I don't know what is becoming of me lately. I've been snooping through all of your diaries on a regular basis, but I haven't given you anything new to snoop through for almost a month. I do apologize. I simply cannot seem to drum up the energy to update lately. Part of this may have had to do with the fact that the burden I've mentioned in the past was beginning to seem permanent. Now, much to my total amazement and profound relief, it has finally come to an end -- after two and a half years. Since then, I have been so relieved and content that I haven't had the driving need to write. Even so, I am trying to figure out how I might describe it in a future entry. I may not find the right words, so don't get your hopes up (as if your hopes were ever up -- ha...).
If I hadn't been intrigued by the most recent survey on Clarity's site, I might still have been wondering what to post. It seems more creative than most surveys, so I couldn't resist giving it a try. If you start to get bored with my answers before finishing it, I ask you at least to skip down to the "Song I love, but don't have" part (because you can actually click on a link and listen to this one).
Please note that I defer to Clarity's responses twice in this survey. It turns out that her comments were almost identical to what I would have written, and I didn't want anyone to think I was plagiarizing her.
I began filling this out late Saturday night and then worked on it again Sunday night and this evening (Monday). It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be to complete these thoughts.
With regard to the first survey "sentence" below, let me introduce it by stating the obvious: Some TV shows and movies are absolutely hilarious. In spite of that, it is a safe bet that, if we read the actual scripts, the most humorous lines wouldn't seem funny at all. It is only in the presentation that they take on their inherent hilarity. My first entry in this survey is like a script that needs to be acted (by the right person) to be funny; nonetheless, I wrote it anyway.
Survey begins:
My uncle once fell asleep in his living-room chair (during my visit two months ago). At one point, the phone rang, and his wife (she being my aunt, of course) answered it. My uncle continued to sleep. After speaking briefly to the person on the phone, she said to my uncle, "Albert!" He jumped awake the way you do when you don't want anyone thinking you don't have your wits about you. He must have heard the phone in his sleep because he didn't wait for my aunt to explain what she wanted. He quickly grabbed the TV's remote control from the arm rest and put it to his face. "Hello?" he said. After a brief moment, he said in an ever-so-slightly embarrassed, yet all-too-dignified, air, "Oh! This isn't right." He then put the remote down and picked up the real telephone. Although we had been watching him, my two aunts and I had not noticed that he had answered the remote until he made that comment (it almost resembles a phone). We then laughed our heads off at his face-saving comment while he tried to talk to the caller. I continued to laugh for a week or two afterward every time I replayed his comment in my mind. It was just one of those moments that had to be seen to be appreciated.
Never in my life have I... How on earth can I pick just one of the million sentences that could begin with those four words? But I'll try anyway: Never in my life have I been so confused as to how I will spend the rest of my life. The confusion is almost paralyzing.
High school was filled with all the usual agonies and ecstasies that rack the teenage heart and mind. My freshman and senior years in South Dakota were close to excellent. My sophomore and junior years in Nebraska were terrible. Why? Because kids here treated (still treat??) new kids like dirt.
I will never forget a certain married female coworker in the school where I used to work. She was the first person since I was a teenager who fit -- to perfection -- my very strict definition of "best friend" (she was also the first woman who ever fit that category). It was very unpleasant knowing that I could never tell her so. This leads me to add: In some cases, the line between best friendship and love is so thin that it can only be seen with an electron microscope. Since I didn't have access to one of those expensive gadgets, I just simplified things by considering her to be the only best friend I ever loved.
I once met Governor George Mickelson of South Dakota in a very popular and very small "dive" bar in Pierre, SD, celebrating for the evening with his staff. I had been sitting at the bar with my back to him. He was sitting at the table directly behind me. I had not seen him yet. Soon he got up to pass by me. I turned to smile a polite hello to him and immediately had to struggle to prevent my eyes from widening when I recognized him. I just nodded my head in a nonchalant greeting, and he did much the same to me. Still, he seemed to convey a kindness that I had not expected. About three weeks later he was killed in a plane crash. Since I was working at the State Historical Society at the time, I attended his funeral in the state capitol building. Very sad. I hadn't realized how well liked he was by so many people.
There is this girl I know who... Can you believe that my mind has gone totally blank on this one? Maybe the next "answer" can suffice for this one too.
Once at a bar in Montana (where I worked) one of the most gorgeous girl's I had ever met asked me to show her an abandoned room in the back of my father's bar. It had once been the "cooler" for a funeral home or morgue in earlier decades. She hadn't believed me when I told her there was such a room back there. We had to walk through a pitch dark back room (no light bulb), with me holding her hand so she wouldn't trip over piles of junk (there was a single hanging light bulb at the far end of our trip). I will wonder in agony for the rest of my life if I was completely stupid for remaining a perfect gentleman during that walk in the dark (she had never shown an interest in me prior to that night). A few days later I moved away without ever seeing her again.
Last night (Friday night) I drank a little gin and grapefruit (grapefruit is definitely not something I usually put in gin, but it wasn't bad) and wrote a somewhat angry response to a fundamentalist, evangelical conservative nut on another web site (which I found by accident a few months ago). He is a young married man in his 20s, but he reminds me of an 8th grader in his conceited dismissal of people with whom he doesn't agree. Gin brings out the "intellectual" debater in me, and so I was on a roll. I'm sure it was a complete waste of time, though. People like him, when confronted with concrete facts, just close their eyes and pretend they aren't there.
If only I had a large number of my old friends living nearby.
Next time I go to church... Ain't gonna happen.
Terri Schiavo, if she was thinking at all, was probably thinking, "Gee, I'm glad so many people are convinced that I want to spend another twenty or forty years counting the same ceiling tiles over and over and over, without being able to scratch my itches or speak or read or anything. I wonder how they would feel if, for instance, they had to spend the rest of their lives buried in concrete up to their noses, so that they can do nothing but breathe and stare in frustration at a tiny portion of the world around them until they die of old age."
When I turn my head to the left I see the wall.
When I turn my head to the right, I see (sleeping on the desk's pullout leaf) the cat that multiplied shortly after I rescued her from the cold, cruel world two years ago. She is almost my constant shadow wherever I go, always looking at me with total affection, and seemingly afraid that her rescue will turn out to have been a dream from which she might awaken at any moment if she lets me out of her sight.
You know I'm lying only when I confess that I am lying. :-) Actually, I am not really the lying type -- the bad kind of lies, that is. Good lies? The kind that spare someone's feelings? or save them (as well as me) from harm? Sure. I tell those when the situation calls for it. For most of my life, though, I've always told the truth, even when it got me in trouble. Even my parents thought I was too honest for my own good. Lately, though, I have become really good at omitting things from public discourse instead of being honest about them. It took me much of my life to learn how to do that.
That being said, I must admit that, when it comes to lying merely for fun (for practical jokes), I can fool even the most skeptical person.
What I miss most about the eighties are the thousands of chances I had "to get it right," but didn't. Instead, I stumbled blindly along, continually thinking that my "real life" had not yet begun.
If I was a character written by Shakespeare I would sew my mouth shut to save people from having to listen to me babble on and on, seemingly incoherantly, for ten or twenty stanzas in a row. I am the only English major I know who cannot stand Shakespeare. Clarity says it perfectly. She writes, "Even though [Shakespeare] is considered one of the greatest historical writers, I think there is a lot of hype surrounding his work." Yaaaaayyyyyy!!! How refreshing it is FINALLY to "hear" someone else say that besides myself!
By this time next year, I am hopeful that my confusion will have come to pass.
A better name for me would be Festus Hagen.
If I ever go back to school it will be a sign that I have run out of less creative and less painful ways to torture myself. When I was in college, I wanted to stay there forever. Now that I am out, I cannot stand the thought of ever going back again. I absolutely love being able to choose what I want to learn, when I want to learn it, and how "hard" I want to learn it. It is great not having to learn what someone else wants me to learn.
You know I like you if ... Once again, I cannot top what Clarity wrote.
If I won an award, the first person I would thank is.... Hhhhmmm... I guess it all depends on what sort of award I won.
Darwin, Mozart, Slim Pickens, and Geraldine Ferraro are totally unrelated to one in another in every conceivable way.
Take my advice and NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER allow your name to be put on a will, unless you stand to earn billions. If you do, the greedy, self-serving lawyers will make your life a living hell for a year or two (at the very least), and then they will charge you a fortune for the very strenuous chore of doing almost nothing for you. Wills are nothing more than legal scams. If you allow your name to be put on anything at all, make sure it is a trust and not a will.
My ideal breakfast is any one of a number of things, such as cereal, oatmeal, doughnuts or rolls, and, most wonderful of all, Hardee's Breakfast Friscos. Just writing about a Breakfast Frisco makes me want one.
My idea of a repulsive breakfast is anything that the majority of Americans (and Japanese) normally think of as lunch, supper or hors d'oeuvres material. :-)
A song I love, but don't have is "Cozy in the Rocket" by Psapp (2004)... Happily, the original response here became outdated last night (Sunday) evening, one day after I began this survey. It is the first new song I have liked (really, really liked) in a very long time. It just happens to be the theme song to the new hit series "Grey's Anatomy," which I mention in my previous entry. The show's producers play only about fifteen seconds of it, making it easily the shortest TV theme song of all time, and this definitely leaves you wanting to hear more. This evening, after watching the show, I got on the internet to see what its name is and who sings it. During my search, I accidentally stumbled onto this link, which, unbelievably, contains the entire song (in MP3 format). The other four minutes and thirteen seconds are easily as good as the fifteen seconds that plays on TV. Please give it a listen. I think some of you might like it.
Click here to read a little bit about Psapp, a British/German duo.
If you visit my hometown (or, rather, the town I think of as my hometown), you would probably initially react to it the same way Dr. Joel Fleischman reacts when he first arrives in Cicely, Alaska (on TV's Northern Exposure). Then, just like him, you would slowly start to realize that there is a touch of magic surrounding the place.
[By the way, Northern Exposure is one of my favorite TV shows of all time.]
Tulips, character flaws, microchips, and track stars are the random thoughts of a surveyor who was determined to write something here, in spite of suffering from severe "blank-mind" syndrome.
If you stay overnight in my house be prepared to visit into the wee hours.
I'd stop my wedding for just long enough to ask my bride-to-be if she truly realizes what she is getting herself into. :-)
The world could do without so many things; but I don't want to sound like a contestant in the Miss America pageant. Therefore: It could definitely do without rap and hip-hop music.
I'd rather lick the belly of a cockroach than sit on a jury that has to contemplate imposing the death penalty on someone.
My favorite blond is Veronica Lake.
Paperclips are more useful than your finger when your ear itches (if the sharp point is bent outward, that is).
If I do anything well, it is trying to treat people the way I would like to be treated.
And, by the way, it has been two years and two months now since I last had a cold (knock on wood). It has been equally as long since I suffered any sort of illness. I had to learn the hard way how to avoid catching colds (luckily, I have very seldom gotten sick throughout my life). For about the first two and a half years that I worked at the school, I caught an average of five colds per school year (which is about four more than usual), thanks to about 450 or so little viruses (aka "students") that infest the place. Finally, I had had enough. I began to take seriously the advice of one of my coworkers (the best friend mentioned earlier): DO NOT touch your nose or eyes during the school day, unless you have thoroughly washed your hands first. After I began doing that, I caught maybe only two colds in the next two and a half years, as well as a single case of a light 24-hour flu (normally, I go lots of years without ever having the flu); and those colds and flu probably occurred only because I forgot and touched my nose and/or eyes at some point. Since leaving the school, as I say, it has been two years and two months since I have had a cold or illness.
Of course, there are times when I am in public that I absolutely have to scratch an itchy eye or tickly nose. At those times, when no one is looking, I use the back of my hand or wrist (or, I must confess, my shirt sleeve) since they seldom ever touch any surfaces or other people. It isn't perfect, but it suffices. My friend also got me into the habit of cleaning my hands with hand sanitizer numerous times a day. Even with that, I still avoided touching my face until I arrived home at the end of the work day. At that time, I would immediately wash my hands and proceed to scratch, pick and rub my nose and eyes like a five-year-old hillbilly for the rest of the night. :-) In short, I am here to tell you that not touching your eyes and nose really works (it also helps immensely not to have any habits that weaken your respiratory system).
Whew! That took a long time
Speaking of a long time, I will try my best not to take so long between entry posts. Sincerely yours, YouNameIt
