People Underestimate the Value of a Good Ramble

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

My Life As a Teenage Geek

So we moved, right? Well, I'm still sorting out boxes and stuff, naturally, and the other day the shelf in our closet, which I had clearly overloaded, tilted and this box I hadn't looked at yet - or actually hadn't looked at in about 30 years and which had been sitting on the top of our other closet since we built that addition in 1996 - tumbled down, spilling several large expansion folders.  You know the kind, like lawyers use.

I had to be sure to tell my husband that those should not have been in the bedroom closet in the first place, since they belonged in the office. I wasn't exactly sure what was in them, but it looked like papers and stuff, which obviously should go in an office. So it was clearly his fault. Clearly. Am I right?

Anyway, he dumped them all on the long table in the office and I decided to go through them before putting them away in that closet. This may or may not have been a mistake.

They contained my life.  Seriously, my entire life was in there. At least the teenage part of it.

There were notebooks full of my scribbles, stories, plays, and notes; random news clippings; construction paper pages with pics of hot guys of the times pasted to them (these were in my locker and I'm not naming any names, but Tim Hutton just may have been in there); song lyrics; my high school diploma; poems; term papers; and just so many memories.

There were even pages in which I had clipped out and pasted parts from the TV Guide about movies I watched. Everything was all neatly cataloged and dated.  So I was clearly an organized insane person. My husband was amazed cause he was a high school jock and apparently I was always a geek girl.

I can't even imagine having the time to do stuff like that now, and then I remember that I have a spreadsheet to keep track of what shows I watch and I realize that I haven't changed all that much over the years.

I had to just shove it all back into the folders and stick them up on the shelf in the office closet, or I would have spent the rest of the day and probably several days afterwards just going through it all and re-living my glory days of being a geeky teen-aged freak.

At some point, I definitely plan to go back through all that stuff and maybe even read over some of those stories to see if they are worth re-working and finishing.  Maybe my great american novel is in there somewhere.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

I'm Not Any Percentage

I think I know myself pretty well. I’m under no illusions about who I am. Other people may be, but I know myself enough to be honest about me. I’m selfish, shallow and pretty much self-involved.

A friend once told me that she appreciated how I never had anything bad to say about other people, that I wasn’t a gossip. I responded, it’s cause I don’t care about anyone else. Hey, it's only the truth. That’s why you can also share your secrets with me and I won’t tell. I won’t even remember them within half an hour, cause I’m probably not even listening to what you tell me.

This frustrates my poor husband, who doesn’t understand why I’m apparently so proud that I’m a jerk. It’s not that, it’s just that I realize people don’t really change. Not deep down, not that much. This is who I am. Maybe I’m selfish, but I’m a good cook and I’m smart. And being selfish about some things doesn’t necessarily make me selfish about everything.

For instance, if we’re both sitting, all comfy, wrapped in blankets and watching a movie, or whatever, and I ask my husband to do something for me, it turns into a fight. He’s not going to get up and kill that spider or get me something to drink or whatever. Even though he knows I can’t exist in the same room with a spider, dead or alive. He knows I’m going to start whining about it, but he just won’t get up and deal. On the other hand, if he asks me to go get him something, or even if he doesn’t ask, if he just realizes he needs a cough drop or hot chocolate or something, I’ll get up and go get it. I just will. I like him and I have no problem missing part of the movie or whatever, to do something for him.

Of course, if I point this out, then I’ve ruined it. He needs to realize this for himself. But he never will. He’s a guy.

I think that’s a major issue for me. I figure things out, I process information quickly. So sometimes, I want to tell people stuff that I should let them figure out on their own. But I’m too impatient to wait for them to catch up with me. Did I also mention that along with being selfish and shallow, I’m also impatient and a tad bit arrogant. Or maybe I’m just a snob, which is kinda like being arrogant, but not quite.

It’s the area I grew up in. We’re all snobs. Sort of like attorneys, who are given that little extra thing when they go through law school, some little gene, that makes them a little bit better than all the rest of us. Either they get it in law school or they’re born with it and it’s what makes them want to be lawyers in the first place. I’ve never been able to work that one out to my satisfaction.

But, in any case, it’s like that where I grew up. We’re from a slightly-higher-than-middle-class income area and it’s been around for a while, it’s old money, if you know what I mean. We’re not nouveau riche. (Of course, I'm not any kind of rich, but that's beside the point here.)

Those types of things, the little class distinctions that I’m apt to make, are just cause of where I grew up. We still believe in a caste system. I’m almost not even kidding.

It makes my husband crazy, but that’s just he’s not from Williamsville. Seriously. If he was, he’d understand, but he grew up in Cheektowaga.

So you can see what I mean, right?

Friday, November 4, 2011

Toni's Blogging Tip No. 1

I follow a lot of blogs.

I faithfully put them all in my Google Reader, pressing that little RSS button even though I have no idea what RSS means.  I tried to explain this to my husband, so he could get all the news he wants delivered to  his phone, but all he cared about was what RSS meant.

Seriously?

Who cares? I know what it does and that's the important part. (And if you know what it does, too, you should click on my little RSS thingy so that my posts are delivered to your phone, too!)

Look, I know the reason I only update 2-3 times a month isn't cause I'm trying to be nice, it's cause i'm lazy.

But some people, and I have to be honest here, they just update too darn much.

Please, do us all a favor and don't update every single day.  No one wants to read that much about you.

I'm just being helpful.