Things about which I never anticipated I would have a strong opinion, and yet here we are:
We’re into that part of winter where the short days and cold stretch long before us, where it’s months to go before any more scheduled holidays or hopeful weather, where all there is to do is stare down the barrel of week after five-day workweek, slogging through all the stuff that got delayed, deferred, deprioritized during the holidays.
It’s not entirely bad, this time. Things get back to “normal.” One settles back into routine after too much of too much. There are nice nights spent on the couch watching tv, reading, feeling no guilt for not being more “productive.”
And soon enough, of course, things will ramp up again. The calendar suggests we will have a baby in two months. We should probably buy a crib mattress, a car seat, some burp cloths. I have a case currently scheduled to go to trial in February. I foresee some late nights. John still thinks we ought to try to redo the first floor bathroom before the baby comes. Which means selecting and purchasing things like tile, and toilets. Oy. Maybe it’s not so restful after all.
This weekend, driving home from a beautiful baby shower hosted by wonderful friends that made me feel so, so lucky to have such kind and generous and smart and funny people in my life, I heard about the tragic events in Arizona. I have spent time since alternately seeking out updates and trying to stay away from the updates and the accompanying shouting and invective. It’s made me feel sad, and frustrated, and reflective. Grateful for my quiet little life. Longing for some rationality, a little bit of restraint, some measured tones.
From former Bush speechwriter David Frum, two sentences that I think express something important, something at risk of getting lost in the bluster: “Again, this talk did not cause this crime. But this crime should summon us to some reflection on this talk. Better: This crime should summon us to a quiet collective resolution to cease this kind of talk and to cease to indulge those who engage in it.”
Look, I realize that it is profoundly boring and uncool to write two posts in a row about bad service from the same company, but the nonsense we are going through with AT&T right now is SO RIDICULOUS that I can’t resist. Truly. It’s breathtaking in its ineptitude.
Our internet saga: a timeline.
August 15: John calls AT&T to request internet service. Is told that we will receive a self-install kit, and that our service will be activated September 5. John asks some reasonable questions about why, exactly, it takes over two weeks to turn on the signal when we are doing a self-install kit, receives no satisfactory answer.
September 6, morning: John is out of town, we have not moved in yet. Nevertheless, I troop over to our new empty house to install the self-install kit. I follow the directions on the chipper self-install instruction sheet. Nothing.
September 6, afternoon: I spend an hour on the phone with AT&T, where the technician asks me such helpful questions as “is the unit plugged in?” and “do you have the ethernet cable plugged into the computer?” Look, I know that many people are not terrifically computer-savvy, but do you honestly think I’d be calling you if I hadn’t made sure the damned thing was plugged in?
Finally, tech discovers that my service has not, in fact, been turned on. New estimated date when service will be turned on? September 20. More than a month after we first ordered service.
September 21, evening: Attempt once again to install the self-install kit. Blinking red lights, whirring noises, no internet. Call AT&T. They write a work ticket, inform us that they will either get it working or call us within 24 hours.
September 22, evening: 24 hour period has elapsed. Have neither functioning internet nor phone call explaining why.
September 26, evening: Call AT&T again. After 45 minute rigamarole, receive reassurance that internet should be working “any day,” once the “lead service team” gets to our region to “activate the line.” Am told I have been delayed because the “lead service team” is the best team, and they are in high demand, and it’s only them who can activate our service. Wonder if there is a curtain somewhere I should be looking behind.
September 29, morning: Am home sick, decide for shits and giggles to try self-install kit again. After 30 minutes, manage to connect computer to actual interweb-like thing. Complete 45 minute-long “registration” process. Proceed to check email. Weep with joy. 5 minutes later, internet dies.
September 29, lunchtime: Call AT&T. Explain problem. They “ping” the line. Problem persists. Internet will work, but every hour or so, will stop working for ten minutes, then come back on. Try to explain to nice man on the phone that no, actually, that’s not “good enough,” and I do, in fact, expect my internet to work *all the time.* Receive time for service call, Oct 2 between noon and 4.
October 2, noon: Begin home confinement, waiting for tech to arrive.
October 2, 4pm: No internet guys.
October 2, 6:30 pm: Dinner guests arrive, still no internet guys.
October 2, 7:30 pm: I call AT&T, am reassured that “they’re coming.”
October 2, 11pm: conclude they are not coming, go to bed.
October 3, 9am: Call AT&T. Am pleasant, but firm. This whole “waiting eight hours for guys who don’t show” business is unacceptable. Receive profuse apology, rescheduled service call for 4-8 pm on Wednesday October 6.
October 6, 4pm: John arrives at home to wait for internet guys.
October 6, 8:30 pm: Call AT&T to inform them that for the second consecutive service call, no one has showed up. Nice lady on the phone informs me that she has spoken to the dispatcher and the tech was a no show for his shift today, they’ll need to reschedule. I ask, in a voice as free of venom as I can muster, whether it had occurred to anyone to call us BEFORE WE WAITED AT HOME FOR FOUR HOURS FOR A DUDE WHO DIDN’T EVEN SHOW UP TO WORK. Nice lady hems, haws. Inform nice lady that I am LOSING MY MOTHER-LOVING MIND. She upgrades our service request to “emergency” status, which entitles us to the next available appointment, which is: next Saturday. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
October 6, 8:42 pm: As we’re about to get off the phone, nice lady says “I notice here that you have an unpaid balance on your account for the last month of service- would you like to pay that now?”
NO. NO, lady, I would NOT. I DOUBLE DOG DARE you to try to collect one single penny from me for any “service” I have “received.” JUST TRY ME.
I’ve been to weddings each of the past two weekends. They were about as different from one another as two weddings in the Christian tradition can be. First wedding was a black tie affair, full Catholic mass, oldest church in Chicago, fancy reception at fancy club with live band and steak and a full open bar and a photo booth. Second wedding was outdoors, a mix of secular and sacred with such tidbits as a water ceremony and a kazoo parade, dinner in an unairconditioned but beautiful old university building, group singalong, several guests wearing Tevas. Different, is what I’m saying.
John and I have been to a lot of weddings in the past 16 months- these were numbers 12 and 13 – so I consider myself somewhat an expert on the genre at this point. And both of these weddings, different as they were, were really honestly perfect for the couples they married. That’s so cool, right? That you can have this ceremony that is such a huge and life-changing thing, surrounded by your friends and family, and it’s virtually infinitely customizable to fit your particular personality and style? I love that.
The experience of attending the wedding last weekend was a little different than most because I went without a date. John’s baby brother’s high school graduation was the same weekend as the wedding of my sister’s best friend (my sister was maid of honor – did you catch all that?) So John and I decided to divide and conquer – he to the graduation, I to the wedding.
Going to a wedding solo when you’re not single is a really different experience than going to a wedding when you’re single. Going to a wedding solo when you’re single carries endless possibilities- many drinks and wacky dancing and potential hijinks with single friends of the groom, that kind of thing. Flying solo at a wedding as a married person can just be kind of sad- everyone else gets up to dance and you head off to the bar to get yourself another diet coke, because you’re old now and can’t pound gin and tonics like you used to.
So it was with some trepidation that I picked up the card that told me my seating assignment. Sure enough, I was seated at a table of odds and ends - my parents, the bride’s boss and his wife, the parents of two other bridesmaids and one other solo married person, Sarah, who works with the bride and whose husband couldn’t come because he got last-minute tickets to the World Cup.
Rounding out the table was Patrick, the twenty-year old son of the bride’s boss, who had Bieber hair and whose button down was about three sizes too big. Oh, and a red and gold striped tie that looked like it should have been worn by a character in School Ties. When Sarah told him that his tie looked like it was from School Ties, he looked at her blankly and asked “what is that?” And then he swirled his Bieber hair while she and I died of old age.
Sarah knew Patrick from working with his dad for years, and it turned out she had invited him to come as her “date” when her husband flew off to South Africa at the last minute. He told me excitedly that Sarah and the bride were the first people to ever get him drunk when he was fifteen. As the evening progressed, he told us about his frat, and his summer internship, and the girl he broke up with right before summer started because he just wanted to have fun. He was, in short, entirely ridiculous and entirely adorable. He was also, quite clearly, entirely in love with Sarah, which was a little awkward to watch. Poor kid though Sarah hung the moon.
When the dancing portion of the evening started, we three sad sack solo acts sat at our table, watching everyone else (including my parents, known paragons of rhythm) hit the floor and start rocking out. Finally, Sarah suggested we all make the best of it, and we got up to dance together. This is how I ended up spending the better part of the evening dancing noncommittally with a person who had to use a fake id to get the bartender to serve him Jack and Cokes.
As the band took a break and we returned to the table, Patrick pulled out his phone. “I wrote about you guys on my facebook!” he said, as he showed us the page. His status update read: “bagged two cougars in one night. Awwwww, yeah.”
AND THEN I DIED. The end.
I wrote a few weeks ago about one of my current favorite songs, and it got me thinking about the wide variety of songs that have held the title of “favorite” in my heart over the years. I have had phases where certain songs burn hot and bright and I listen to them on repeat until the cassette breaks or the cd scratches or the spouse begs to please put something, anything else on the ipod. Some have been a slower burn, a deep affection that makes me smile with pleasure any time it comes on the radio, even years later. And some are just embarrassing, but what is this space for if not to embarrass myself?
Here, then, a partial list of songs that have spent some time on repeat on my boom boxes, discmans, and ipods over the years:
1985 (ish): Morning Has Broken, Cat Stevens. My first favorite song. My dad and I would listen to it as we drove around in his late-70s Mercury Cougar.
1987: You Can Call Me Al, Paul Simon.
1989: Free Fallin’, Tom Petty. My best friend introduced me to this song, having discovered it on the radio. She had a radio in her room, people. Her OWN RADIO. I seethed with jealousy.
1991: American Pie, Don McLean. I came back from three weeks at camp having memorized all the words, then made my parents play the song on repeat for weeks. They must have loved that. I still know every word by heart. All eight minutes of them.
1992 Paradise City, Guns N Roses. This one was a popular “fast” song at junior high school dances.
1993: Lady in Red, Chris DeBurgh. Older, wiser, and in the 8th grade, I’d moved on to this junior high “slow dance” classic.
1996: A Long December, Counting Crows. A boy I liked put this on a tape for me. Smooth.
1997: Romeo & Juliet, Dire Straits. I still love this song beyond all reason. It came on Pandora the other day while I was at work and I couldn’t help but sing along. I think my officemate was afraid.
1998: Torn, Natalie Imbruglia. Let us never speak of this again.
Later 1998: Philosophy, Ben Folds Five
1999: Closer to Fine, Indigo Girls.
2001: Tangerine, Big Head Todd and the Monsters. A truly great cover.
2002: La Cienega Just Smiled, Ryan Adams.
2005: Music When the Lights Go Out, the Libertines
2006: More Adventurous, Rilo Kiley
2007: South Texas Girl, Lyle Lovett. I first heard Lyle Lovett play this song at Ravinia, before it had been recorded, and I waited anxiously for months until he released it on an album so I could hear it again. It’s that good.
2009: Casanova, Baby!, Gaslight Anthem. Seriously, if you’re not listening to these guys, I highly suggest you start.
There are so many more- several per year, really- but these are some of the ones I played so many times I could sing them in my sleep. I can’t be the only one who falls hard for songs like this. Please tell me what some of yours are. I need some new inspiration.
Internet, I’ve been keeping something from you.
For the past week, I’ve been pretty much convinced that I was dying of some horrible mystery ailment.
It all began last weekend when I got a searing, knife-stabby feeling in my stomach. “Ow,” I thought, and also “oh dear.”
The knife-stabby pain continued for a few minutes, then seemed to abate. Every hour or so, though, it would flare up again. “This is bad,” I thought. “I am almost certainly dying of some horrible mystery ailment.”
So of course I did nothing about it.
The next day, it happened again. In fact, I didn’t even make it to the next day, because the knife-stabby feeling woke me up in the middle of the night. I drank a glass of water that did little to improve the situation and tried to go back to sleep. Mostly, I stared up at the ceiling contemplating my imminent death.
This has continued for several days. I had a good day on Wednesday, with few attacks of the knife-stabby feeling, but yesterday they were back again with a vengeance. Last night, they woke me up at 4 in the morning. As I sat on the floor of the bathroom, whimpering, phone in hand, I contemplated twittering some last words, something for you all to remember me by. Instead I went back to bed.
I told John about all this when he woke up this morning. The knife-stabby feeling, where it hurt, the coming-and-going, the searing pain when it’s there and feeling pretty much fine when it’s not. I was just about to tell him that we should probably schedule me for a CAT scan and start drawing up wills when he interjected:
“Oh, that’s the worst. Heartburn sucks.”
Heartwhaaaaaa?
So. Ahem. It appears that I might have been suffering from the world’s most common gastrointestinal ailment, and I just didn’t know it. In my defense, I have never had heartburn before, so I was clueless! I have done some googling, and apparently heartburn can feel like a searing pain in the dead middle of your abdomen, right below your breastbone. Did you know that? I didn’t! I figured, it being called HEARTburn and all, that it would be up by where the heart is, up in the throat. But no! Apparently it’s really common to feel a knife-stabby feeling in your gut!
So you can all be relieved that I’m not dying. I know you were concerned. I’ll be over at Walgreens, buying some Tums.
Like much of the country, we’ve had stunningly lovely weather for the past couple days. I fell in love with the city a dozen small ways Wednesday night. The guy grilling on the steps down to his garden apartment on his tiny tailgate grill; the man playing beautiful classical guitar on his balcony; the dad and his three kids playing joyous, chaotic kickball on the sidewalk — everyone in the city seemingly waking up from a long slumber. We’ve had it comparatively easy this winter, with no huge snowstorms or 100-year rains, but it still felt LONG, and these balmy evenings so early in the spring feel like a gift.
To take advantage of what I’m sure will be a short-lived breath of summer, I decided to run home from work last night. It’s about seven and a half miles, a distance that would have been no big deal for me when I was training for the half marathon a few short weeks ago. But something about running in 80 degree humidity is a LOT HARDER than running in thirty degree cool, and HOLY GOD that was a hard run.
My ipod was not helping. I recently had a snafu with updating software, so none of my playlists were on it. I figured I’d choose a super-peppy workout song and generate a genius playlist based on that, and that would carry me through the run. So I queued up “Toxic” by Britney and hit the road.
Dude, you guys, my ipod was totally fucking with me. In case you’re unfamiliar with the classic that is “Toxic,” allow me to refresh your memory:
Good workout song, right? Now, behold, a sampling of the songs that the so-called “genius” playlist maker added to a list based on “Toxic”:
Seriously, ipod? SERIOUSLY? By the end of the run I was ready to sit moodily in a cafe with an espresso, penning angsty poetry. Or, you know, stick my head in an oven. Not so much running music. Lesson learned: before I run again, I’ll make sure my playlists are uploaded.
In order to maximize our relatively short long-weekend vacation, we elected to take a very early flight out on Friday morning. As in, 5:45 in the a.m. I can only conclude that when we made this plan, we had not fully calculated that because we were flying internationally, this would require us to be in a taxi at 3:45 in the morning. Also called: the dead of night, a time when no sane person is awake, prime zombie-hunting hours, etc.
We stumbled downstairs, bleary-eyed and woozy on lack of sleep, to get into the cab. I walked around back to the trunk to put my bag in and the driver was futzing around back there, apparently trying to make room for our bags? But not really clear? Because it seemed like there was plenty of room already?
“Just drop it on the ground,” he said to me. “I’ll do it.”
The ground being wet, I decided to just hang on to it until he was ready.
“Just put it on the GROUND,” he barked again. (Apparently he’s not a dead-of-night person.)
“I’d rather not, since the ground is WET,” I barked back. (Apparently neither am I.)
We got the bags into the cab, installed ourselves in the back seat, and set out for the airport. Normally at this time of night I’d conk out in the car immediately, but after a few minutes I started to feel kind of seasick. The cabbie appeared to have learned to drive by watching old black and white movies- you know the kind, where they put the two main characters in a car, and run a film reel of a road behind them, and then have the man (it’s always the man driving) constantly move the wheel back and forth a few inches to let you, the viewer, know that he is obviously driving, not sitting in a non-moving set piece on a Hollywood back lot somewhere? The car kept drifting back and forth, back and forth as the cabbie corrected and overcorrected and corrected some more, never really staying in his lane.
About halfway to the airport, as the cab swerved dramatically to avoid running into a guardrail in front of an overpass, it hit me:
This cab driver is not tired. He is drunk.
You want to know what really wakes you up at 4 in the morning? Realizing that you and your husband are sitting powerless in the rickety back seat of a dilapidated cab with no seat belts being driven by a man who is honest to god intoxicated.
For the next twenty minutes John and I held hands, vice-grip-style, as the driver careened along the freeway, straddling two lanes as cars swerved around us, honking. It was all very “Jesus Take The Wheel.”
We made it there safely, thankfully. After we got out, John and I asked ourselves what we could have done differently. Making him pull over and having us get out of the car would have been impractical on the freeway. At the very least we should have gotten his cab number so we could report him, but we were so stunned that we didn’t even think of it until it was too late.
You know the old proverb “pride goeth before a fall?”
I propose a modification. Something along the lines of “smugness goeth before the universe hands your ass to you and laughs its ass off.”
Less than 24 hours after I wrote this nice post at LiveWell about how we can all be better stewards of the land through filtered water bottle usage, I got the following notice from our building:
Dear residents:
During construction today, a plumbing contractor discovered that a drinking water pipe may have inadvertently been crossed with another pipe not used for potable water. He informed the City plumbing inspection department which came out today and inspected the plumbing. They have taken samples of the water to determine the cause of the POSSIBLE contamination, and to ensure there is no danger to the rest of the water supply.
Unfortunately, we will not have water test results until tomorrow morning. It is recommended, therefore, that until further notice, no water be used for drinking or washing hands, body, or clothes, and that you only use water for toilet flushing. It is also advised that you do not drink from any filtered water through your refrigerator or any filtering system attached to your faucet or use of carbon filters like Brita pitchers until we have the results from the test. There is bottled water available for residents on the first floor by the management office.
Sincerely,
Management
That’s right, folks: less than a day after I wrote a superior-sounding post about the need for our society to rid ourselves of our addiction to disposable water bottles, John and I are now the proud owners of a dozen such bottles for drinking, hand washing, and teeth brushing. And we have to shower at the gym. Awesome!
The week ahead:
I have nervous tummy just looking at that list. Send help.