This is Lindsay. She is better at talking than I am.
Anyway, I know a lot of you use Twitter, some more than others, but how long does it take to write 140, or, in this case, 160 characters, for a no cause, let alone a good one? The goal is 1,050,200 messages and they’re not even at 12,000 yet as of this posting, so to get that done by Thanksgiving is going to take a lot of [thoughtful] keyboard mashing. So stop by The Big Thank You Project when you get a chance – stop by a lot of times, if you get a lot of chances – and pass the link around through your various internetly connections.
I don’t really have a good concept of what 1,050,200 is, as a number, but it sounds pretty huge, so every little bit will help.
1. Figuring out when my mother can come for the visit she would like to come for.
Reasons I Am Putting Off the Things That I am Procrastinating
1. I just saw my mother last month.
2. I will see my mother next month.
3. My mother is not actually so much interested in seeing me as she is in seeing my two best friends.
4. This makes me petulant and bratty.
Things My Boyfriend is Not Allowed to Reference With a Gloating “A-HA!”
1. The fact that I just referred to myself as bratty.
People I Owe Apologies To
1. The person who tonight’s post was inspired by and supposed to assist.
Things I Will Do To Make It Up To Them
1. Make an excellent post tomorrow.
Reasons That This Does Not Count as a Sign of Impending NaBloPoMo Failure
1. Everyone should be allowed at least one freebie.
2. My posts to this point have not only been acceptable, but far more acceptable than what I have been posting in recent months.
3. Because I said so.
Things I Have to Do Tomorrow That I Will Forget I Have To Do Until An Inconvenient Time
1. Put gas in my car.
Things I Have To Do Tomorrow That I Did Not Do Today
1. GET MY BAGEL.
Reasons I Did Not Get My Bagel Today
1. I left home exactly on time rather than 7 minutes early.
2. Dunkin Donuts is pissing me off with coffee inconsistency.
Things I Will Do To Rectify the Situation Tomorrow
1. Leave 7 minutes early.
Things I Will Do To Re-rectify the Situation On Friday
1. Leave 7 minutes early again, as leaving 7 minutes early to get my bagel on Thursday will have been foiled by that fact that I will not recall I need gas in my car until the inconvient moment when I SIT in it and have to use my bagel time as gas time.
2. Order the exact same coffee the exact same way that I always do.
3. Grumble and drive away when my coffee is one of 7 different variations of “cream, two sweet ‘n lows” that they manage to come up with.
Problems I Have Right Now
1. I am wide awake.
Problems With My Problems
1. My boyfriend is asleep.
Possible Solutions
1. Call and wake him up for company.
Reasons I Will Not Go Through with Proposed Solutions
I was hoping that the gods of ridiculous occurrences would smile on me and perhaps throw a cat about to have a litter of kittens suddenly in the backseat of my car, or that some kind of fracas would break out while I was in line to vote, in order to keep NaBloPoMo rolling at a nice clip, but alas, absolutely nothing of interest happened to me today. There wasn’t even a line for me to wait in when I went to vote. The place was deserted. Aside from the fact that my commute took 2 fucking hours on the way home today, I’ve got no events of which to speak.
So I’ll tell you some things instead.
First, the time change – sure, an hour backwards equals an “extra” hour of sleep, but this year, the change is getting a big thumbs down from me. For one thing, it’s knocked Phil and I off of our simultaneous schedules. He gets up at 5am, I get up at 8am. He goes to bed at 9pm, I go to bed at 12am. Until Sunday, that worked perfectly for us. However, now his 5am is my 7am, and his 9pm is my 11pm and you all KNOW how I FEEL about my sleep schedule. I am pretty ridiculously rigid about staying on a strict schedule. Normally I’d adjust for the time change easily – I sleep 8 hours and that is that. Now, however, my brain is sending the wrong signals to the rest of me. Phil calls every night when we go to bed, only now he is calling when HE goes to bed, and I am to be up for an hour longer. Except instead of having the bedtime call and then watching a DVD for an hour or so before I sleep, something in my brain triggers and says “I sense that Phil is calling you from bed. Thus, you sleep now as well.” And then I end up crushingly tired by the end of our 10 minute call and go to sleep anyway, only to pop awake well before my alarm, and then my whole morning routine is thrown off, and I don’t know whether to sit on my bed until my alarm goes off or start getting ready, and if I just sit, I end up getting wrapped up in something and starting my routine late and there’s no time for my bagel and LACK OF BAGEL DOES NOT WORK FOR ME, PEOPLE. Or else I get up and start getting ready and then I’m done getting ready and I kind of just stand aimlessly in the middle of my room wondering if I should just leave for work way early, because what else are you supposed to do once you’re done getting ready, right, so if I leave early, I get my bagel early, but I’m not READY for bagel that early in the morning so by the time I AM ready, not only do I have to perform dangerous bagel bag removal maneuvers on the highway, my bagel is COLD by then and that also DOES NOT WORK FOR ME, PEOPLE.
And this is only after two days!
And the other thing I want to tell you about. Because of… the way I am… which I do not want to end up as a search term for this website, so I will not use the words, but you know, and I know, and we will both agree that I am neither ashamed nor hiding anything, just not interested in being any sort of poster… adult… and, wait, ok, anyway, because of that, it was a very long time, well past the stage of development that this should have occurred, before I realized that people may very possibly have opinions about things that differ from mine. I have, of course, gotten much better about this and these days only forget occasionally, and even then will usually take a moment to remind myself that maybe everyone DOESN’T agree that Born to Run is absolutely and without a doubt the best Bruce Springsteen song and it’s not even reasonable to believe that someone might think otherwise because why the fuck would they? But still, even though I have made great strides in that area, there is one small sliver of me that clings to the past.
The thing is, I have endless faith in All Request Music Hours on radio stations. I guess I have it in my head that DJs just play shitty music because they hate me, and when I hear those words, that an all request period is coming up, I am filled with glee and relief, as my arm often gets tired continually pressing the seek button on my radio for 45 minutes every morning. See, the thing about all request hours is that it’s PEOPLE calling in to pick the songs, people like me, so of course they won’t pick anything terrible, and I will have an entire hour of music that doesn’t suck!
But they DO! They DO pick terrible music, and it blows my mind every single time! I don’t know when I’m going to let go of my naively-held faith in people and their ability to request decent music to be played during my commute. No matter how many times I am crushed and disappointed by the general listening population, the next time an all request hour comes along, it STILL doesn’t even remotely occur to me that people would VOLUNTARILY CHOOSE to have a DJ broadcast the most horrible of crap. I would explain my feelings on this further but I have just realized that I have not come as far as I have thought in realizing and accepting that other people may have opinions and tastes and thoughts that differ from mine, because I cannot for the life of me come up with any words that would even begin to explain why or express my dismay at the fact that people would choose songs that I DON’T LIKE when given the opportunity to choose ANY SONG IN THE WORLD. The concept is so absolutely boggling to me that I am coming up a mental brick wall when trying to wrap my thoughts about it. Of course that sounds odd and stuck up and closed minded and music snobbish, but you have to understand that this exact feeling is what I came up against when I was informed/taught/beat over the head with the fact that other people did see things – ALL things, not just music – differently than I did. It completely blew me away. It still does, sometimes, if I’m not taking the time to think carefully and consider my own difficulties when interacting with other people – it doesn’t come naturally to me and never will, though at least now I am aware of it and can take measures to compensate – but while I have, as I said, improved greatly in other areas of this nature, this is one thing I WILL JUST NEVER GET.
Internet, there’s no graceful way to say this, so I’m just going to come out and say it.
Today, I fell down an escalator.
An up escalator.
I had a meeting in DC today, and I don’t drive in DC because oh my fucking god, so I was taking the metro. There’s not actually a metro station too close to my house, so I was really driving to the metro and THEN taking the metro. Being as it was a weekday and I was going on the DC Metro system, there was of course only one parking spot open in the whole of Shady-Grove-Metro-Station-Ville-Shire, and it was way at the edge of the kingdom. And being that I was going to an importanty work meeting, I had my laptop. And being that I’m a girl, I had my purse. And being that I like to carry around things that I don’t actually end up using, I also had the office’s fancy projector with me as well.
I strapped my laptop backpack to my pack, slung the projector bag over my shoulder in the front and threw my purse on my other shoulder and headed across the lands for the station, considering an alternate career as a sherpa, maybe part time, just a weekend gig, possibly. Eventually, I got to the station, and since I was down in DC last week for the conference I mentioned that I am not going to try to explain again, I already had a farecard and headed through the turnstile while digging my phone out of my purse in order to check my email before heading underground for the half hour journey.
I got on the escalator and stood to the right, as you do. Normally I stomp up the left side because I am impatient and I like how moving stairs make me feel like I’m moving extra fast, you know, to have a little super hero moment in my days, but I had so much crap strapped to me that I would have been whacking the hell out of other people on the escalator.
So there I was, standing, looking down at my phone, completely oblivious to the world around me, which is my normal operating state, until some action started. Now, I don’t really know what happened to the woman a stair above me, I don’t know if someone brushed by her too hard or if the wind blew in some freakish gust that only hit that exact escalator stair or if she was productively using the time to practice some dance moves, but all of a sudden her arms started waving. You know, like in the movies, where someone is trying to catch their balance, and they’ve got their arms windmilling around and just when it looks like they might pull it off, they go tumbling down anyway? Yeah, exactly like that. Just as I was looking up and getting a grasp on what was happening and dropping my phone back into my purse, she lost it. Her butt into my gut and down we both went.
All the way down. All the way down the up escalator. Which I imagine takes longer than falling down a down escalator, or even regular stairs. And me, me with my laptop strapped to my back and the projector strapped to my front, I was like two turtles taped together. Which piece of expensive company-owned electronics shall I let my entire weight land on?
So, down we go, tangled up, to land in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. Her, flailing like it’s going to do something – we’re already past that point, lady, we are now at def con 1, skull protection stage of the fall – and me, trying to awkwardly angle myself so as to maybe chip my pelvis instead of crack the screen of my Macbook, and then all of a sudden we were in said heap at the bottom of the stairs.
I kind of laid there for a second or two – felt like forever, not long I’m sure – and the woman starts WAILING. Wailing like a person would wail if… well, if they had just fallen down an escalator and apparently broken an arm. So, hey, I know what that sounds like now. So she is wailing and quite distressed and there are people gathered around, and I was kind of just blinking at them, when I very slowly – and again, I am sure this was all just a matter of seconds – came to realize that wailing lady is stretching her vocal cords from a position that puts her mouth quite close to my ear, as she was still heaped on top of me with no apparent immediate intentions to do anything but wail.
Some people gathered around and a nice gentleman reached down and grasped me under both of my arms and dragged me out from under this woman. See, now I have fallen down an escalator, been pinned by a wailing woman, and then touched and dragged by a stranger. I put my hand on the ground to get up and the man put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back down and said “Stay down, someone is calling an ambulance.” I tried to get up again, and this time he and another man each put one hand on one of my shoulders and gently pushed me back to the ground again. That was it, I had been touched too many times. Probably within about 2 minutes or even less of the whole incident happening, I was back up on my feet. There was a small crowd gathered around Screamy McTwistyArm and myself at this point, and I could hear the train coming in, and they were blocking the escalator, and I had a meeting to get to, and people were touching me and crowding me, so I started to wiggle my way through.
The nice gentleman once again made a grab for me, catching the back of my laptop bag and said “Stay here, the paramedics are coming, you fell pretty hard.” I responded, “I’m fine, I have to go!,” and shook him off. I heard him say “But miss!” but I took off running up the escalator and made it into the train just as the doors were about to close.
Total super hero moment!
Upon assessing the damage, I seem to have escaped with two minor scrapes/scratches to my hand and wrist, one mysterious painful bruise-esque spot in the middle of my back, an unpleasant head-lump, a sore shoulder, a raging headache and a dazed feeling that didn’t wear off until halfway through the meeting I was on my way to. Oh, and also, a kind of vague feeling of guilt that I left Yelly O’GrossInjury lying on the ground.
I’m sure that, at least, will wear off by tomorrow.
So, I’m reasonably certain that all of us, at one point or another, heard someone voice a frustrated complaint about, say, the drive through at McDonald’s and the fact that maybe people should learn to speak English more betterer before taking such a job. Or said something like that ourselves. I’m sorry, I know it may not be the most appropriate complaint in the world, but sometimes a girl just wants some damn chicken nuggets, you know, and not a chicken sandwich, and certainly not REGULAR COKE. But anyway, as I said, I am reasonably certain everyone has had or heard such a complaint at one time or another.
However, I am willing to completely let that one go, 100% totally and forever, in exchange for people who may be a bit newer to this country learning something else in its place. See, I was in 7-11 a little while ago, buying some diet soda, as I do, and I went to get in line. There was just one man in front of me buying some lottery tickets and one clerk at the counter, so I got behind the lottery ticket guy and stood and waited my turn.
While I was standing and waiting, with my arms loaded with soda, the door opened and several people walked in, together. One went directly to the counter, one got in line directly behind me, and another stood right with the one behind me. The one at the counter asked the clerk something about phone cards and the two behind me were speaking in Russian.
And when I say “the two behind me,” I mean right behind me. RIGHT behind me. If I breathed through my back… I mean, I guess if I had gills or something back there… and oh, also, I guess if we were under the ocean, I would have DROWNED. That’s how close they were. If 7-11 was actually an ocean and I was actually a fish, I would have been a dead fish. Two other Russian fish, right up my damn fish ass.
There’s a fish tank right by my desk at work. It’s ridiculously captivating. Please excuse me.
Anyway, so at this point, having gotten an answer about the phone cards, the gentleman who had stepped up to the counter moved to get a better vantage point to look at said phone cards. Having left an appropriate amount of space between myself and the lottery ticket guy, I had apparently provided the perfect sized opening for this man to step in and lean unnecessarily. I don’t mean he leaned too close, he was already too close to me. I mean he was leaning, and then shifting, and then leaning some more, so if 7-11 was again the ocean, and I had auxillary gills on my front, I would be DOUBLE DROWNED.
At this point, the two behind me, having realized where the phone cards were, also began their own little game of crazy and decided to get their compatriot in on it. What’s the game, with the little ball, and the shells, and the ball is under one of the shells, and then whoever is the ball/shell set up owner starts swooping them all around? These people must participate in some kind of human-version circus act of that game. Maybe I was their ball. Regardless of who was a cup and who was a ball, they all began some kind of rapid swooping/place exchanging elaborate phone card purchase 7-11 dance ritual all around me. All in my gill-space. All of a sudden, I couldn’t tell what was going on. They were too fast. I couldn’t tell if it was one or twenty, they were just everywhere, and they were after two things. One, phone cards. Two, the exact square of tile I was currently occupying. But yet they felt no need to ask me to kindly give up my square of tile. Not even an attempt to move me out of my square of tile. No, they were perfectly happy to juggle themselves around my little tile square, maybe trying to see if I’d share.
I did not want to share.
So, anyway, here’s my point. I don’t care how many times I have to eat my chicken nuggets with hot mustard instead of honey mustard, or even if I have to gag down a Coke instead of a delicious Diet Coke every now and then. From here on out, I will vow to no longer complain about the fact that it is getting increasingly more difficult to find someone who speaks English from whom to order my chicken. I will make this vow, though, contingient on the fact that those who may be new to this country or visiting will make a solid effort, if not to learn the language, then at least to learn what is an acceptably sized personal space bubble.
Seriously, though, where the HELL was I going with that fish thing?
(PS – Today is the first day of NaBloPoMo. Hopefully I don’t suck at it this month.)
I haven't found a convenient, easy to update method of displaying a list of links to all of the blogs I read, nor am I interested in getting all wrapped up in the politics of who is listed and who is not, so here is a link to a single blog that I do, in fact, read, to be updated randomly and completely at my own whim, for no particular reason or reasons I DON'T FEEL I NEED TO DISCUSS WITH YOU, INTERNET, but you can rest assured that I would not maliciously steer you wrong.
Hello! I'm TJ and this is my blog. The picture is a joke, get it? Because I'm INSIDE the INTERNET?
I'm 30 years old and I live in Arizona with my husband and our two big dogs. I've been married for just over a year, and we have a 7 month old daughter named Penelope. You can do the math. It's okay. We don't mind.
Read my stuff. You'll like it.
I know that at some point, this section of my site will be out of date. I promise you in advance, I'm aware of that.
