Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions (12 page)

_Stalking

You’re focused on one person, often someone smarter
and better-looking than you.

_{People-watching}

You stay in one place, happy to watch people
pass.

_Stalking

You follow one person around, hiding in bushes.

_{People-watching}

You take cute, humorous notes in a little black
notebook so you don’t forget wacky things you see.

_Stalking

You take copious notes in tiny, tight handwriting,
collecting it in 27 scrapbooks you keep under a floorboard in your
closet.

_{People-watching}

You chuckle cheerily at the funny things people
around you are doing.

_Stalking

You drool over what you’re seeing in someone’s
bedroom window with those night-vision goggles.

_{People-watching}

You search through the trash bin in the park after
you see a child accidentally drop in a favorite toy while throwing
away her candy wrapper.

_Stalking

You root through the garbage at someone’s house,
looking for old gas station receipts, coffee grounds, and bits of
rancid food the person might have touched so you can frame it and
hang it on a secret wall in your basement.

_{People-watching}

No one who’s watching you watching others will call
the police on you.

_Stalking

Two words:

restraining order

List #2: Important Stuff to Remember:

•
Never try to jury-rig a
WiFi connection with a wire coat hanger and chewing gum connected
to your laptop with a twist-tie from an old bread bag, no matter
what my husband tells you. It won’t work. He was just filching off
the neighbor’s unsecure network and didn’t know it. (This is not to
be confused with an “insecure network,” which is just a fancy,
high-tech-sounding name for my group of women friends when we get
together for dinner.)

•
Never pray for
patience.

•
I opened a bag of corn
chips today and noticed a small logo in the lower right corner of
the bag: “Official Snack of Minor League Baseball.” Take note of
that:
Minor League.
Somehow this bag of yummy snack food didn’t make it to the
Show. What does this say about the chips?

•
Ever notice that clichés
regarding work involve torture-chamber levels of pain? Putting your
nose to the grindstone. Working your fingers to the bone. It’s a
good thing we don’t realize as kids that this stuff is far closer
to literal than any of us want to admit. We’d have thrown ourselves
off bridges the first chance we got.

•
I don’t care how fast
you want it: Never,
ever
pray for patience.

•
During one week, I see a
news story about a study saying that coffee is good for you. The
next week, a new study asserts that coffee is bad for you. So, just
to be safe, I drink coffee every other week.

•
There’s something about
Velveeta that creeps me out a little bit. My husband may have grown
up with the stuff and may indeed have fond memories of eating it as
a child, but anything called “processed cheese food product” that
can also be branded with a half-life just shouldn’t be
ingested.

• I’m serious:
Don’t pray for patience.
It’s a
trick.

It’s been another of those muggy weeks here in
western Pennsylvania where I become a hermit in my house, enjoying
the constant 74 degrees and low humidity of our central air. I turn
into a wuss unable to leave the house to do anything unnecessary.
Doesn’t help that the air conditioning in my car doesn’t really do
much more than cool off my knees and my right elbow because the
only cold air I feel seeps out of the vents and only the body parts
in a three-inch radius from a vent get cooled off. And frankly,
driving with my face hunched down in front of a side vent really
wouldn’t do much for my driving record. Not really.

Where was I? Oh yeah.

We’re moving a big bookcase into the house from our
storage facility, so I may get the rest of my books in here, and
also the rest of my vinyl record albums. Yes, kids, you don’t
remember such things, but we old fogeys played vinyl record albums
instead of CDs.

It’s a weird thought that none of my now-grown
children know how to operate a turntable. I’m not saying I miss
vinyl, despite the many things I’ve read about how compromised CD
sound is compared to vinyl. I certainly don’t miss playing songs in
a different order by lifting up the needle at the end of one song
and physically placing it on the beginning of the song you want to
hear next (which may have entailed flipping over the album first
and holding in that little metal thingy at the top of the spindle
so the album would fall all the way down and sit flat on the
turntable). And I certainly don’t miss hearing that scraping sound
of a needle scoring its way across the album, leaving a nice
scratch in its wake that usually meant hearing a skip at that
precise point in the song every time you played it from then
on.

And none of us would have been able to play vinyl
albums in our cars like we can with CDs and now iPods. Can you
picture trying to shove a big ol’ twelve-inch album into a huge
slot in your dashboard, which would have taken up the entire width
of the car? Instead, we’d all still be stuck playing cassettes in
the car, hitting FF or REW in a vain attempt to skip songs on
albums we hate without causing traffic accidents.

Then again, in my case, even that would be a step up.
Over a year ago my husband got me a CD player for my car. (I’m
driving a ‘92 Corsica, made before technology was invented.) I was
thrilled to replace my tape deck, and except for the fact that it
apparently had no skip protection whatsoever, especially for burned
CDs (“Don’t breathe, Jeremy, or it’ll skip over every three seconds
of your favorite Good Charlotte song”), I was thrilled to have this
technology available in my car.

For approximately six months.

Then the contraption woke up one morning and decided
to forget what a CD looked like. And it hasn’t recognized a CD
since. We’ve tried every type of CD in the book. We tried every
type of cleaner known to mankind (except peanut butter, which every
preschooler seems to think belongs in CD players). Nothing worked.
Certainly not the CDs. So then I was reduced to using it as a very,
very bad radio. Which was worse than the radio that had been in my
tape deck.

Then the thing started to physically slip out of the
slot in the dashboard. When I drove up a hill, the whole CD player
(or, should I say, “the very expensive yet
cheap
radio”?) would slide out the rectangular hole and whack the gear
shift. I had to drive with one hand holding the thing in place to
keep it from ramming the car into neutral, which got dangerous
after a while.

I asked my husband to disconnect the CD player
entirely, and all I had left staring at me from the hole in the
dash were about two dozen wires of different colors. Oh sure, they
were pretty, but . . .

Someday I hope to get him to put the tape deck back
in. I’m actually looking forward to the day when I’ll be able to
play a
tape
in my
car
again. My standards have gotten
really low in the past six months.

Till then I have no CD player, no tape deck, no
radio, and no clock in my car. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Total silence when
I drive. Well, except for when my kids are in the car. There’s
never total silence then, of course.

But, it’ll be months till I see another radio or tape
deck in my car. Why? Because it would mean my husband would have to
sit in my cramped, sweltering car jiggling wires around for hours
on end. And, of course, it’s August.

Oh well. Maybe for Christmas. . . . Oh wait, it’ll be
snowing then. He won’t want to sit outside in my car then
either.

What’s the old saying? Silence is golden? I wish I
could agree.

Today I’m in pain. I must’ve moved the wrong way or
turned funny or coughed or something (also known as exercising at
my age). The muscles along the right side of my back went haywire
and since then it’s been torture to move—but only in certain
directions. Like, to the right. Or the left. I have trouble
sitting, getting back up, twisting to one side, reaching down with
my right arm, and a whole host of other mundane gerundial
movements. I’m sitting in a chair right now dreading hoisting
myself up. More than usual, I mean.

The obvious explanation for my dilemma is that I
shouldn’t have dragged that five-shelf bookcase up a flight of
stairs to the second floor this morning. It’s obvious now, but it
seemed like a good idea at the time. And, really, I didn’t do
anything extraordinary. I just eased the thing up onto each step,
one at a time. I don’t recall pulling any muscles then, and the
pain didn’t come till hours later, after I’d been sitting on the
couch for a few hours doing a lot of nothing. You know, a typical
evening at my house. Still, the mind wants to make connections, and
this is the easiest explanation that accounts for the data.

But, it could have happened while I was vacuuming the
entryway. (That’ll teach me to clean the house.) At one point the
belt slipped off the upright vacuum and I had to un-upright it and
take the plastic bottom off, holding the whole contraption between
my knees at a weird angle and cleaning out the gunk and hair while
putting the belt back on properly. Perhaps I held something at an
odd angle for too long and yanked something then. Besides the
vacuum belt, I mean.

Doesn’t matter. I’d love to sink into the waterbed
right now and let the heated water in the mattress help the muscles
unknot. But I’m afraid I won’t be able to get back out and I’d be
declared lost at sea. (See “Water, Water Everywhere” on page
95.)

Plus, the TV that was in our bedroom had to be sent
back to the cable company (we got it free as part of their cable
rewards program so we got what we paid for), so we’re TV-less in
that room for the next few weeks.

This would be a perfect time to read a book, but I’ve
never quite mastered the art of reading a book in that sloshy
waterbed. Severe seasickness comes to mind.
My
mind. Literally.

Oh, dear. I feel my entire right side tensing up
again. A hot shower earlier had loosened things up enough to move
around with only a little excruciating, searing pain—which was an
improvement—but the effects seem to be wearing off. I can’t turn to
the right at all now.

As a last resort I may climb into Wayne’s recliner
with a book and the TV remote. Sounds like nirvana for a lot of
people, but it’s tough for me to get comfortable in that thing.
It’s made for people well over six feet tall, not short things
topping out at five feet, two inches. I feel like Edith Ann in her
rocking chair, legs dangling six inches off the floor.

But lying in the recliner would give me the support I
need for my back and the creature comforts I’m not ready to do
without right now.

I may resort to getting the hot water bottle, which
is only for very old people who actually know how to use them
without scalding their asses.

It’s not a bad idea, really, to try that—or anything
else—as long as I don’t have to turn to the right to do it.

Last night the kids and I had the brilliant idea to
go the drive-in to see a double-header of
Finding Nemo
and
Tomb Raider 2
. We spent the early evening scrambling around
getting ready. I popped some popcorn, the girls helped pack up the
car with a blanket, four camping chairs, and a cooler (with grapes,
cauliflower—Grace’s favorite munchie on the Atkins diet—and some
ranch dressing to dip the cauliflower in). We scurried out of here
a few minutes later than I would have liked, but we didn’t forget
to bring anything.

Or so we thought.

We stopped at a local beverage place to get cans of
soda (“pop” in western Pennsylvania, but I refuse to call it “pop,”
ever) and were finally off. Made it through the construction on
Route 60 and were soon outside the drive-in waiting in line to turn
in off the street and get into the driveway of the theater. A
worker was doing a walk-through telling everyone that
American
Wedding
was sold out, which didn’t bother us, of course. In
fact, all the cars turning around and leaving ahead of us made
getting off the street that much easier. We paid our cheap fees to
get in and the ticket window worker told us to make sure to tune
our radios to 97.5 FM to get the sound for our movie. (Each screen
has its own radio frequency—a far cry from the days when we used to
grab a big metal contraption off a metal stand at our parking spots
and hook it onto the car window and had to make a mental note not
to leave with the thing still stuck to the window.)

I’m sure you all know where this is going by now. But
I digress.

The place was so crowded we ended up making our own
parking spot, way down front, way off to the right (almost up
against the guard rail over the road below). I made sure all the
windows were down before turning off the car. And, I instinctively
reached for the radio dial to turn it to
97.5 . . . F . . . M .
. .

There was only a hole—and some loose wires—
where my radio used to be.
I forgot Wayne had taken out
the faulty tape deck.