My Meandering Mind

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, they say.  Unless, of course, it kills you.

Wouldn’t it be great if “writer’s block” referred to an Algonquin Roundtable-like neighborhood populated by a myriad of clever authors and not to the phenomenon of being at a complete loss for words?

You know you are indecisive if you can’t even figure out which socks to wear.

A friend of mine swears her first husband divorced her because she couldn’t load the dishwasher properly.  Let’s just say it’s a good thing that I’m not married.

I absolutely cannot read a magazine without first tearing out those annoying subscription cards and offers. 

People magazine just sent me an offer to renew my subscription, which doesn’t expire until November of this year.  Seriously?  Pay now for a subscription that doesn’t expire for 10 months?  I don’t think so.

How do my socks escape from the dryer?  Should I expect to find a pile of them outside my house, near the dryer vent?  And why is it that pairs never go missing?  It is always one sock from one pair and one sock from another.  From now on, I will buy the same socks all of the time so I can make my own pairs.  I’ll outfox those sneaky socks yet.

Can someone explain how/why the washing machine gets dirty?  It’s not like I work on an oil rig and come home with filthy clothes.  I actually do too much laundry, so nothing is ever that dirty.  Yet, I find that I need to wipe down the inside of the machine every now and then because I guess soap and water just don’t do the trick. 

I just received an interest payment of 16 cents on my checking account.  I wonder how much it costs the bank to process that?  And I am waiting for a bill from the doctor’s office for 99 cents, the portion of the payment that Medicare and my J&J insurance didn’t cover.  High finance in the Gordon household.

I may have hit the epitome of laziness today.  I bought a package of peeled hard-boiled eggs.  I mean, who doesn’t have 15 minutes to make a hard-boiled egg?  And then peel it?  And get rid of the smelly shells?  I guess that would be me.

I can’t even imagine how much dirt I have consumed in my lifetime.  It’s not like anyone can really scrub a potato completely clean.

I’m sleeping so badly lately that I am considering installing a sound system that simulates being in a movie theater (where I have no trouble sleeping), complete with the sounds of people munching popcorn, unwrapping cellophane-wrapped candies, talking to each other and coughing.  And I’ll leave the TV on so I get the total theater experience.  Maybe I’ll even sleep sitting up.  I don’t care what it takes, as long as I can sleep.

Those Amazon Deals of the Day are so intriguing.  Today I found myself looking at a serger.  I don’t know anything about sewing or what a serger does, but I looked.  They just reel you in!

If the doctor’s office really needs your detailed medical history, why are the spaces on that form so small?  At this age, my medical history is more like an anthology than a short story.  And does it really matter at what age I had the measles?  Trust me when I tell you it was a half a century ago.  That’s as specific as I can get.

What with the recent blizzard, I can’t help but wonder:  How do the people who operate the snowplows get to the plows?  Do they sleep near the road all night, in a running plow?  Do they start when there is just a smattering of snow?  And when they are done, who digs out their cars?

Don’t you just love it when you are feeling the epitome of cool and you look down and find a trail of toilet paper stuck to your shoe?  That just kills the cool, doesn’t it?

Who else would geek out over having lunch with Marry Norris, grammarian extraordinaire and a sister alumna from Douglass College?  Mary wrote a book called “Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.”  I not only bought this book for myself, but two friends bought it and gave it to me.  Clearly, Mary and I have a lot in common.  I mean, I could have spent our entire luncheon debating the merits of the Oxford comma and how to punctuate within a quote, but that’s my grammar nerd in full bloom.  Mary turned out to be warm and funny and full of good stories.  I commend the AADC for getting her to come and do a lecture for students, alumnae and staff this coming April.  If she has a fan club, I’m running for president.

I’m not sure I want to live in a world where Sean Penn has any role in international diplomacy.

Don’t you hate it when you are vacuuming and some little piece of fuzz refuses to get sucked up and you don’t want to give in and bend down to pick it up, but you finally do and then you place it back on the floor and try to suck it up again figuring that now it is loose and ready to disappear into the vortex?  Of course this sentence could have ended with, “Don’t you hate it when you are vacuuming?” 

How is it on days when I don’t actually go anywhere that by the end of the day I have spent an hour and a half driving and have logged 100 miles on the car?

There’s always that one damn crumb that you just can’t shake out of the toaster.

Oprah and I have a lot in common.  Sure, she’s a multi-millionaire with a staff pf people, fame and fortune, and her own TV studio.  But she has a weight problem just like the rest of us (or many of the people I know).  Now she’s on Weight Watchers (are you seeing the connection?) and she is telling us on TV that she LOVES bread!  Me, too, Oprah!  And she is eating it every day (keep going) and she’s lost 26 pounds already.  OK, I dropped 80 a few years back, but I’m back at it again to erase the pounds that found their way back to my hips and butt.  I bet Oprah has someone who tracks her food for her, unlike the rest of us.  And the key difference between us is that she invested money in WW stock (which immediately rose after her purchase – the Oprah effect), where I just invest my money monthly as I pay my membership fee.  So at the end of the day, we will both be thinner, but Oprah will be richer.  Since she started that way, I can live with that.  I hope to see less of you, Oprah!

To me, more friendships die of attrition and neglect than anything else.  You want to get together, but you’re too busy.  You forget to answer that e-mail, you meant to send that text.  Soon, you are no longer exchanging Christmas cards, and you stop trying to schedule nights out.  True friendships are sustained by effort, by keeping in touch – not constantly, but intermittently enough (or more) to show you really want to have that relationship.  And when you do get back together, it is like you never skipped a beat.  If that doesn’t happen, it wasn’t a real friendship all along, just a situational relationship where some common interest(s) bound you together for some moments in time.  Friends are everything.  Work harder to keep the ones worth keeping.