So, I’m 28. And I’ve started playing this game. It’s called “I’m Almost 30 And”. I like to play it when I’m falling asleep at night. To play, just fill in the blank at the end of the sentence with one of your Almost 30 realizations.
I’m almost 30 and I have a stuffed animal in my bed.
I’m almost 30 and I have socks with little pictures of bees on them.
I’m almost 30 and I don’t know how to apply make up.
I’m almost 30 and I’m afraid to hold a baby because what if I squish it?
I’m almost 30 and I’m intimidated by the dry cleaners.
I’m almost 30 and I just learned what it means to balance your tires.
I’m almost 30 and my favorite wine is a $3.99 chardonnay.
I’m almost 30 and I don’t own an umbrella.
I’m almost 30 and I’ve had 2 pedicures in my life, and 3 manicures.
Your turn!
Do you ever go grocery shopping, fill up your basket, get to the check-out line and have the strong urge to drop your basket and just walk out the door without buying anything? Or is it just me?
That happens to me sometimes. Especially when I’m shopping at Food Lion, which is one of the less glamorous grocery store chains in North Carolina. (And yet is still oddly pricey– no one wins!)
I almost walked out this evening when there was a bizarrely long line for a Sunday night. I didn’t even want most of the stuff I was buying, because I’d gone shopping in a resentful, crabby mood, which is ALWAYS when you end up with a basket full of ten cent Food Lion brand mac & cheese, Rocky Road ice cream and chicken bullion cubes. NO GOOD CAN COME OF THOSE ITEMS. Malicious spirits were practically drifting out of my basket moaning, ‘Eeeeeevillll’.
Sometimes I really dislike Sunday night. There’s just no getting over it.
So I’ve been training to run this 10k race in November for a few weeks now, and several things are becoming clear:
1) I can now understand how people end up training to run ridiculous distances. The human body is really good at getting used to things, so, just like with drugs or alcohol (I assume), once you’ve been indulging in something for awhile, you have to up the dosage, because the same old amount just doesn’t do it for you any more. In any event, on Tuesday I ran 5 miles during my lunch break, which would have been unheard of even a couple of weeks ago. So I’m becoming one of those people! At least my pants fit better now.
2) A 10k race is less impressive than I once might have assumed. I’ve deduced this after talking to several friends who are also training to run races—half marathons. Their big races are all much sooner than my big (or small) race. This makes me feel kind of lame, but I’m trying not to let it dissuade me. I’ll get there someday.
3) When I’m running considerably more than usual, I also want to eat more, and I also also want to eat more crap. This came as a surprise to me. I thought I’d be craving leafy greens and carrot sticks. But I’m craving chocolate chip muffins. It’s as though my body recognizes that it is now theoretically possible for me to be eating more, so it may as well be more donuts. And how can I say no to my body for something like that? Especially when it’s stepped up and begun to log way more miles and work harder when I’ve asked it to? I kind of owe it.
Hey! I’m still writing foody posts for The Examiner.com! Y’all are still reading my foody posts on The Examiner, right? Oh, I sure hope so.
Matthew David Brozik and I took on real and surreal crime-fighting in this week’s Perpetual Post. Read his much more informed side here.
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Last week someone broke into my car and ripped out my stereo. Since I fancy myself to be a bit of a forensics buff, I took some clear tape and lifted a partial fingerprint off the car door handle and brought it to my local precinct so they could ID it and catch the criminal. Well, they laughed in my face! Told me to stick the tape over my mouth and buy a car alarm. I was shocked and offended! While these guys were out writing speeding tickets and answering domestic disturbance calls, some crazed junkie was making off with my car stereo!
I just knew that if David Caruso from CSI Miami had been there, he would have slowly removed his sunglasses, squinted at me, tossed off a one-liner about catching the guy ‘in stereo’, and used my partial fingerprint to pull up a copy of the perpetrator’s criminal record, including a glamour shot of him looking like a threatening lowlife. Then he would have pinpointed the thief’s exact location by tracking his cell-phone signal or figuring out what he ate for lunch that day or where he bought his shoes or something. Finally, he would trick the guy into confessing, exposing a giant car-stereo-theft crime ring in the process. A hot girl would try to seduce him for some reason, someone else would get pushed down an open elevator shaft, and after an hour everything would be neatly wrapped up with a parting shot featuring David Caruso slowly removing his sunglasses and squinting.
So what the hell were those lazy boring police officers thinking? They were doing it all wrong! When will law enforcement catch up with television law enforcement? Those guys on TV—now THEY know how you get things done! They don’t second-guess themselves! There’s no whining about how blood spatter analysis is an inexact science. The title character on Dexter can tell what kind of weapon was used, at what speed, and whether the attacker was left or right handed just by looking at a few errant drops. On CSI Las Vegas, the team used lasers to convert the grooves in some clay on a pottery wheel into sound so that they could hear what the victim had been saying as he threw a pot. And you’re telling me that real law enforcement can’t even tell for sure if fingerprints are a definite match or not? Batman pulled a fingerprint off a shattered bullet in The Dark Knight. He’s putting non-televised criminal investigators to shame.
So what if lie detector tests are inadmissible in court! From what TV has led me to believe, if you’re a hard-bitten FBI agent who’s passionate about your job, you can make someone confess to a crime they committed just by yelling at them, because you can just tell that they did it!
The next time I visit the local police station to ask if one of their trained dogs can tell if my coworker is a drug addict by licking his coffee cup, and they give me the cold shoulder, I’m going to suggest that they watch more CSI and do less boring paperwork and beat-patrolling. There are apparently a few things in life you have to learn the hard way, from television—not from experience.
Today was not my day. I spent a hectic day at work and came home in an angry funk. I tried to fight off the bads in various ways, but it was an uphill battle. I took the dog for a walk. I watched some 30 Rock. I still felt crummy. When Brian called to invite me to come meet him and his school buddies for dinner in Raleigh, I didn’t really feel like leaving the house, but I made the executive decision that a little beer and company on a Friday night was exactly what I needed, so I told him I’d come out to meet them.
I went to get into my car and realized that it was partly blocked in by a haphazardly parked truck with a trailer on it. I could still pull my car out, but it took some maneuvering. My bad mood came back with a vengeance. Not only was the truck almost blocking me in, it was also parked directly behind and thus blocking the two handicapped parking spots in front of our apartment complex!
What the hell? Who does that?!? In a sudden fit of pique I parked nearby, grabbed a notepad from my glove compartment and hastily scribbled an angry note. It said, “You are blocking 2 handicapped spots! WTF! Seriously!?”
I got out of the car to throw my note into the cab of the truck, since the driver’s side window was down, and stopped short.
Hanging from the truck’s rear-view mirror was a handicapped parking permit.
Like I said, not my day.
Akie, Dave Tomar and I took on the remastered Beatles albums in the Perpetual Post.
I have to say I’m a little underwhelmed with the concept of remastering all of the Beatles’ albums. This doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that is done with the fans in mind, as much as with the private island which the producer wants to buy in mind. If the remastering is really done for the sake of bringing the works of the Beatles to a higher and more digitally delicious plane, then I would imagine that not every single song would need to be remastered. Maybe just do the ones that are scratchy. But no—this has to be an overhaul of the entire Beatles library, so that compulsive fans will feel obliged to once again collect ‘em all.
I understand that technology is improving every day, but really, how much can they do to improve the sound quality of these songs? It seems to me that the technology that existed back when many of the Beatles’ albums were first recorded had its limits, and thus that any sort of digital cleanup of that original sound is only going to be able to go so far. Besides fixing minor imbalances and background noise, how exactly are they improving these songs? Is the sound now…soundier? Did they fix it so that it feels like the Beatles are standing around you in a circle singing Yellow Submarine in your ear? Can you hear George Harrison blow his nose during the chorus of Eleanor Rigby? Do you care?
I think there’s also an argument that the way the songs sound is the way that generations have listened to them, and is in effect part of the Beatles musical experience. Similar to how turntables have experienced a resurgence in the last several decades; because they impart a certain quality to the sound that is lost with modern musical media. Digital is all fine and good, but does it have to be the ultimate way to hear things? I like a little variety sometimes. You can shove Blu-Ray in my face and I’ll still seek out black and white movies because they’re still great. Is it wrong to feel some nostalgia and love for the sound of a scratchy record? To feel that it has a place in modern life? Plus, what if they’re not just remastering these songs, whatever that even means? What if they’re adding in sneaky little subliminal advertising messages? I wouldn’t put it past them, would you? Is that the Windows chime you heard as the last strains of Rocky Raccoon faded into silence? Did Paul McCartney just sing “Come together” or did he sing “switch to Geico”?
Maybe I’m just being cynical. Or unenlightened. Maybe I have relatively bad hearing so everything sounds all the same to me. But I don’t really understand the fanfare surrounding the release of the digitally remastered Beatles canon. That is, unless some sort of crucial discovery was made in the process. If while remastering Rubber Soul they realized that you can hear Ringo hitting a bong during the instrumentals of ‘Norwegian Wood’, let me know. I might just buy that on iTunes. Otherwise, I’ll take my fab four Original Style.
Howard and I took on the following ridiculous statement from CBS news in this week’s Perpetual Post:
“A majority of those who watched the speech, 58 percent, said the president had explained his plans, up from 40 percent before the speech. But among those who didn’t watch, only one in four now say he has explained his plans — the same percentage as before the speech.” CBS News poll following President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress.
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I did not watch President Obama’s speech on healthcare last week, and I have to say, I found it particularly lacking. The address would have been a great opportunity for our beleaguered president to set the record straight on his healthcare agenda, had he actually done that and had I watched it. Though there was a great deal of anticipation surrounding this speech, the president’s remarks, from what I gather from myself, fell flat.
I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt in my assumptions about your address, Obama, but your message was garbled and unintelligible, like the pirated football game I watched instead of your speech. You’ve let this country down, and wasted our time to boot. You think I have all day to sit around remembering to watch you speak to a joint session of Congress? I’m in the middle of planning another trip to Canada to buy prescription drugs since my insurance won’t pay for the pills I take for my high blood pressure.
Even though I didn’t give you a chance, President Obama, you still managed to let me down. At this point, you’re 0 for 0. That’s a pretty disappointing record. Not only that, but you’ve been discussing the subject of healthcare reform for months now, and I still have a very cloudy sense of what your plan is for revamping the healthcare system—if you even have one at all! You could be winging it for all I know! And if Americans can’t trust you to explain a serious subject like healthcare to us without forcing us to turn on the television, listen to the radio or read a newspaper, then how can we be expected to trust you? How will we know for sure that you’re not planning to load sick people into Death Stars like I read about on a cocktail napkin somewhere?! How, indeed.
Big news! I’ve started training to run a 10k race.
Those of you who know me personally probably know that I like to run a little. I did cross country in college, which involved 5k races. Since then I’ve done a smattering of 5ks here and there, mostly through the jobs I was doing at the time. But this time I’ll be doing twice that amount of running in a race!
It feels good to be training for something. I don’t know that I’ve ever actually ‘trained’ to do any sort of ‘physical’ ‘activity’ before. Yesterday I ran for 40 minutes! In a row! This was big for me. I haven’t done that kind of running in awhile. I usually stop after 20 or so, because I’m sweaty and tired. But not yesterday!
During my last year or so Boston, I used to occasionally run home from work, which did take about an hour. Yes, I am crazy. On certain days I’d bring running gear to work, and then at the end of the day I’d pack a little sport backpack with my necessities and run from my office in downtown Boston to my home in Somerville. It was just so damn convenient; and with the public transportation in Boston, it was actually quicker than taking the T. Plus, I had the extra motivation of ‘the faster you run, the sooner you will be home.’ So that helped. But I haven’t done anything like that in awhile.
So wish me luck! I’m hoping to run this 10k sometime in November. From what I understand, training for races like this is a slippery slope. You start out doing just one and then you keep doing them because you don’t know how to stop. I guess we’ll see what happens.
I Heard Tell 