Monday, 19 Mar 2007

…to describe what was on the ground this past Saturday morning. A Saturday morning that has the dubious distinction of being the single most unpleasant morning so far in the 7+ months I have been delivering papers - and keep in mind that includes mornings so cold my eyeballs hurt if i was out of the car for more than a minute, mornings where everything even partially horizontal was completely covered in about a half inch of ice (e.g. the road, people’s driveways, walks, stairs, rocks, dirt, grass, EVERYTHING), and the morning I was so sick the nausea came in intensifying waves so strong I had to stop several times during my normal 1.5 hour delivery route to vomit, AND the day I had THREE flat tires in 24 hours - 2 of which occurred while delivering papers, AND the day I got stopped on the way to work and had my car towed because my license plate had expired and I ended up having to pay over $100 to the tow company AND had to go to a hearing in CRIMINAL COURT the next month. It was bad.

Why so bad? It had been snowing on and off since late Thursday night, mostly off, until Friday mid-day when it really started snowing. My commute home from my 9-5 was a 3+ hour exercise in tedium. By the time I left the house Saturday morning there were several inches of snow on the ground but it wasn’t frozen solid (which I naively thought was a good thing) it had warmed up a bit and had apparently been raining/sleeting for some time. By the time I drove to the paper distribution center, and got the 299 newspapers all doublebagged and was ready to hit the road, there was a “solid” 4 inches of freezing cold water all over the ground. Which is of course bad, but that’s the kind of bad where you would see the melted snow and say “wow, there’s 4 inches of water on the ground, I am going to find some solid ground to walk on instead of walking through 4 inches of freezing cold water” but no, this water was clever, only a small portion of it was showing it’s true snowy form, the rest was masquerading as snow (aka ’slush’) . So, when I saw those 4 inch deep puddles and decided to walk around them, picking ia ’safe’ path through the snow, instead of my dry snowy path I ended up walking through 4 inches of all-but-liquid water the temperature of a freshly made frozen margarita. Forunately I had planned ahead and done the childhood prune foot saving technique of putting my stockinged feet into plastic bags (one more use for newspaper bags) before putting them into my boots so my feet stayed dry for 90% of the route (up until the last 10 minutes or so) but by the time I was home I was soaked through to the skin with freezing cold water. My jacket, sweater, shirt, pants, socks and boots were just sodden. Because I have to leave the driver’s side window open to throw papers out of, the inside of the car door was sopping as well. Took most of the day tumbling in the dryer on high heat for my boots to dry out. Not the slipperiest day so I didn’t wipe out, or worry about the car getting stuck, and not the coldest of days so I wasn’t in danger of falling into a hypothermia induced ‘nap’, but all in all it was probably the most uncomfortable I’ve been while delivering papers. I have a bit of a lingering cough, but I’ve had that most of the winter so remarkably I don’t think I suffered any health effects from the experience.

Monday, 19 Mar 2007

Sometimes people communicate much more about their current state of mind and the events that led them there than they probably intend to.

A couple of examples from that online dating site I was talking about earlier:

example 1)

“WHO I’M LOOKING FOR

i am looking for someone who is real. not a cheat, liar, or thief. someone who can remember what for better or worse means, not when it just means for them.”

example 2)

“Things That Make Me Angry: when someone knows their wrong and dons’nt addmitt it

Turn-Offs: someone who does;nt take care of them selves

Unforgivable Vices: nasty words that hurt!

World’s Worst Evildoers: MY EX”

example 3)

“Pet Peeves: CHEATERS, LIERS

Things That Make Me Angry: CHEATERS

Turn-Offs: CHEATERS

Unforgivable Vices: CHEATERS”

Monday, 19 Mar 2007

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s cropped up again so I will talk about it again.

The topic is how I sometimes look down on Americans born and raised in America who use the English language badly. (or should that be ‘poorly’?) My own technical knowledge of English grammer is marginal at best (at around age 40 I finally started remembering what an adverb is, but I still can’t tell you what a dangling participle is or even identify one). I don’t know where it comes from, although both of my parents speak in fairly good english, and one was (briefly) an English major, and I have read a lot so maybe just have a large backlog of impressions of how language is ’supposed’ to be used.

It is though, a very strong bias. As an example; I clicked through an ad to an online dating site this morning (Hey - I was bored, and I like the concept of meeting someone and being in a relationship, it’s just the reality of it that I am not that fond of). I found I had just as strong an aversion to someone who wrote grammatically poorly as I did to someone who smoked and I _really_ dislike smoking to the point I won’t even consider dating someone who smokes regularly. Realizing this is a rather large flaw in my self-perceived ability to just accept people as they are, here are a couple of examples of linguisic ‘turn-offs’. (I won’t name the site or the names of people because I am sure these women are perfectly wonderful humans undeserving of being singled out as I am doing here)

[note: One can see from this preceding paragraph alone (which I edited at least once then decided to stop editing lest I give a false impression of my own writing abilities) just how imperfect my own language skills are. In the context of this discussion, e.g. my criticizing other people's poor writing, it seemed hypocritical for me to edit and re-edit my own writing, though I would hope that the people whose writing I point out below would have taken the time to read and edit their profiles before posting them.]

Mystery Date 1) “I’m looking to meet some interesting people who capture my interest but hold it as well. …. I’m looking for honesty, respect, and great conversation. If you can get passed those 3 musts, then you’ll have to wait and see for what else may come.”

Mystery Date 2) “Favorite Appliance: the fridge so the food don’t go bad :)… Favorite Season: Season: summer an winter…be true to yourself and except people for who they are,beauty is skin deep…Activities I Avoid: not being able to do anything i dont enjoy…”

[note: I know I am being picky, but the use of ‘an’ for ‘and’ was not a typo - there were at least half a dozen or more of this error in the text - basically every place you would expect to see ‘and’ she wrote ‘an’)

Mystery Date 3) “The first thing I would like you to know about me isI’m a mother of four children and a grandaughter …I love to sit by a romantic fire and kiss, cuddle and capturing moments that you never want to end…Worst Fashion Crime: fat people that let there belly hang out gross”

Mystery Date 4) “My Worst Job Ever: making sadilite dishes …Pet Peeves: where a seat belt…Things That Make Me Angry: lier and a man thats hits women and children…Turn-Offs: someone that doesent keep them self clean”

Realizing that I exclude people soley on this makes me feel kind of shallow. Not as shallow as I feel for making appearance such an important criteria, but still shallower than I would like to be.

Thursday, 15 Mar 2007

i have an email address i set up a couple of years ago (longer even maybe?) which i set up to explore online dating options. (i know, i know. i just thought at the time i needed to keep (start having) my options open).

anyways some of the dating services send emails with my new ‘matches’ (apparently my criteria must be ‘living females within 20 years of my age who are within @50 miles of where I live’) .

sometimes things strike me funny (and yes, I assume many people have had similar humor over my profile(s)). Here’s an example.

——————————————

About my dream mate
Finding a date is not challenging to me. Finding quality however is. I am interested only in intelligent men who is educated, articulate, eloquent yet still exude charms in a sincere manner, witty, honest, spontaneous, quirky and funny, non-narcotic affiliated and someone who is worldly & cultured. I consider myself a well read person.

Earlier in the body of her post she used the Odd Capitalization code to communicate something but wasn’t clear what she was trying to communicate. Her AIM ID? Her email ID? Her personal motto? This is what she said:

BuT you have to be educated add the caps in the paragraph or the heading.
the only problem is that when I add all the caps from her paragraph together I am left with:

MKLUVNODOBT Which I GUESS could be ‘MK LUV NO DOBT‘ or ‘Make Love No Doubt“? or Make Love, No Date of Birth Tea?

Thursday, 15 Mar 2007

Dreaming

When I met you in the restaurant
You could tell I was no debutante
You asked me what’s my pleasure
A movie or a measure?
I’ll have a cup of tea and tell you of my dreaming
Dreaming is free

I don’t want to live on charity
Pleasure’s real or is it fantasy?
Reel to reel is living rarity
People stop and stare at me We just walk on by - we just keep on dreaming

Feet feet, walking a two mile
Meet meet, meet me at the turnstile
I never met him, I’ll never forget him

Dream dream, even for a little while
Dream dream, filling up an idle hour
Fade away, radiate

I sit by and watch the river flow
I sit by and watch the traffic go
Imagine something of your very own
Something you can have and hold
I’d build a road in gold just to have some dreaming
Dreaming is free

Dreaming
Dreaming is free
Dreaming
Dreaming is free

–Blondie

————————–
Not the deepest or even close to deepest lyrics but I always liked that song. Catchy, poppy but not schmaltzy or overtly commercial.

The lyrics are true - for a person on a budget, dreaming is a very inexpensive form of entertainment. Some of my dreams are good, some less so. Lately I’ve been having a couple of recurring elements in my dreams. Perhaps because my sleep is in such short snippets (more so lately, as I’ve been trying to take catnaps to catchup during the day - e.g. stopping to snooze for a few minutes at a rest area on my morning commute if I am feeling particularly tired, or napping in my car during lunchtime, or just a 20 min nap after getting home from job 1 before starting to get ready for job 2) punctuated by alarms and snooze buttons that the dreams seem to be continuations or segments of a larger reality - or are at least taking place in the same general place/time. Sometimes my waking world seems only marginally more ‘real’ than this other dream world.

so the two recurring elements are that i am happy, and in a relationship with a certain woman (hopefully the two are not too closely related) and that the brakes on my car don’t work. with the car it’s always the pushing the foot to the floor then pumping when nothing happens like when the clutch is going and if you can just press _hard_ enough you can engage the clutch but the brakes just don’t work. can’t remember any dream accidents but lots of incidents. the other car related occurrence I get sometimes is the infrequent dream that I have fallen asleep while driving and jolt awake disoriented to find myself in bed. dreaming about dreaming appeals to the escher/lynch in me, but it is really disconcerting and confusing and blurs the edges of what I perceive as “real”. the relationship dreams are obviously much more enjoyable. perhaps in my life cycle of cynical optimism i am getting to the end of a cynical relationship cycle and am starting into an optimistic cycle. time really does heal most wounds, i just wonder if i will have enough time.