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eating breakfast

Something’s happened to me lately. After spending all of my adult life as a person who never ate breakfast, I’m all the sudden hungry in the early morning.

This is new to me. Breakfast has never been part of my morning routine. At least, not in any substantial way. A few years ago, when the sawmill started giving away fruit, I began eating a banana or apple with my morning coffee. I did this more for fruit-intake reasons than any three-squares-a-day thing. Maybe this small expected intake worked to change my metabolism to some degree, training me, as it were, to desire food in the morning. I don’t know, but there’s no denying that I’m now looking for a (more substantial than fruit) meal to start my day.

So far, I’ve handled this poorly. I’ve been purchasing this meal at work and eating it at the desk as I read my morning news. That costs money and likely means I’m eating something in which tater tots have been integrated, not the healthiest options (Father in Heaven, please help me overcome this penchant for tots). To adapt, however, I need to change my whole morning.

In fact, I’ve always thought it might be nice to do the kind of 1950s sitcom breakfast table thing. You know, coffee and paper while I eat half a grapefruit and smoke my pipe or something. OK I hate grapefruit and even though I do enjoy smoking a pipe Sharaun surely won’t let me do so inside. I’d settle, however, for my laptop, coffee, and some toast and jam or an egg or two over easy. If the family is up during this time, which they most often are, it would even be some bonus time with them beyond the typical morning kiss goodbyes.

I have a friend who tells me he does this. Has a morning breakfast sit-down at the table with an old-fashioned analog newspaper and something his wife makes. I don’t expect whatever routine I land on to be quite that anachronistic, but whatever it ends up being it will feel old fashioned to me. I mean, who still takes the physical paper? Tree-haters, Amish, papier-mâcheurs, perhaps. Oh great now I’ve romanticized it, turned it into a mental “quaint” happening like the breakfasts Sharaun and I enjoyed outdoors on Martha’s Vineyard where we honeymooned. It won’t be like that, though. It’ll be a rushed bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and a bagel with the Today Show on in the other room. It’s cool y’all… it’s still breakfast at home.

Now to set my alarm clock twenty minutes earlier than usual. Wonder if it’ll be worth it? Goodnight.

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shopping for me

The other day Sharaun texted me at work to ask if I would stop by the grocery store on the way home and pick up a fresh loaf of bread for dinner.

I used to hate these sort of requests, and it was rather unfair of me (I never voiced my dislike, but instead just went about the task in a huff… I’m sure it was totally discrete).  It’s just that I’m very much a creature of expectations, and by that I mean that once I’ve set my mind on a series of events playing out in a certain way it frustrates me when something causes those plans to change.

There is no logic to this, for the things I have mapped-out in my brain are almost always of no importance at all, and executing them out of order or not according to some arbitrary plan almost always brings with it zero consequences.  Still, when I have to go get gas and stop at Home Depot before work, my OCD brain creates an instant order-of-operations “plan” to achieve these things.  No sooner than this plan is formed does my brain christen it gospel and accept it almost as fact; I now have an expected sequence of happenings and I react negatively to any deviation.

I’ve found this trait to be the genesis of much of my impatience, random frustration, and, oddly enough, the reason I so value spontaneity.  I’m always perceiving the little non-occurrences of life as somehow “getting in the way” of my “plan.”    So you can see then, that when I’ve been sitting at my desk at work all day thinking about how I’m going to leave and go directly home after 5pm, that I’ve built up about eight hours of ludicrous expectation things will actually happen in the way I’ve been planning they will.  The out-of-plan bread interrupt, then, throws a seemingly frustrating wrench in the works.  Silly, right?

Yeah, silly.  And some years ago when I realized I have this brain-curse I strove to overcome it.  I am constantly internally asking myself, “Does this matter?  How does this change anything?” and then reminding myself, “Why worry or bother over it then; just let it happen.”  I want my plans to be ultimately malleable, changeable, adaptable – I feel like if they aren’t I might miss out on something truly random and unintentional.  When we go on vacations, when we travel, when we’re at Disneyland… in all these places I have to take a breath before I let my brain react with, “No!  This isn’t how I envisioned this!”  People call it “going with the flow,” for me I just have to surrender to the flow.  I think I’m better at it for acknowledging it.

But this isn’t what I came here to write about.

The other day Sharaun texted me at work to ask if I would stop by the grocery store on the way home and pick up a fresh loaf of bread for dinner.

Since I’m a better man and this kind of tasking no longer irks me, I replied with a simple, “Sure.”  As luck would have it I was able to leave work about fifteen minutes early that day, and thus found myself alone at the grocery store with some perceived time to kill (a notion which also owes its existence to my forever mental scheduling).  In no particular hurry, I found myself ambling about the aisles a bit.  Suddenly, a thought came to me: “I’m here, alone.  In the grocery store alone.  With all the buying power my Capital One Venture card endows me.  I am the decision-maker!  I can buy anything I desire!”  For the non-husbands in my audience, this translates roughly into something like, “Sharaun cannot tell me that this is too expensive, or too bad for me, or that I’m the only one who likes it so why buy it?”  In other words, I was free to do my own shopping.

I relished the moment.  I strode the aisles with a sense of power and domination, evaluating everything I saw by my standards alone.  Some $9 Hoisin sauce?, might be interesting.  A jackfruit?, sure, why not?  Bread made from potatoes?, dear God yes someone finally invented it!!  Now where’s the pasta made from the potato bread?  It would be like the Godhead of a foodstuff!  In the end, I didn’t go quite as crazy as I thought I might have, but I did manage to score some very “me” purchases.  Here’s what I came home with:

  • A hunk of exotic veined cheese & “water crackers” to eat it on (probably the most luxurious purchase, in terms of dollars)
  • 90 pack of “combination” flavor Pizza Rolls
  • One of each flavor Ramen, and three each of the super-spicy seafood ones that are all in Korean
  • Grape Nuts (Sharaun refuses to get them for me)
  • A bag of barbecue kettle chips, the ones that looked the hardest and crunchiest
  • Butter & vegetable oil (what?, we needed them)

And yes when I got home Sharaun looked on my spoils with skepticism, tsking the chips and cheese.  Perhaps it was my subconscious playing passive-aggressive; we’ll see if I get asked to pick up bread again anytime soon.

Gotta run, the Pizza Rolls are ready.  Goodnight.

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the moments that make up a dull day

8ish on Monday night.  Got a lot done today.

All the Halloween decorations came down over lunch.  They’re still piled in the garage and need to be put away for the year, but at least the house wasn’t out of theme for more than a day.  Came home, ate dinner, cleaned up the dishes, gave Cohen a much-needed bath, and spent a good undistracted hour with the voter’s guide studying for my early-morning trip to the polls tomorrow.

Glad I did, because I vary decently from my party’s line in some places.  Those voter guides man… it’s like reading a transcript from a highschool debate.  These people can’t be more persuasive?  They write like they’re trying to convince teenagers and simpletons.  I resorted to reading the text of the propositions and making my own call, at least they show you what current law will be null and void and give you the new language…

Today I shaved some very noticeable hair off my earlobe.  Really.  I have no idea when my earlobe got hair, but once I saw it in the sunshade mirror on the way to work this morning there was no unseeing it.  It’s obviously been there, it didn’t wholly sprout overnight.  And even though it wasn’t anything dark or stringy like facial hair, it was fuzzy and clearly visible.  No one wanted to tell me I had ear hair?  This business of getting old is for the birds.  I still remember the first day I shaved my face and on that day I’d have never pictured myself holding my beard trimmer to the inside of my ear.  “And when I die… I expect to find him laughing.”

I obviously have nothing to write.  Things have been busy.  Maybe with more time to think.  Goodnight.

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halloween 2010, some pictures

Halloween weekend went off just splendidly.

Our annual let’s-pretend-we’re-in-college-again soirée was (and maybe I say this every year, but…) my favorite yet.  The be-cosutmed attendees took the whole thing to another level, and it’s the first year we’ve had the police grace us with a visit (two cruisers the first time, and one came back to hang out later).  Part of me sometimes goes, “Dave, why do you still have a party like this?”  I mean, I’m old… we have kids… I can’t just spring back into action the next day like I used to.  But every year I have a great time.  Maybe that’s why.  I was proud of Sharaun too, she closed the place down with me and the usual late-night crew around 4:30am, sitting around a big bowl of molten pizza rolls drinking rum on the rocks.

And, while I didn’t have a whole ton of time tonight (Sunday, “beggars’ night”) to write a fancy blog (even though you might think I’d have a bunch of test stored up after last week’s dalliance), I did find time to upload some pictures of the costumes from the party to the normal place.  Thanks to Bill for the loaner camera after our died midway through the evening, and double-thanks for the Saturday morning upload that made the gallery possible.

So then, head on over to the Halloween 2010 Costume Contest and vote for your favorite getups.  After that you can check out some candids that Bill put up over at his place.

Until tomorrow, take care.

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halloween dashed

Monday.  Almost didn’t write.  Fired this off around 11pm when I realized I had one thing to write about and that Sharaun made a neat video.

Here’s the one thing: Wouldn’t be the run-up to Halloween if there wasn’t some catastrophe with our stupid-complicated house and yard decorations.

In the past it’s been vandals, poor workmanship, and storms.

This year storms struck again.  A two-day rainstorm with freak winds strong enough to wreak havoc on the props.  The witch tore her moorings to the fascia and dropped to the driveway below.  The mausoleum blew over and couldn’t be set right without falling apart at its shoddily nailed joints.  On its way over it took out two of the homemade tombstones.  It was a mess to wake up to.  I’m not sure I can make all the repairs before Friday’s party… it’ll be  race at best.

Here’s the video:

Goodnight.

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castles on the moon

Turned out to be a pretty strange, loosely-connected deal today friends. Came easy though so let’s run with it.

When I was a tween I was big into all things occult. Not to say I was a practicing version of anything, rather that I was just intrigued by the mystical and magical and unexplained. I’ve written about this before, I think.

I sat riveted to television shows about ghosts and UFOs and cults and other manner of unexplained phenomenon. Which, at that time, before the great “paranormal bastardization” of cable channels like TLC, Discovery, and the History Channel, were a more rare occurrence on television. I checked out and devoured books from the local library on psychic phenomenon, spontaneous human combustion, witchcraft, Stonehenge, Bigfoot, and the like. I don’t know what drew me so to this kind of stuff, which then seemed supremely interesting and truly mysterious and now seems just so many folks talking through their hats and is interesting mostly as a curious aspect of human nature. Anyway, I loved the stuff.

You can imagine, then, how awesome it was when I somehow convinced my folks to spring for a series of Time-Life books called Mysteries of the Unknown that I’d seen advertised on television. Looking back, I can’t imaging these were cheap, and I wonder at my parents’ willingness to purchase them on my behalf. There were thirty-three volumes in the set, and they’d send you a new one every month or so (remember when book-series’ like this were the rage?). Each volume focused on one of those so-loved “mysterious” pursuits of mine.

Holy crap I loved those books. And while I didn’t quite take them as gospel (the skeptic was strong in me, even then), I did at least ascribe them some credence. I remember vividly closing myself in my closet with my copy of Psychic Voyages, following to a tee the step-by-step instructions required for one to achieve “astral projection,” where the consciousness leaves the body and can travel seeing through the physical world. I was going to astral-project myself down the street, into the cul-de-sac, and into Mary’s bedroom if I had to try all damn afternoon. I never was able to have that out-of-body experience; never set foot in Mary’s room either (although I guess I could look for pictures of the modern-day version now that Sharaun is friends with her on the Facebook, if I really wanted to).

It was in these books somewhere that I learned that, in “the old days,” they used to hang bells above-ground with strings running down into the coffins of the newly-interred deceased. The idea being that, as death was more then often mispronounced for things like coma or other catatonic state, these poor buried-alive souls could then signal the world that they there were merely resting, not in final repose, but instead now awake and quite ready to be un-buried.

I don’t know why but that image concept really stuck with me as a kid, and I still use it as a powerful mental image for the intense fear that comes with utter helplessness. Even today, when that everyday entropy begins to weigh and I get the itch to “run away,” I see a mental image of a man furiously pulling a string he hopes is attached to a bell he can neither see nor hear. It’s a pretty striking picture of being “stuck” and wanting to change one’s present situation.

Anyway…

Later in life I had a brief obsession with one the series’ covered topics, alchemy. In my late twenties I got interested in the history and thought processes of the ancient physical alchemist, and subsequently the grafting of those physical precepts onto the field of psychology by Mr. Carl Jung. I wrote about that a little at some point too, I think over here. But for the most part I left the “mysteries of the unknown” for the tweenage me to ponder… and grew up into a mostly practical adult (who’s just a little given to whimsy).

What the heck am I talking about?  Goodnight.

PS – Kristina, if you’re out there, you still have some of my books.  Love you.