How Was Your Day?

The other night, Brandon and I were both in the bathroom. I had just come home from visiting my mother in the nursing home and was about to take a bath, and he, having seen little of me that day, was just in there chatting with me.

BRANDON: So how was your day, Mama?

ME: (wearily) Ohhh... it was fine, I guess.

HIM: Except for the part where you had to work?

ME: Yeah. And the part where I went to the nursing home.

HIM: (stating the obvious, as if to a fool) Mama, that's all you've done all day.

ME: Oh. Then I guess my day sucked.

HIM: (laughed heartlessly)

Sex Lives of the Old and Portly

Last night I was huddled over my laptop, working, while my husband sprawled nearby, reading. He closed his book, yawned, and mentioned that he’d run into a friend of ours earlier in the day. The friend had seemed unusually cheerful, Brian said. There was quite a spring in his step.
“It’s ‘cause he’s getting some,” I told him. “He’s got a new girlfriend.”
“He does?”
There was a brief pause during which I suppose we both imagined what such a relationship might entail for our very overweight, over-fortyish friend.
“So you think they’re doing it?” my husband wanted to know.
“I imagine so,” I said, stopping to push up my glasses. “And I really need to have a discussion with him, because I need to know how in the hell he took his clothes off in front of somebody new.”
“Why's that?”
“Because personally, I’m pretty well figuring that if something ever happens to you, I’m never having sex again.”
“Really? So you figure you’ll just ask him for some tips?”
“Yeah, I mean what’s the secret, you just go out and find somebody even fatter and worse-looking than you are?”
He started laughing. “I guess.”
“Then why would I want to have sex with somebody like that?” I screeched. “It’s like that thing Groucho Marx said about not wanting to join any club that would allow him to be a member. Anybody that’d have sex with me, I wouldn’t want.”
“Well, this really says a lot about your opinion of me,” remarked Brian.
“Doesn’t it? Of course,” I considered, “you and I declined together.”
“Hmm, we declined together,” he repeated. “Interesting.”
“We did,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I’d be way hotter than I am right now, except I was just trying to keep up with you in your declining process.”
“Wow,” said my husband. “Well, you're keeping right up, I have to tell you.”

My Brain Has Been Rewired

I'm convinced that excessive computer usage has rewired my brain, and maybe yours, too. And not in a good way.

Yesterday morning I got up and of course (!) checked Facebook before I even had coffee. I was surprised at how many other people had posted that they were already up and had been unable to sleep. I'd had another unsatisfying night, myself. After going to bed I'd been bothered by restless leg syndrome (previously only experienced in times of extreme stress). I had to get up around midnight, take a hot bath and a Tylenol PM in order to get some rest, and I was still the first one up in my house the next morning. Also on the subject of sleeping/not sleeping: twice this past week I've dreamed of web surfing.

At work at my regular job, I check my office email over and over and over, a million times a day. I could set it to automatically notify me; but no, I'd rather obsess. In short moments of downtime, such as when I'm waiting for my printer to spit something out, I check my personal email or look at Facebook or hit a website for whatever topic has crossed my mind in the last few minutes. (My mother-in-law has mentioned that she can never think of anything she wants to look up. To me this is incomprehensible. I can't STOP thinking of things I want to look up.)

Saddest of all, and I've heard this expressed by other readers, is that my relationship with books has been altered. Books have been the love of my life and until the past year or two, I dove into them and easily became absorbed. But lately I find it much more difficult. At present I'm reading a new book--one I had long looked forward to--by a favorite author, and instead of savoring the beautiful prose I'm impatient for the story to get moving, already, and show me some action. I still do pretty well when I return to favorite books from the past, but NEW characters and stories have their work cut out for them, trying to wrest my attention away from this magic screen in front of me.

It's almost as though we've conditioned ourselves to have ADD. No longer is it a way of life to concentrate on one thing at a time; EVERY job description uses the term "multi-task." We go through our days trying to do one main thing while flipping back every few minutes (seconds?) to another. I find this all disturbing. You?

Ruby Slippers

When my daughter Bliss was little, Target used to sell sparkly jewel-encrusted red shoes that reminded me of the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Every time I went in the store I would look at them and think how thrilled she would be if I bought her some. But then I'd think, Don't be frivolous. That's ten dollars, or whatever, that could be spent on something more practical.

A hundred times I looked at them, a hundred times I never bought them.

Eventually Bliss got too old to be delighted by such things as ruby slippers from Target. And then one day I realized that I would never in my whole life have another little girl to buy them for.

Moral of the story: that's ten bucks I should have spent.