure, baby. C’mere.”
I was still dressed in my work clothes, having collapsed on the bed when "Studio 60" came on, so she covered us both up with her blanket and wiggled around until she was curled into a comfortable little mass of warm, my left arm wrapped around her. And for the first time in a long time, I watched her fall asleep.
I remember doing that when she was a tiny baby. She would fall asleep on her own just fine, but I loved to hold her until she started to nod off. I’d sing her the lullaby song and rock her or pace about the room with her in my arms. If she was fussy, I’d soothe her by lightly running my finger down the bridge of her nose. She would close her eyes each time I did it, until she was too tired to open them again.
Last night, holding her close, I watched as her breathing slowed and deepened, feeling her soft breath on my bare arm. Her eyes blinked, fluttered, blinked again, and then slowly closed. It took less than three minutes from when she stood in the doorway to that moment – and she was sound asleep.
Labels: offspring
