Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Wednesday, December 21, 2011 Like Clockwork Anyone whose ever done any research into sleep disorders knows about the importance of a regular routine when it comes to getting to sleep reliably. I'm here to tell you it's true, but not necessarily in exactly the way you think. Most weekdays at some time between 3:20 and 3:30 PM, I save whatever I'm working on, get in my car, and drive the three miles to M. Edium's school. I pull into a spot in the pickup line; turn off the ignition, the heat, and the radio; and tilt my seat back as far as it will go. The next thing I know, the daily alarm I have programmed on my cell phone is going off seconds before the school bell does, and I hop out to wait by the exit, alert and refreshed, until M. Edium comes out one to two minutes later. It's the high point of my afternoon. There are some days when the routine doesn't work out quite so well. Sometimes a tight deadline might keep me at my desk as late as 3:32 or 3:34. That same pressure might make it difficult for me to relax and shut down my mind when I get to the school. I might almost get pulled over or hit by another car. On more stressful days like this, the process of falling asleep in my car can take as long as thirty seconds. I was worried about the disruption in routine when I got my new car in October, and indeed that first day didn't go too well. I found myself lightly dozing instead of enjoying a proper ten-minute coma. But then by the next day I'd figured out how to lower the headrest, and once again I was able to deactivate myself like C-3PO. In fact, my internal clock has come to count on it. On that last residential street, I'm already yawning in anticipation, and if I get stuck behind anyone slow, I ride their bumper, lean on the horn, scream obscenities, and give them a punitive little tap as I pass them, just so I can get my beauty sleep that much sooner. Sometimes I feel a little self-conscious, sitting in that line of cars with the other parents with my closed eyes and open mouth pointed up at the dome light. Maybe some of them have noticed my pattern and have possibly even come up with their own little nicknames for me, like "Napping Dad" or "Pick-up Van Winkle" or "That Asshole." But since many of them sit there with their engines running for no reason the entire time, they're in no position to judge. Ten, fifteen minutes of post-peak oil going into the ozone layer. Do you know how long it's more efficient to leave your engine on than to turn it off and back on? Six seconds. Which, to be fair, it longer than it takes me to fall asleep, but it's a lot less than ten or fifteen minutes. In fact, there's only one downside that I can see right now. Today was M. Edium's last day of school until the first of the year. He'll be home with us every day for the next week and a half, so there will be no need for me to go pick him up. I just hope he and Trash will have a little patience for the narcoleptic fits that are almost certain to hit me between 3:30 and 4:00 for the rest of the year. I might ask them to let me spread pillows and cushions around on the floor just in case I black out while walking from room to room, but I have a feeling that I'll be invited to crash out in my car. As usual. Which I'm actually okay with. And if that doesn't work, well…nobody cares if a guy's parked alone in a car outside a school when there's no class in session, right? posted by M. Giant 8:37 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, December 15, 2011 O Tannenbomb It was some years ago when we started getting real Christmas trees. I'd like to say that the impetus for the change was that Trash finally got tired of my insistence on calling our old fake tree a "permanent tree," but I suspect that the real reason has something to do with the fact that the last year we had it, I strung 32,500 lights on it in Gordian tangles designed to illuminate every single needle, but which made it impossible for Trash to de-light it in a day's time without ripping out several of the fake branches. She was pretty irritated about that, and we had a standoff. I said I wasn't going to allow any shadows on our Christmas trees in the future, and she said that in that case she wasn't going to spend the entire week of New Year's trying to untangle the lights from it without wrecking it. At this point she was in such a severe state of post-holiday letdown that I was afraid she was going to throw her wire-cutters and hacksaw at me, so I agreed that we would get real trees forevermore. As a result, M. Edium has never had a Christmas without a real tree in the house. He's used to the whole routine, from driving to the tree lot four blocks away, to picking out the perfect-shaped tree that somehow always looks shorter under the open sky, to the twining of it to the roof of our car for the short drive home, to the wrestling of it inside and the ceremonial marking-up of the ceiling, to the annual battle with the Christmas tree stand, which gets its annual drink of water. But this year, he wanted a tree in his own room as well. Trash and I weren't entirely on board with this, because his room's not that big. It's basically a narrow L from the doorway, with bookshelves on your right and his dresser and massive bunk bed dominating the left, leaving a passage so narrow that Trash and I can't get past each other in it. It's basically a galley bedroom. But he insisted, and Trash figured out how to make space in his bedroom, and soon we were back home with a tall, full, symmetrical tree half an inch taller than our living room, and the shortest tree on the lot. We were expecting to get a Charlie Brown tree, but they didn't have any of those. He ended up with a Charlie Manson tree instead. Our tree is lovely, with plenty of soft, plump, moist pine needles that barely deserve the name; they feel softer than the bristles on a baby's hairbrush after a few minutes in the oven. M. Edium's tree, on the other hand, is a footless porcupine crossed with a mutant cactus. The needles on that sucker are more like spikes. We thought we could cheap out and just stick the sawed-off trunk in a planter full of dirt, but after just a few minutes of trying that, my arms looked like I'd tried to bathe both cats in maple syrup. So we had to get a small but proper stand for it, because it kept flinging itself at us in these terrifying homi/suicidal attacks until I could get it locked down. I left the lighting and decorating of the horrible thing to Trash and M. Edium, at least until my fingerprints could grow back. But it's still there, and I still have to deal with it. It would be bad enough just having to be in the room with it when getting M. Edium in or out of bed, but I also have to water it. Because, you know, if you don't, the needles get all dry and pointy. Gosh, what would that be like? Because right now, when I put on an elbow-length steel gauntlet and reach in through those carnivorous branches to add enough water to replace that which has evaporated into the air, I still pull my hand out feeling like I've just tangled with a brigade of Lilliputian archers. Those needles stick in your flesh, and no matter how quickly you pull them out, they leave behind a tincture of poisonous venom that causes the wound to sting angrily for a full hour. And yes, this is in our child's bedroom. I remember when I was his age how I used to count down the days until Christmas with anticipation. One does that less as one gets older, naturally. But this year, I'm counting down the days until December 26th with…not anticipation, exactly. More of a grim knowledge of an ugly battle that I may not survive, but which must be fought to make the world safe again. posted by M. Giant 9:27 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:Great post, I just discovered your blog after reading the piece on TIME magazine website about holiday music. Your take on it was spot on!
By Wait, wait wait wait wait! You took the lights off your tree? I thought the whole point of the fake tree was that you could leave the lights on when you put it away? (I put a new string or two on mine every year. It's mostly lights now.)
By Jeff, you;re absolutely right about the lack of new Christmas death of melody being the prime force in pop music. But that's directly traceable to the demise of melody as the driving force in pop music - when rap and hip-hop pushed melody aside, the only refuge in American pop was country music. And too many country songs sound alike - so no distinctive country Christmas song has broken through for years. But fear not - I recently wrote (with a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame) a great new classic Christmas song - it'll be out next year. Get back to me then.
By Tuesday, December 06, 2011 Cage Rage After Bucky's death, our house was hamster-free for six days. It would have been less, but the house was also human-free for five of those days. Last year, after getting a belt promotion in karate, M. Edium chose as his reward (and spent some of his savings on) a new cage for Bucky. Unlike the basic starter cage we got for him at first, this one had brighter colors, several elaborate pathways, and a little visiting tank on top where you can open the lid and pet your hamster if he feels like going up there. I also hated it. I knew while I was struggling to put it together for the first time that it was going to be a bitch to clean, because the roof and all the side segments would come totally apart as soon as I removed just one of them. Fortunately for me, Bucky also hated it. After we moved him in, he went from being a happy, active little critter to a miserable, nervous dust-bunny who spent all his time trying to gnaw through the neon-green bars. He seemed much happier once we moved him back to his old, white-barred cage. And so was I, because that cage took me only ten minutes to clean every time. I felt a little bad for M. Edium, though, working so hard to get a cage his pet hated. But then he said Bucky could have little vacations in it, and everyone was happy because he never did. When we brought home the hamster that Trash and I both assumed would be called Bucky Junior or Bucky 2.0 ("I prefer just Bucky," M. Edium soon corrected), the barely-used cage was still down in the basement. And we figured that since new Bucky was going to have to get used to a new cage anyway, it might as well be the one M. Edium had earned. No reason not to, right? I put off cleaning it until the hamster-cage smell was perceptible from down the hall. I should have put it off longer. The first issue is that new Bucky is kind of an asshole. He hates to be touched, let alone picked up, and will dart away if you try. If you do succeed in catching him, he'll sink his teeth into your finger with intent to kill. The only way to get him out of the cage is to lure him into his exercise ball, which he enjoys for about ten seconds before rolling it into a corner to sulk and to try to fill it with as many little turds as possible. This ended up being a surprisingly large number, given what a task the cage-cleaning turned out to be. First of all, I did my best to keep as many pieces together as possible, only to have the whole thing collapse into its individual elements like a house of cards. the spiral ramp has to be detached from the ceiling, which is a step I would have skipped except for how he seems to think that's his bathroom. The fancy wheel is fully enclosed and has an entrance so tight and twisted that the only way to get rid of the tiny little turds he's filled that with is to stick it under the bathroom tap and hope for the best. The water bottle it came with leaks horribly, so the aspen shavings on that whole end of the cage were totally soaked. But at least that was better than the reason I originally thought the aspen shavings were soaked. So between disassembling, cleaning, rinsing, and drying all of these fiddly little bits and then putting them all back together (which isn't any easier the second time, or the third), digging out the old water bottle and hanging it from the bars, getting rid of the soaked bedding, and tipping a very reluctant Bucky back out of his poo-filled ball, the whole process took me about 45 minutes. Even better, this cage somehow gets smellier faster than the old one, so I'm going to have to go through the 45-minute process much more frequently than I had to do the ten-minute process. And for a new hamster who's a dick. M. Edium isn't as sad any more about his original Bucky dying as he was. I, however, am much more so. posted by M. Giant 9:51 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:Sounds like it's time to upgrade to a cat. MUCH lower maintenance!
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Thank you for reminding me why I am NEVER letting my children get a damn hamster.
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