Temerity Jane

I voted, and that’s all I have to say about that.

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.