Some Days in the Life - May 6, 1999

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As I'm not only going to be up late but out late tonight, I think a nap after work may be in order. Mmm... nap. Which means setting an alarm and not sleeping through it.

In Steve Martin's The Lonely Guy, Charles Grodin explains why he doesn't like naps. "You know, I don't know if I could take waking up more than once a day and realizing I'm me." This doesn't apply to me. For one thing, I think naps are cool. I personally believe quite strongly that the average workday should be six hours long and we should spend from three to five sleeping. The Mexican (and I believe Spanish, but I could be wrong) people are all over us when it comes to sane sleeping habits.

Alas, I have things to do after work. Laundry to pick up. Food to get. Food is especially important -- Mason would likely not wish to starve. I normally don't think about it. I have free grub within walking distance of the apartment while the school's in session. Buuuuut it's considered good form to actually feed your houseguests, so....

Fortunately, there will be a nice, clean apartment for him to walk into. My apartment is generally clean, which would shock anyone who's ever seen my living space before this apartment. I'm messy. Very messy. My favorite personal state is "chaotic." Sometimes to the point of frightening apartment mates.

This apartment is clean now for one important reason, but not for the reason you would think, given the reason: I have a housekeeping service I subscribe to.

On the surface, this makes perfect sense. The apartment is messy. I pay professionally neat people to come in and clean it. The apartment is then clean. 1-2-3 causal relationship, right?

Nope. It's deeper than that.

You see, I have perfect strangers in my house once a week. These are people who don't know me at all. They just know my name, and the fact that I work at Brewster Academy. One of them is, I have learned, the parent of one of my days students.

I can be a total slob when I'm around people I know, but strangers coming into my home make me nervous. So once a week, the night before housekeeping comes to clean the apartment, I clean the apartment. And because I'm lazy, I've gotten into the habit of putting dirty clothes in the hamper and dishes in the sink. So, that cleaning tends to be "toss any clutter that's accumulated around the computer desk" and "do a check for socks and tea mugs."

I'm not neat. Stuff still forms little piles here and there. But I'm not a slob, either. So, when the housekeepers come, they don't have to spend their time picking my place up, and they can instead spend it cleaning the bathroom, wiping stuff down, dusting, vacuuming... you know, all the crap that you know you should do weekly but you don't.

They also spray this "stuff" to make it lemony fresh. I suppose it could be Pledge. Or it could be hallucinogens. How would I know the difference?

Nostalgia. It's a deadly killer.

I got e-mail from John Bankert (Alacrity, from yesterday's "Frank" topic) about the journal. He read through it and almost felt maudlin. Which I can understand, because in rereading it I did too. It's not that we truly want to go back in time to when we were ten years younger and kind of foolish and a lot broker. But you miss those days. The simplicity of them. As John put it, "all we really had to worry about was beer, food, gaming and fun." You miss that kind of a life. I can understand that.

I suggested we get some of the old time gang together and do something like Arisia next year. Realizing full well that we'd barely touch the Con itself -- we'd be too busy just hanging out, talking, reverting to our 21 year old bonehead selves for three days in a hotel room. We'll see what we can do. Darn it, our mid-life crises need to be carefully controlled.

I'm not going to talk about the weather today. It's not really significant. I am, however, going to mention trees.

On Tuesday Morning of this week, a good number of trees, including two crabapple trees just outside of the Estabrook dining hall, were bare, with perhaps hints of buds on them. It rained for much of Tuesday. On Wednesday, at lunch, there were leaves on those crabapple trees. Not buds. Leaves. Today, almost every tree has leaves on it.

It's astounding what a little water can do.

Site changes -- you know we have to do them.

I've added a person (hi Gail!) to my recommended journals page. And I've put up an "Essays" page. These are essays that I cull out of journal entries, on the theory that some people might occasionally like to read them without having to wade through my discussions of the Weather. Anyway, the link's on the Journal's front page.

Wow. I have content. Who'd have thought it?