And I’m off!
I’m packing for a long weekend, beginning tomorrow. Originally, I was content to send Himself off to play in the woods while I stayed home – until I saw the hotel. The resort, actually. What kind of selfish person would I be to send him off alone to a suite?
Me: “You got a suite? Not a room?”
Him: “It was all they had left. What do I care, I’m not spending a lot of time in it.”
Me: “You do know what a suite is, right?”
Him: “Uh … yeah. Sure.”
Me: “I’d better come with you.”
So, it’s been a crazy few days of trying to get everything done and packed. I watered the plants, stopped the mail, the neighbors are checking in regularly, and I have a big note on the door to take out the trash before we leave. (We left once in July for a week, neither realizing the other hadn’t taken out the kitchen trash. We won’t make that mistake again.)
The packing is underway. Himself used to be amused at the list I make and check off but ever since he forgot his cell phone charger, medication, and socks, he no longer offers wise comments. He was amused that I checked the weather until I pointed out we would be an hour away from Canada and the nights could be as low as 34 degrees F and it might be wise to take a jacket, eh?
He did feel free to point out I didn’t need to take such a stack of books with me. Do you think a dozen paperbacks for a long weekend is too many?
Me neither.
See you next week!
I’d give it a 10, but your bra strap was showing
I shipped the babies off to their grandmother’s for a few hours, which left me free to catch up on my SONA case studies and watch one of my favorite movies ever:
STICK IT!
The beauty of STICK IT! is that you don’t have to be a fan of women’s gymnastics or teen movies to appreciate its content (though I will admit, it does help). Because at its core, STICK IT! is all about being alienated in a world where it’s less about who you are and what you know, and more about who you know and what you are.
Like when Haley gets a low score on floor not because of how she executed her routine, but because the judges are still annoyed with her for walking out on Worlds two years ago. Or when Mina gets blasted on vault because her bra strap was showing (allegedly), even though we all know it was because Burt Vickerman was her coach, and the judges are annoyed with him, too, for going rogue.
I guess this is something you can chalk up to life not being fair, but this past week it’s really gotten to me in a way I haven’t felt since that time in fifth grade, when Sarah Williams got chosen for the smart class and I didn’t, even though she totally plagiarized her scary story assignment and I made mine up from scratch. Then when I told Mrs. Sade what she had done and asked why – WHY? – I couldn’t go learn French and Latin and algebra like they did in the smart class, she wrote my name up on the board and told me I was being a sore loser, and it wasn’t Sarah’s fault I was stupid…that’s just how God made me.
Talk about devastating. I went through the rest of my grade school experience thinking, God made me stupid AND fat, and Sarah smart AND skinny? How the hell is THAT fair?
And after last week, that’s how I’m feeling again – stupid and fat. And stupid. Like it’s not bad enough that my hormones are so screwed up that my chin looks like a losing Bingo scorecard. That’s too easy. Let’s throw on a heaping helping of toxic advice and a double dose of kitten diarrhea!
YEAH!!
I realize at this point I’m being vague in an annoying sort of way, and I would elaborate if I knew how. Truth is, it’s not just any one thing that’s put me in a funk. It’s all the little things piled up on top of one another that do it: a critique that borders on condescending, a rejection (or two), a frustrating psychology professor, a history exam disaster, a kitten who won’t stop crying, the drink machine that won’t take my dollar…the list goes on and on.
It’s silly to be overcome by those kinds of things, because if you zoom out and look at them individually, they’re insignificant, like grains of sand compared to the entire freaking universe. But right now, they look big. And what’s more, they make me feel small. Like I can’t do anything right. Like everything I do is wrong. Like there’s no point in even trying anymore.
Like I’m stupid and fat.
And sometimes it’s hard to not throw in the towel, or worse, conform to what everyone else is saying is good, even though I can tell that it sucks. Big time.
Then I think about how at one point someone told a pre-Gaga Lady Gaga that she would never be Norah Jones, and I wonder if it was as funny then as it is now, because I doubt it was. Probably it hurt. A lot. Like she was doing everything wrong, just by being different.
And that makes me feel a little better, like maybe I’m not wrong at all. Maybe I’m just different, and someday other people will see that, too.
As for Sarah, I later found out that she wasn’t really as smart as she wanted people to think she was, and that her parents had donated a shitload of money to the school to secure her spot in the smart class. A few weekends ago, I saw her working the till at the Dollar Tree in Dandridge, and let me tell you, she looked more confused by the numbers on her screen than I did looking at my history exam this morning.
So now I’m thinking, maybe God has a sense of humor after all.
Why I Hate My Nook
One of the things I purchased when I decided to go back to school was an e-reader. This, in spite of my well-documented hatred of all things ebooks and my vehement refusal to do anything but grumble and roll my eyes at any mention of the so-called “digital revolution” and “death of publishing”. You’d might as well throw on your best bacon thong, top it off with a cow intestine lavaliere, invite yourself to a PETA meeting, and then vote Independent in a Republican state, because THAT IS THE LOOK I AM GIVING YOU WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT HOW EBOOKS ARE GOING TO SAVE US ALL, LIKE, FOR REALS THIS TIME.
So for me to walk out of a Barnes & Noble store with a Nook was a dark day. It was the first and only day where I started to question whether or not ebooks really were going to take over the world, and what would we do then, with no John Connor to save us from THE DEATH OF PUBLISHING, OMG?
Then I used it, and I knew I had nothing to worry about.
Because my Nook?
It sucks.
I hate it.
And here’s why:
It’s awkward.
Don’t let the spin doctors fool you – holding an e-reader is nothing like holding a book. Books bend. They fold. They move. E-readers don’t do any of those things. I read for fifteen minutes and my hand cramped up.
It’s slooooooooooow.
The primary reason I bought a Nook was because I still have pain from a spinal fracture earlier this year, and trudging around campus with forty gazillion pounds of books on my back was out of the question. Of course, when it takes 55 minutes to go from off to on to page 170 in your physics text, and your class is only 50 minutes long, there’s a PROBLEM.
Nook is not an e-reader. It is a Barnes and Noble portal.
With the exception of Barnes & Noble’s customer service, this is probably the thing that infuriates me the most, because when I buy a product, I buy it with the expectation of what it can do for me, not what I can do for its parent company.
Amazon’s blatant attempt to control and monopolize the ebook market by using an exclusive format is what kept me away from buying a Kindle, so to have Barnes and Noble do the same thing, under the guise of offering universal access, sticks in my craw like nobody’s business. True, I knew when I bought the Nook that it was integrated with Barnes & Noble in mind. What I didn’t know was that the features that sold me on the product – like the ability to search for books by title or author – were only available on books purchased through the Barnes & Noble store.
Which is fine, if you only ever by from Barnes & Noble.
But if you don’t? Sure, you can still load books onto your Nook. Whether you or not you can find and access them, however, is a different story.
Customer service?
I actually ran these issues buy a member of Barnes & Noble’s customer service department the other day, and the conversation went something like this:
“I’m having some problems with my Nook.”
“You mean, like, with the Nook or with the stuff on it?”
“With the Nook.”
“Oh.”
“It’s really slow.”
“Like, you mean, it’s slow?”
“Yes.”
“Like, slow how?”
“I press the button to turn the page and it doesn’t do anything for a minute. Then it turns the page.”
“Oh. Have you tried waiting on it?”
“Yes, but it’s slow. Really slow. It takes longer to turn a page than it does to read one.”
“Right. That’s why you wait on it, ma’am.”
I could go on, but I think you get the gist. And besides, I have class in an hour. I’d better to turn on my Nook so I can wait for it to load the assignment.
