personal

Alarming news

I do this thing sometimes, where I set my alarm for an hour earlier than I plan to get up, in today’s case five when I actually want six. Then I wake up and re-set my alarm for what’s essentially an hour’s nap. I read somewhere, not too many years ago, that this is a way to trick your brain. The fifteen-minute snooze alarm is actually terrible for your sleep pattern, giving you just enough time to sink back into dream sleep…and therefore be even more tired when you’re jostled back out of it. But forty-five minutes to an hour allows for a more natural cycle, and sometimes that single hour can actually trick your body into feeling more rested than a full night’s sleep. It’s worked for me, or at least seems to have, in the past.

But see, I do this other thing sometimes, where I just sleep right through my alarm clock. Or I wake up only just enough to turn it off, not really conscious of it, making all this talk of power-napping, snooze alarms, and tricking the body rather moot. It’s not completely out of my control, but sometimes my body just decides to oversleep.

This morning, I eventually woke up around 6:30. I went to the bathroom, then decided, you know what? I’m going to go back to sleep for an hour. I’ll catch the 8:15 train like I did yesterday and Monday. And I lay back down and re-reset my alarm…and then I threw off the covers and decided, no, fine, I’ll get up now after all and try to make the 7:01 or 7:20 train. So I showered, brushed my teeth, and got dressed…and then it was about ten to seven.

And I thought, as I was pulling on my socks, I’m not going to go crazy here. The train station’s just five minutes away, but I still need to get downstairs, take the dog out to pee, and walk to the station. No need to race through all that, only to get to the station a minute too late. No, I’ll wait for the 7:20 and then…

Ah, screw it, I thought. I pulled on my socks and raced out the door.

That’s how I arrived at the office at eight o’clock. I made the train — which is nice, because twenty minutes is a long time to stand around the station platform in the (relative) cold, but not really enough to do anything if I decided to walk back home.

The day itself was pretty ordinary — unlike that thrill-a-minute tale of when-did-Fred-wake-up-today? above. It only got interesting, really, about an hour before I was set to leave, when my boss asked me to pull together some research on psychopathology courses for a sales conference on Friday. Which doesn’t leave me a lot of time for research, since I have to pass this on to marketing sometime tomorrow, but I’ll spend tomorrow morning weeding through a spreadsheet of some 8,000 book adoptions — both our own and of competing books — and try to piece together some useful data. If it doesn’t sound hugely exciting…well, there’s a reason for that.

Meanwhile, there’s rain and possibly snow in the forecast for the rest of the week, which should make the morning commute a whole lot of fun. Whenever I wake up to take part in it.

A whole lotta Tuesday

A pair of clementines for breakfast, a cheeseburger for lunch, and chicken salad for dinner. This is about as close as today gets to interesting: a litany of my meals. Beyond that, it was pretty much just a typical Tuesday. If I were a Republican in New Hampshire, it might have been more interesting…but only just, considering the candidates.

Anyway, tomorrow’s Wednesday. So there’s that.

That was Monday

What can you say about a Monday? I have the next one, the one next week, off. But there fifty-three Mondays in this year, and not every one of them is going to hold thrilling tales. Most of them are just going to be your average…well, Monday.

I slept late this morning and was again rewarded by a slow train — although not anywhere as delayed as last week. I RSVP’ed for a wedding in March — anybody wanna be my plus-one? And at lunch, I took a chance on the Chinese place around the corner and discovered it — or at least my sweet and sour chicken — wasn’t bad at all. And I finished reading a book. I wasn’t super-impressed.

That was Monday.

Tinkering, tailoring, etc.

A quiet Sunday.

First there was the crossword puzzle.

Then there was my regular writing group:

“We don’t talk about the boysenberry incident,” said Rogers. “I won’t lie, it was a rough time for all of us here at the company. But we’ve retired the flavor, and we’ve settled with the families of the victims out of court. We’re moving on.”

He eyed the young reporter from the Frozen Dairy Times. Karen, or — no, wait, Careen, she had politely corrected him — and regretted, not for the first time, having agreed to this tour of the facility and interview. Corporate had insisted — all part of their kinder, gentler initiative, a “so sorry we accidentally poisoned some of your ice cream last year” — but now was a terrible time for it. There was the new hire in flavor development to contend with, for one, who continued to insist his lab was understocked and a disgrace, and someone in order processing had accidentally swapped two-percent for skim milk again, all eighty-eight gallons of it. But most of all, there was that cryptic memo from the head of R&D Rogers had received in his in-box just that morning: “New technology. Tighten cybersecurity. Tell no one.” The first time he’d seen a memo like that, it had been before they’d released their best-selling creme de menthe and butterscotch swirl. They’d cornered the market, skyrocketed the company to the big league and, for the first time, the national supermarkets. But the last time he’d seen this kind of memo had been right before the boysenberry incident. This could be accolades or tainted berries, and either way Rogers didn’t need a nosy reporter snooping around while he tried to figure it out.

“So if you don’t mind me asking,” said Careen, flipping the page of her little notebook and clicking her pen, “what are you working on now? I’m sure our loyal readers would love to hear how Super Tastie Ice Cream plans to bounce back from last year’s troubles.”

“Oh, you know,” said Rogers. “Several irons, lots of fires. A bit of this, a scoop of that. Nothing too exciting, I’m afraid.”

“That’s not what I heard,” said Careen. “Word on the street is your R&D department has been stockpiling loganberries and home-brewing its own marshmallow sauce.”

“No comment,” said Rogers. Damn, where was this woman getting her information? It was going to be a long, long day if he couldn’t get rid of her.

Yeah, I don’t know either.

Then there was the new Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It was…I guess the word I’m looking for is “okay.” It’s very well cast, often quite well acted, and looks every bit like 1970s England. And yet…dear lord is it ever slow. Like the book, which I read originally in anticipation of the movie over the summer, a lot the appeal is that slowness, the tedium, the very humdrum reality and paper-pushing of being a spy. John le Carré’s novel may be one of the few I’ve read where boredom is actually kind of a selling point. Yet that slowness isn’t necessarily very cinematic. There’s a lot to really like about the film, particularly in the performances and subtle moments, but at times I felt like there were just too many subtle moments — too many scenes of quiet men having hushed conversations or just exchanging knowing looks in smoky rooms. If I hadn’t read the book, and so recently, I might very well have been lost.

It’s far from a terrible movie — it looks too good and has too many good performances for that — but I’m not entirely convinced I enjoyed it.

This evening, though, I watched about half of Aliens, which I definitely enjoyed. I haven’t seen it in years, but for Christmas I got the Anthology, Blu-ray discs of all four films. (It looks incredible in that format, by the way.) I’d still be watching it now — and long into the night — if I didn’t accept the fact that I have to go back to work tomorrow.

Hail Soyka!

A quiet day, spent mostly reading Kaleidotrope submissions. (The zine’s open again to submissions til the end of March.) On the back deck of all places, since it was warm enough to hang out there in short sleeves for most of the afternoon. Seriously. What’s with this weather?

I tried to do a little writing, but it didn’t really pan out. I did this weird experiment this past week, where on Monday I’d write for ten minutes, then on Tuesday for twenty, and so on. I don’t know. My brain suggests weird things sometimes. I had some pretty mixed results with it, to be honest. I think the important thing is to write almost every day, so I’m going to do that next week, in the evenings, instead of incrementally increasing the amount of time. At least half an hour each day, and I’ll see where that takes me. I really do want to get back into writing more consistently. I don’t feel like I’ve really done that since I went to Banff in September. And here it is, January.

Anyway.

This evening, I watched the…smartly funny? cutely quirky? movie Drones. I enjoyed it.

And that was Saturday.