Monthly Archives: September 2012

Proper etiquette when using spell check on Microsoft Word

I’m thinking about writing my own etiquette book. Geez, I think I need to learn how to spell etiquette first. Obviously, you have no idea what I’m talking about because, if you’re reading this, you’ve already seen the word spelled correctly twice. That’s because you’re viewing the finished product. Whenever I’m writing, I’m typing, and it’s always really fast. I’m the fastest typist. I initially wrote typer, but apparently that’s not a word, it’s typist. Man, anyway, what I was trying to say, before I was so rudely interrupted by Microsoft Word, was that I need to type fast, because the sentences, as they play out in my head, like when I want to write them down, they’re being thought out really fast. The typing, the writing, it feels like this constant game of catch up, my hands struggling to keep up with whatever’s going through my head.

And as long as I’m uninterrupted, it’s fine. It’s like those Tony Hawk video games, when you’d be riding around on your skateboard, and there would be a car driving around, and you’d have to wait for it to slow down, and then you’d skate up to it and hold down one of the buttons, and Tony Hawk would grab onto the back. It was called sketching. Or skitching. I don’t remember which one; it’s been years since I’ve played those games. But once Tony Hawk grabbed onto a car, you were just along for the ride. It actually wasn’t as easy as it sounds. There was a balance meter that you had to keep locked in the center, and if it went too far off balance, you would wipe out and, well, you wouldn’t die, it wasn’t like other video games where you had lives and you could lose them. No, if you jumped off a cliff in Tony Hawk you would just instantly reappear somewhere else on the map. Maps are what they call levels. I’m only explaining this because maybe you’re reading this and you don’t know anything about video games. Actually, let’s be real here, if you don’t know about Tony Hawk, chances are you’re not getting any of my other lame-o references. And maybe that’s good. Maybe this blog is educational for you. I’m educating people on nonsense.

I don’t even know how I got here, halfway through this blog post. I was going to write something about etiquette. At work the bosses put out this etiquette book, telling us to leaf through it in our spare time, learn how to act all proper and stuff. This book is gigantic, like two Bibles and a Koran smashed together. I was working the other day and I felt like taking a break without really taking a break and so I went over to the book, planning on pretending to read it for a little bit while I zoned out into space. I wouldn’t be getting any work done, but if my bosses caught me standing there, they might at first come over to scold me, to quit standing around, to get back to work, but as they got closer, they’d notice that I’m looking at their etiquette book, and they’d think to themselves, look at that go-getter, bettering himself with our book. And I’d be flipping pages at regular intervals, my brow furrowed, giving the impression to the outside world that I’m interested in learning all about manners and whatever.

But on the inside I’m still thinking about that Tony Hawk game. And I imagine a car driving through the restaurant, and I can skitch, or sketch, or whatever I can whip out a skateboard and hold onto the car and joyride around, going faster and faster, and it would be so much fun. That was my plan, to open this book and ignore it and think about a nice little daydream, but I opened it randomly and the first etiquette rule that I saw was something like, “What should I do if my ex-husband invites me to his wedding?” And I couldn’t help but to start reading. And the answers were so specific. I’m like, who’s making up all of these random rules? Is there a single authority on what to do in crazy situations like this? I thought to myself, I could probably make up answers to this type of stuff as well as anybody else can. And then I thought, well, I have a blog, I should write about etiquette and what to do in situations that normal people will probably never have to deal with.

So that’s what I was planning on writing about today. I was starting to talk about etiquette, but the spell check thing totally sidetracked me, immediately. That’s how this always goes down. Microsoft Word sucks. I’ll be writing really fast, skitching on the back of a really cool idea, when a word that I rarely, if ever, use, like etiquette comes along, and I give it a decent shot. It’s not the best spelling, whatever. But Word’s like, ah, ah, ah, Rob, you spelled that all wrong. And here, let me just underline your poor spelling with a nice obtrusive red squiggly line. There. Good luck finishing out that story that you were working on. Just try to ignore your error. Just try not to double click and see how it’s supposed to be spelled.

Of course I correct it. Those red lines drive me crazy. And Word sucks so bad. Sometimes it’ll correct words that I’ve spelled correctly, but then when I double click on it, to be like, what the hell Word, the red line just disappears. It’s like Word is going, haha, just kidding. Haha is underlined in red. Skitching is underlined in red. Facebook is underlined in red. Word, why don’t you keep your stupid spelling corrections to yourself until after I’m done? Geez, now I’m stuck with this crazy blog post that started going in one direction but splintered into a thousand different tangents. That etiquette idea was going to be hilarious, insanely funny, the essay that was finally going to put me on the map as a writer. But what do I have now? Nothing. One thousand words about nothing.

 

I’ll never go skydiving. Ever.

I would never go skydiving. I know lots of people who have done it and they all say it was great, unbelievable, super exciting, you should definitely go skydiving. But I would never, ever go skydiving. I’ve pictured the whole thing in my mind, played out exactly how it would go down, and I’m already pretty scarred just from the whole visualization process. I have a very vivid imagination, and I really don’t like what I’ve seen in my head.

It’s not just skydiving. Maybe if it were just jumping out of a plane I would consider it. No, I still probably wouldn’t do it. But the jumping out of the plane isn’t really the hardest part. It all starts months in advance, when one or more of your friends decides to plan a skydiving outing. You don’t want to look like a weenie, and so you say, “Of course! Yes! Hell yes!” and that’s it. That’s when the terror starts.

So it might be a month, or two months away until it’s time to go skydiving. And you’re just thinking about it constantly. You’re like, holy shit, in two months I’m going to have to jump out of an airplane. And you just sit there thinking about it, picturing what it’s going to be like, waiting around for the plane to take off, getting up there in this tiny little box, nothing like anything you’ve ever been in before, this toy, this propeller driven prop. And that’s just imagining it.

And as the weeks crawl by, you keep getting text messages from the group saying stuff like, “Only five weeks left until the big day!” and you’ve tried to put it out of your head but it’s the only thing that you can think about. Your work is suffering. Your home life is spiraling out of control. You can’t seem to connect with anything or anybody. Everywhere you look you’re reminded of skydiving.

And then all of the sudden skydiving is tomorrow. And you can’t go to sleep that night. You’re just lying in your bed, shaking, figuring out if there is any realistic possibility of somehow getting out of it. But there’s no way. Your friend who organized the whole thing already put down a lot of money. But it’s really not about the money. Right now you’d pay double just to get out of it. But where would that get you, really? All of your friends would see right through your lame-ass excuse. Their perception of you would forever be altered. Maybe they wouldn’t show it right away, but it would be there, a chasm between your relationships.

And what would you talk about the next time you saw them all? Would you just pretend like nobody went skydiving, like the trip never happened and that you never chickened out? It would be super awkward, everyone sitting around, talking about the Mets or about the election and then someone would say something like, “Man the Mets’ season is in freefall,” and everyone in the group would look at each other, their eyes getting just a little wider, smiles creeping up on their faces. They all want to say, “Just like when we all went skydiving!” but they wouldn’t say it, because they’re trying not to make you feel bad. But you can tell. You can feel their energy, their shared experience. And they can feel your discomfort, your awkward smile, and it would make them feel bad about their accomplishment. So they’d have to have separate get-togethers, separate from you, so they could talk about skydiving, about their giant leap into their communal conquering of such a base fear, and the rapturous thrill of staring death in the face.

You definitely can’t back out. It’s the night before and, if you backed out now, what, the previous two months’ worth of fear and anxiety and sleepless nights were all for nothing? You back out now and it’s going to haunt you for the rest of your life, because you’ve found your limits with fear. You know exactly what your body and mind are capable of doing. All of the sudden your whole viewpoint on life has gone from “sky’s the limit” to “skydiving’s the limit.” And it’s a real limit. And part of you will never get past it.

So you wake up on that big day and you and your friends have to drive way out of the city to some rinky-dink little airport somewhere in the country and that tiny old plane that you imagined is even more dilapidated in real life. Is that really a canvas roof? What is this pedal-powered? But don’t get too excited, because you all have to sit through some five-hour class before you all get to pile into that death trap. And the five-hour class is all about safety, and how to jump, and how to land, and please sign this waiver, so that if you die, our skydiving company won’t get shut down and we can still collect money from people who want to skydive in the future, because it’s not our fault, it’s your fault, you signed the waiver, you jumped out of an airplane, idiot.

And then it’s time to go. But let’s just all wait a second, just an hour or two, or four, the wind’s not right. We’re all just going to wait for some better wind. Really? Wouldn’t it be safer to just wait for a different day with perfect wind? But no, the company’s booked for the next month, and there’re no refunds, and everybody else’s months are just booked from here on out, so the wind should be OK, they’ve done skydiving in wind like this, yeah, plenty of skydiving in wind like this.

The plane can only fit half the group, and everybody draws straws to see who goes first. And you’re in the second group. So you have to sit around and watch everybody go up first. And you’re not even jumping, you’re attached to some instructor. He gets the parachute, you just get some clips so you’re attached to his chest. What happens if the clips break? Don’t worry, each clip can hold up to four hundred pounds, and there are four clips. But what happens if the strap that the clip is attached to rips off the clip? Just shut up and get on the plane.

What do you mean get on the plane? I thought you said we had to split up into two groups? Yeah, but we spent so much time waiting for that wind to get better that we’re all running late, and we don’t have all day, and sure, you guys’ll all fit. You’ll all be fine. We’ve got more skydiving groups scheduled and everybody’s waiting. Just come on man, hop on.

And that’s it. You didn’t want to chicken out, but the fear is completely paralyzing. You’re stuck. All of your friends try really hard to snap you out of it, but you’re firm in your commitment not to get on that plane. And your friends try to wave you over, even as the plane starts taxiing, and they all have that look on their face like, really? You’re really not coming?

And you want to move. Just get on the plane. This is going to haunt you forever. And you sit there and watch as the plane picks up speed and takes off. And it starts flying higher and higher, but then it starts to dip. It looks like it’s struggling. It’s definitely too heavy. The plane can’t take it. It sputters, spins out of control, and crashes. You run to the wreckage to see if anybody is still alive. It wasn’t that high up. They could’ve survived it. But just as you start to run, the plane explodes, a huge fireball. You can feel the heat.

And then at the memorial service you’re standing around the wreaths and the framed pictures of all of your friends. And everybody’s bawling and blowing their noses and they come up to pay their respects and when they get to you they pause, and they say, “Didn’t you go skydiving also?” And you say, “Yeah, I went, but I … I … I didn’t get on the plane.”

“Why didn’t you get on the plane?”

“I don’t know, I guess I chickened out. I really had a tough time with …”

“What do you mean you chickened out? Were you worried that the plane was too full? Because that’s why the plane crashed, right? Too full?”

“Maybe. There were a lot of things going through my head at the moment. I …”

“Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you try harder to get them to split up into two groups? Why didn’t you insist?”

“I couldn’t have thought … I was just … I …”

“This is your fault! All of your friends are dead and it’s all your fault!”

And that person would start crying even harder than before, and you’d just hang your head in shame, waiting for that exact conversation to repeat itself over and over again, the line of people stretching around the block, all of them wondering why you didn’t speak up, didn’t try to convince everyone that the plane was too heavy to carry the whole group.

How would you live with all of that guilt? How would anybody ever want to be friends with you ever again? Nope, there’s no way that I’m ever going skydiving. Never. And I never even want to be friends with anybody who ever wants to go skydiving. So never ask me. Because I’ll just hang up the phone midsentence and I’ll delete your number from my contacts. It’ll be like I never knew you in the first place.

Wasting time

I get so bored sometimes. Especially on days like today, when I don’t have to be at work until four or four thirty in the afternoon. The night before I’m always like, I’m going to have such a productive day tomorrow. Carpe diem or something like that. And I always set my alarm for eight. That seems like a pretty adult hour to get up. I mean, I know it’s not. I know real adults have to get up at like six or six thirty. Jesus. My sister-in-law’s boyfriend teaches at a school in Jersey and he has to get up at like four-thirty. Yikes.

So yeah, eight seems like a pretty reasonable time, if not the most adult time, well, you know, it’s not eleven. That’s definitely not an adult waking up time. When I was in high school I used to be able to sleep until one, two, three in the afternoon. That was the best, just that sense of being in bed, but so overcome by exhaustion that you literally had no choice but to sink deeper into your pillow, stretching out further to touch every corner of the bed. But yeah, I can’t do that now. I’d waste the whole day.

But still, eight o’clock in the morning, it’s more like an aspiration to me than an actual time of the day. I set my alarm to eight. But it’s often the case that I’ll just kind of ignore it. Or I’ll get up and act like I’m up and I’ll turn off the alarm and I’ll prepare to really get up, get up, but sometimes, not always, but sometimes a really weak part of my brain will take over my body and I’ll just be asleep again. So what I do is I set multiple alarms, one for eight, one for eight-thirty, all the way to ten.

But much as I try to outsmart my brain, I’m just too smart, and so I can’t do it. My mind  always knows that no matter what the eight o’clock alarm sounds like, it’s really just a hollow ringing. All I have to do is get up briefly to turn it off, because there are going to be more alarms going off at half hour intervals. And by the time I finally get up and go to the bathroom and take a shower and take the dog for a walk and make coffee and make breakfast and sit down to eat breakfast, it’s already much later in the day. What happened to being productive?

So I start to freak out. I’m like, OK, getting work done starts right now. Right this second. Right after I go online and check my email and check Facebook and check the newspaper and check reddit and then check my email again to see if anybody emailed me in the twenty minutes that have passed since I checked it the first time. And then I have to get up and stretch my legs, because I can’t sit still for too long.

And I know that I really should have started writing right away, as soon as I got up. I should just get it done and then I’d have all this free time to fuck around on the computer guilt free. I should just reverse it. Writing first, online second. But I can’t. It’s impossible. Not totally impossible, but definitely improbable. And then I’m hungry for lunch. And then I’m bored. And bored is the worst, because it’s a vicious cycle. I’m sitting around bored, and it just makes me want to sit around even more, even more bored.

And then maybe I’ll have a day off. I can sleep in until ten, guilt free. I can take as much time as I want getting my day started. But everything just gets pushed back. And I can see time skipping in front of me like a strobe light, like in twenty-minute chunks. I’ll be like, what the hell, it took me twenty minutes to read one article online? No, it took three minutes, but my brain just keeps clicking to more and more online nonsense.

What I really need is no job at all. Then I could spend six to eight hours every day just totally goofing off. I’d have to get more work done that way. Right? There’s no way I would just loaf around all day looking at videos and browsing lame jokes and pacing around my living room, totally bored. Right? It’s not possible that I would just sit around eating snacks in my underwear all day long. Right?

Lessons I learned while farming

I had a garden this summer. Well, it was really a farm. Well, not really, but, and I’ve said this before, but farming is so much more manly than gardening. And what is a garden if not a small farm anyway? Please, nobody correct me. I’m very set in my ways here.

Anyway, I planted stuff. For a first attempt it was, I’d say, a pretty successful experiment. During the first few days of warm weather last March, I hacked at the tiny piece of land in my backyard, getting rid of as much grass and random shards of glass that I could. After that I put down a few sacks of compost that I bought at the Home Depot. And I started planting stuff: lettuce, radishes, Swiss chard, all sorts of random stuff. Some grew, some didn’t, whatever, I was happy that I got anything at all.

After that first round of spring veggies, I planted tomatoes, sunflowers, peppers. The tomatoes grew like weeds, to the point where they wound up consuming the majority of the garden. Once they really got going, all I could do was water and wait. It was too late to even attempt cultivation. This thing was on its own.

I got a lot from the garden, I got tons of tomatoes, some peppers. I thought that some of my plants were peppers, and they got huge, and started to bear fruit. But it turned out that they were just little berries, the poisonous kind, the weed kind, and here I was, thinking it was something valuable, and I was clearing space for it, making sure the tomatoes left just enough space for this weed to blossom and make a mockery of my whole project. But, not a big deal, a minor setback, lesson learned. I cooked the berries into some poison jam and sent it over to my neighbor’s. Then I called poison control and claimed that I had saved their lives.

I would go out at night sometimes and look at the plants. Whereas during the day, the plants would always face the sun’s trajectory, bending over in weird ways, twisting themselves to soak up as many rays as they could, at night, everything would be standing upright, straight up, always looking fuller somehow than they did during the day.

And you know, when you look at something everyday, especially something that’s growing, you don’t notice the growth. My sunflowers were a good example. They start out so small but wound up at like twelve feet tall. And I only noticed the growth when I went away for a week’s vacation. I came back and was like, “What the …”

And I’m thinking, what’s it like from these plants’ perspective? I mean, they’re alive, right? So they’re growing, but it must not be slow motion to them. Look online for any of those time-elapsed plant videos and you’ll know what I’m talking about. You watch a plant grow in fast-motion and it looks like it’s moving, like it’s really alive. And at this rate of time perception, you can’t even see the humans tending to it. We’re just an invisible blur, moving way too fast for anything to see. The plants are living and growing and moving, but do they have any idea that they’re being shaped and cultivated?

And then I’m thinking, what if human beings are like seeds, and there are some greater beings cultivating us? Like these higher intelligences are moving so fast that we can’t see them, we only just kind of have an idea that they might exist. And they’re watering us and moving us around, trying to make us blossom and bear fruit.

But then I’m also thinking, what if the higher intelligences aren’t really higher, but just faster? What if they’re like me with my garden, not really knowing what they’re doing, just kind of putting random seeds in the ground and throwing some water here and there and hoping for the best? What if I’m some higher being’s first garden, and I’m coming out all wrong? Like, if the expert higher beings went to the higher being that was cultivating me they’d say, dude, what have you never raised humans before? That’s not how you do it at all.

Or even worse. I remember in high school whenever it was that time of the year for the science fair, I would just throw a bunch of seeds in a bunch of cups. I would feed one water, one of them would get soda, one of them would get beer, and one would get Windex. Bam, B minus please. It was obvious. The one that got water would grow, the one that got Windex wouldn’t even germinate, and the soda and beer seeds would come out all puny and deformed. What if we’re all just some half-baked higher being’s last-minute idea of a science fair project? Are we all just going to get tossed in the trash as soon as this higher creature gets his or her B minus?

And then I look out at the natural uncultivated world. The wild corn and the weeds and all of those plants that just grow without any help at all from us humans. What if that’s us? No higher beings, we’re all just going whichever way the wind blows us, in desperate need of even a little cultivation. Like, maybe we just all need to be six to eight inches apart, like tomato seeds, and if we’re too close together, we’ll all germinate, but only one or two of us will really grow up into anything capable of producing fruit.

Aren’t I so deep? Isn’t this one of the most fascinating, deep, mysterious essays that you’ve ever read? Aren’t my ideas so novel and unique? I just keep going back to the sunflowers, what if they do have a consciousness, what if they experience the world but much faster than we do? They’re sitting around talking to each other, noting that the water comes at a certain time everyday. It must be a higher power! And they get in fights over how a higher power could exist and all of the different possibilities that might explain such a higher power. And maybe I’ll forget to water them one day. Because I’m not higher, I’m just regular, and I get lazy sometimes and forget to feed the plants. How thirsty do they get? They’re tall enough, so do they look inside the window and see me sitting at my computer for hours, all while they’re thinking I’ve abandoned them, I’ve forsaken them, they really want a drink and I’m just sitting here looking at photos on Facebook.

Stop squirming

I’m writing this on a laptop on my kitchen table. It’s a thick wooden table, like at least two inches thick. The table is a set, like a kitchen set, like it came with matching wooden chairs. It’s great. I didn’t have to pay for it. My Aunt Mary-Kate gave me all of her furniture when she got married and moved in with her husband. I’d probably be living a very Spartan existence if it weren’t for her donations. Anyway, I’m slouched in the chair. I have great posture when I’m standing up, but when I’m sitting down it’s terrible. This chair is a straight-backed wooden chair, and so I’m constantly squirming in it.

Whenever I’m writing, there’s this constant battle that I’m having with squirminess, squirming, moving around. I attribute a lot of the squirm to the Internet. It’s like, I can either sit completely still or I can sit and constantly be moving in my chair. If I’m sitting still, it’s usually because I’m on the Internet, trying to write, but not writing. I’m just clicking randomly from page to page. One link leads to another and the next thing I know two hours have passed and I have to get ready for work.

Or, I’ll be writing, focused on the page, only looking at my word processor, and I’m typing, like I’m doing right now, but my body will be all over the place. I can’t fight the squirm. It’s either my mind is squirming or my body is. So I’m typing right now, I’m like three paragraphs into this, whatever this is that I’m writing, I’ve already changed positions in my seat like eight times. Right now I’m slouched at an angle that would’ve gotten me sent to the principal’s office in grammar school. I had these ridiculous teachers that were always yelling about posture and doodling in my notebook and, you know what? What I wouldn’t love to just be able to go back in time and stand up to those teachers and just be like, “You know what!” Like with an exclamation point and everything. Because, listen, don’t tell me how to sit. I’m here to learn, this isn’t a Pilates class.

I got sidetracked again. This is an all-over-the-place kind of day. But I’m slouching, terrible, like my body is only making contact with the chair in two places. The tip of my lower back, like my tailbone, it’s at the very edge of the seat. And then my back makes a straight line, straight from that edge, all the way to the top of the back of the seat, where my shoulders are making contact. It’s like a triangle, the back of the seat and the seat, and then my back as the triangle’s hypotenuse. You see? I was paying attention in math class. Those teachers who thought that I had to be sitting up straight to remember a big word like hypotenuse, well, they were so wrong.

Because, for me, and I already said this like two paragraphs ago, but either my mind can be fidgety or my body can be fidgety. One of them has to be fidgeting at any given time. So my teachers were actually doing me a huge disservice by making me sit upright and sit still. Because with my body locked in such a fixed position, it’s only natural that my mind started jumping from thought fragment to thought fragment. And I’d start doodling, or humming songs in my head, or tapping my pencil, just soft enough so I could hear it but nobody else could.

My left leg is tapping super violently now. It’s so fast that I’m actually surprised at how fast and how steady the rhythm is. Rhythm, that just took me like four times to spell correctly. Eighth: that’s another word that always takes me four or five tries to get right. Sometimes I just refuse to use the autocorrect. Microsoft Word is all, “Rob, you didn’t spell that right, let me correct it for you.” And I’m like, “Fuck you Word, I don’t need your charity. I can spell things myself.” And it’s actually very distracting, because I get so caught up in spelling and getting angry at the word processor that I forget what I was writing about in the first place.

Oh yeah, tapping my leg. I’ve since shifted my position. Now I’m hunched over the computer, my back all the way back in the chair but my torso bent totally over the table. And my left leg is tucked under my right leg, which has taken over the tapping duties from my left. And it’s not happening with this right tapping leg, but when my left leg was tapping, it kept occasionally tapping too high, touching the underside of the kitchen table, and I felt that it was warm.

And I was thinking, no way, is this the computer? Because my laptop is always hot. I don’t know if it’s because we’re just getting over the hottest summer that I’ve ever been alive for, and so my computer has gotten hotter as the world around it has gotten hotter, but yeah, I’m rubbing my hands along the underside of the table and it’s definitely a hot spot right under where the computer is. Isn’t that crazy? This table is thick, like two inches of wood, like I said. This isn’t a Rob G. shitty furniture purchase, this is like an adult kitchen table, my aunt bought it. And this laptop is irradiating it through, all the way through. What about my wrists, typing away? They must be getting equally as hot. Isn’t that insane? And all of the blood is circulating through my wrists, and as the blood flows through my veins it gets irradiated by this laptop radiation, and then it goes back through the rest of my system, irradiating my heart, my glands, everything is just getting hotter and hotter. And then my cell phone is in my pocket, and that’s got to be irradiating everything also. This can’t be good. Everybody, we’re all going to be paying for this technology in one way or another in the future. And I never rest my laptop on my lap, but everyone else does, and that’s going to be another set of issues.

I just need a little break. I should just let my mind wander for a little bit, give my twitching body a rest. I’ll just go on reddit and look at some funny pictures. And then I’ll go on the Times web site and open up like eight articles in eight separate windows on my browser, and then I’ll read like the first three sentences of each article before I get so anxious to read the next article that I’ll X out that article and go to the next. So I always only wind up ever reading the last one, because by the time I get to that one, there are no other articles left to seduce my attention.

I keep looking for a way to wrap this blog post up, but it’s just not happening. I thought that last paragraph, it started with “I just need a little break,” I thought that would lead to some sort of a natural ending, but I just went off on another tangent. So I’m probably just going to have to end this abruptly, this whole mess of words, not going anywhere, just ending, right here, this sentence.