How I Met What Now?
Sometimes I wish I was afflicted with some strange malady that, as its sole consequence, made me forget every episode of How I Met Your Mother so that I could discover them all over again. Is that weird?
Shake On It
I made a strange realization yesterday, driving back from an interview for a story I’m working on – replaying the whole situation back in my mind, analytically, as I generally like to do. I shook a few hands during the time, as one generally does upon introduction. I’m sure of it. But I can’t exactly recall how those handshakes went.
I think that it’s become pedestrian to me, shaking hands, so much so that it has slipped out of the forefront of what my mind deems memorable or even worthy of my attention.
It makes sense on a practical level. I mean, I don’t need to remember what it’s like every time I wash my hands or blow my nose, but shaking hands used to be monumental for me.
I think the first hand I had to shake was that of my elementary school principal, probably after receiving some award or competing at some spelling bee. I probably charged at him with an outstretched hand, for in all things I did (and still do) I have limitless vigor and no finesse. Still, I seem to recall clutching his hand, firm and callous, dwarfing my own, and understanding that it meant something very mature to be doing this. It was almost gentlemanly, in that limited way that women are encouraged to behave in a gentlemanly way.
Now, I don’t even notice what their hands do, let alone my own. It’s all automatic, all performed by muscle memory. I actually tried to shake my own hand idling at a red light, just to see what it was like, but it felt like I was just making a weak attempt at breaking my left hand, so I deemed the exercise pointless.
Now I imagine I’ll pay more attention when I’m shaking hands. I imagine it will be just like discovering that I breath, not being able to slip back into the rhythm and regretting that I questioned the natural order of things.
Just Amazing
It’s amazing to me when I think about who I could have been and how I somehow became exactly what I wanted to be.
Smart People Doing Stupid Things
Husband and I were in the parking lot of the Olive Garden.
I’ve been having problems with the remote lock on our car not releasing the lock on the driver’s side door. Husband gets into the passenger side, while I struggle to open the driver’s side.
He tries to unlock the door from the inside and fails. At that point, I open the driver’s side back door and get inside, hoping to reach over the driver’s seat and unlock the door myself.
After a few seconds of my doing this, he looks to me and says “Give me the keys.” I oblige.
He explains, as he walks to the driver’s side door, that long before I was born – now mind you, I’m only about six years younger than he is – people used to use this “trick” for opening car doors.
He put the key in the lock and turned it.
Needless to say, I felt like an idiot.
Learn On
I guess I thought that when I became an adult, I would just know everything. Sure, I’d pick up skills along the way, and maybe learn new facts, but I generally believed that I wouldn’t come to any new, astounding revelations.
Well, that was wrong. Every once in a while I get a surprise.
I think the latest, while not entirely earth-shattering, is that I don’t have to read the things I think I’m supposed to read. I don’t. I fought like hell into the first fifth of Great Expectations because I thought I was supposed to read it, but who says? I really don’t have to do it.
I’m adopting a new one-chapter policy with a friend-recommendation clause. If I’m not fully invested in a book by the end of the first chapter, I won’t force myself to read it. If a friend were to have recommended me the book, however, I’ll give it a few more chapters to grab me.
This will probably deepen my love affair with the library, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.
Dear Facebook: Part 1
Generally speaking, the Find a Friend function is a place where I can go and see an entire list of people I’ve embarrassed myself in front of, was never cool enough to meet, or was horribly wrong by. I mean, if I have 30+ friends in common with a given individual and I’m not already friends with them, then there is probably a good reason for that. Long story short, Find a Friend is, ironically, a good place to find an enemy.
Little Houses
Hello, my little neglected blog-like thing. Lately, I’ve had nothing good to say.
Lately, I’ve been wandering the worlds my mind creates, which are so specifically tailored to me (specifically, making me happy) that there seems little benefit in reporting the goings-on of this inner world. Who could relate? But still, I persist.
I’m happy within the strange forms it takes. I went driving, a week or so ago, down the streets where I used to live, though I haven’t traveled them now in years. I sewed together the various pieces, some more vivid than others, some reinforced by layer upon layer of material, of memory, until I had this uncanny quilt made from the places I called home.
The image is cleaner, though hazy, when I form it myself. I pretend to live as a future self, neglecting the fact that my own age is closing in on the age of this dream self I’ve been cultivating, preserving, destroying, and rebuilding for years upon years now. I flip through her planner, comb her hair, press the wrinkles on her face. Without fail, I dress her, and well.
I once had dollhouses. Rows and rows of dollhouses. I filled them with well-dressed dolls and over-scale furniture. I made excuses for the failings of the houses – why did some not have bathrooms? why were none wired for electricity? why could I part them with my hands and sit myself inside of them? Though flawed, in tones of hot and cool pinks and plastic finishes, there they were. Tangible. I could reach out and touch them, fill them with meanings and stories and characters, and return.
Their burdens now are worse. They no longer occupy a space, besides the margins of notebooks with more useful purposes, in doodles of houses with elegant HVAC systems and efficient designs. In muted colors. Still it’s a transparent thing, like a ghost of something that’s never been.
And I let the ghosts and creatures haunt my dollhouses.
Confessions of an Editor: Part 1
When Lady Gaga sings “The Edge of Glory,” and I sing along with her, I correct her grammar in the first line and sing “There ain’t no reason you and I should be alone tonight, yeah baby.”
My Reading Speeches
I’m a painfully slow, though avid, reader. I think it’s because when I read, the words don’t just push themselves in and snuggle up into the folds of my brain. They are read to me by a voice (what I imagine the author to sound like), and each character and quoted figure gets his or her own voice as well. It makes the whole process rather long and laborious, but I think robust. (It also makes hearing what an author actually sounds like for the first time, after having absorbed so much of their work, very distressing.)
I’m currently reading a new(-to-me) Oliver Sacks book on my Kindle, “The Mind’s Eye,” which is basically more case studies on the various maladies that the human mind can face (and overcome). It’s not so far a departure from the last book I devoured, “The Psychopath Test.” I threw the Tina Fey memoir somewhere in the mix there, as well. It’s becoming a trend, it seems, this non-fiction reading.
I remember sitting in Honors English class my junior year of high school, when my teacher said something very off-putting to the class. She said she only reads non-fiction, because it’s the only writing worth anything, and that she could care less about fiction writing (even though she spent the class teaching us from good fiction and bad non-fiction works). “Ohhhh,” I wailed, “is a world without the great loves of Shakespeare and the great adventures of Asimov worth living in at all?” This, of course, was all uttered to myself with the pretension that comes with being in a capital-H Honors capital-E English class that usually elicited internal monologue delivered by a young Katharine Hepburn.
But still, be it from not being able to get past the first few pages of a fiction work, or from having a greater appetite for non-fiction, I’m favoring one form over the other. Should I feel bad about that?
Dear Diary
I’ve taken to writing in a diary. Sometimes I get bored halfway through, then read from the beginning down, and get even more bored. Uhhg, inspiration. Please strike me. I’m waiting.
