From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXI

Introduction

This is the twenty-first installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, and Volume XX is here. The different volumes are unrelated, though the real tales related are all real late and do all relate to me. You can read them in alphabetical order, numerical order, chronological order (note that these are all the same thing), check or money order, in some semblance of order, and/or because you’re “just following orders.”

What are albertnet Bits & Bobs? Well, imagine you’re making homemade pasta. When you cut the noodles, you get these stray shorter bits from the ragged edges of the dough sheets that fall on the floor or—if you’re smart—into a large bowl placed to catch them. You can totally use those fallen bits by gathering them up, pressing them together in a ball, rerolling them, and re-cutting them. That’s kind of what I do when I’m writing letters to friends and some extra words fall out of my word processor. The only difference is, I don’t reroll them, so what you are about to read is a big ball of scraps. Serve them with a nice Bolognese Ragu or Alfredo, or your favorite literary equivalent. (And if a presenting a big wad of literary scraps sounds half-assed to you, consider all the effort I put into that extended metaphor you’ve just enjoyed.) This week’s selections of Bits & Bobs are from letters I wrote during college.

[If you’re wondering whose portrait that is in the background, it’s the playwright Antonin Artaud, best known for his “theatre of cruelty.” I happen to remember this from 1990. Neither ChatGPT nor Copilot was able to identify him from the photo, by the way, thought Google nailed it instantly. To its credit, ChatGPT had a pithy comment: “Honestly, it might be the most fitting photo of someone who’s read Artaud and survived.”]

October 30, 1989

I had the weirdest dream last night. I’m at this party and dancing with this totally fly girl. I’ve never danced so well (and as you know full well, in real life I cannot dance at all) and we’re really hitting it off, and then the song ends and the girl collapses into my arms. First I think she’s trying to be funny but then I realize she can’t even stand up. Her legs drop out from under her, so I have to pick her up into my arms as though I’m going to carry her off. Then she whispers, “I have to tell you: I’m going to die. I’ve been poisoned.” I’m totally freaked out, looking at this girl’s face, and then she dies right then and there. I start to wonder if I’ve been poisoned too. I guess the Freudian analysis kind of conducts itself here…

March 1, 1990

I hope March goes better than February; that was out of hand. First off, I was sick all month. Then last weekend I finally started [collegiate bicycle road] racing [for the season]. The time trial sucked because I’m not fit and still not totally healthy after that virus. The criterium was one of these bullshit parking lot jobs that’s roped and coned off so they could make it twist around as much as they wanted. Half mile laps. Oil everywhere—in addition to all these big puddles of oil, the whole surface of the road had this kind of film on it. It was in Irvine, pollution capital of the universe, which gave me a gnarly sore throat. I figured on riding the crit mellow, for fitness etc. Well, the only guy on our team who was riding well was the new tri-guy, Eric, who hasn’t really perfected his sprint, so I went for the primes myself. I won one, and took third in another, and was actually kind of digging the technical course. I got in this breakaway of five halfway through, and T— and Eric were surely blocking for me, so I pretty much had to stick with it, but I almost didn’t want to because I felt like shit. On the other hand, Tony Palmer [a notoriously fast Colorado racer I’d admired as a junior, who raced in the Olympics in 1988], was in the break with me so I was excited about that.

Well, T— was sick and dropped out, and a then few riders bridged up including Eric, who of course would give the break a giant boost, almost guaranteeing our chances of staying off. So things were looking really good when suddenly I stacked in the hairpin for no apparent reason. I think I slipped on some oil. Ripped a big hole in my new Aussie bib shorts, and got this oily asphalt smear on my helmet—really sucked. Road rash on the hip, both arms, and the left leg, but not too bad. I ran over to the pit, and the asshole race officials wouldn’t give me a free lap because I didn’t go all the way around the course. So the Mavic neutral support guy just straightened my bars and sent me off. It took me like five laps to regain my composure, and I was dry-heaving and really wanted to drop out, but I was still in eighth or ninth or so, on my own between the peloton and the breakaway, so I chased hard and eventually got within about fifty feet of the break.

[Zoom in on that photo and you can see the oil smear on my helmet. Note also my teammate, T—, watching from the sidelines.]

I thought I was about to latch on when Eric attacked and blew the break apart (temporarily, anyway). So much for closing that gap. I thought maybe I could solo in ahead of the main pack but about ten laps later I got swallowed up. Towards the end of the race the break lapped the field and I was trying to get Eric off the front, since I knew that was his best chance at winning. Well, Tony Palmer was having none of that, and started cussing at me and yelling, “Don’t even try it!” Somehow, in the moment, feeling as crappy as I did, I accepted his authority, sat up, and just waited for the sprint. Damn, the tricks your mind plays on you when you’re miserable…

March 16, 1990

I was going to hit the sack but I forgot I did my laundry this afternoon and left everything festering in the washer so I just went and put it in the dryer and now I have to kill some time while it dries and I don’t really feel like studying even though I really should because finals start next Monday and I hardly even have a clue what’s going on in any of my classes, especially this boring as hell history class which is so lame that the best I could do for notes are statements like “1629: some emperor on verge of something with his edict of restitution which means something is restored to church; things after this began to go downhill for the Hapsbergs while Wollenstein is an example of why whatever war this was was the way it was, however that was” (that’s an actual quote from my notebook) which doesn’t really put me in a very good way as far as the final exam goes.

May 28, 1991

My dickhead roommate—the one with the Rolex and the $15,000 stereo—had a birthday recently. His mom called and asked for him, and when I said he wasn’t home, she said, “Just tell him happy birthday, and that his present is in the bank.” Nice. Meanwhile his girlfriend got him a Nintendo and he plays it 24x7. At first I couldn’t figure out why she bought him this thing, and then I realized, duh, she’s sick of him, and this will get him out of her hair. Easy enough for her … she doesn’t have to live with the guy. First thing in the morning, he’s playing “Contra,” and actually, he never stops, except to go to the bathroom or grab a snack. Same game, day in and day out. My other two roommates and I keep telling him to get a life and his answer is the same as when we tell him to do his dishes: “I’ll do it later.” What really sucks is that every time his guy is killed, he cusses like a sailor. Like it really matters. What’s he supposed to say if, one day, the television—my giant 26” Sony Trinitron Color Console in the giant cabinet—falls on him and pins him to the floor? Nobody will answer his call for help because we’ll assume his little Nintendo guy just got shot again. I keep hoping he’ll finally lose his temper and smash my TV so I can make him buy me a new one that isn’t all blurry.

November 25, 1991

So I’m in the school library restroom and this guy comes in, heads to the next urinal over, and before even doing his business flushes it. I wouldn’t have noticed except he used his foot, so for a second it looked like he was trying to kick me in the head. I have no problem with him flushing with his foot since the handle is presumably gross, but why the pre-flush? I guess he doesn’t want his good, clean urine mixing with the bad, dirty urine in the bowl. That would be terrible, even if he’s not planning to use that urine again. Just the very sight of his elite urine mixing with the vulgar, common urine is too harrowing for him to witness. What a knob.

April 20, 1992

My mom and [her husband] the Landlo’ left their car here while vacationing in Morocco and I’m using it as much as possible to date this girl. So far that’s only been twice, so I better hurry things up while I still have the car. I don’t expect you’ll chastise me for refusing to have a really deep introspective contemplative period following the death of my last romance; as you well know, I am not some sort of Love Guru. But I can hold my own with the women: which is good, because that’s what they usually want me to do.

July 29, 1992

[To Giro Sport Design, Inc. who had given me a free helmet about six weeks before.] Dear Giro people: A month ago, my Giro Air Attack acted as liaison between my head and the ground. I was mountain biking in nearby Tilden Park, and that’s about all I remember because for several hours after my accident I alternated between being unconscious and incoherent. I was flown by helicopter to the nearest trauma center, where I underwent a CAT scan and was stitched up. Twenty or so sutures were put in my forehead beginning, notably, just below where the helmet left off covering my forehead. I have suffered no permanent damage to my head and for this I thank you.

October 8, 1992

I called my dad the other day and said, “Dad, I need twenty dollars.” He said, “Fifteen dollars?! What do you need ten dollars for?! Okay, I’ll mail you the damn five dollars.” But he didn’t.

But seriously, my medical bills are starting to catch up with me after that mountain bike crash. I wrote letters to the ambulance and helicopter companies, saying basically, “I have no money. Please dismiss my account. Thank you.” The helicopter company was cool about it, but the ambulance company ($550 to drive me one block, to where the helicopter had landed) wrote back threatening to slash my credit rating if I didn’t pay up the balance. (My crappy school insurance had only paid $100.) So now I’m on the installment plan, sending $50 a month through next June for a five minute trip I don’t remember going on. I plan to write in the “memo” section of each check, “You thieving bastards!” or at least “You teething hamsters!”

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

I Drank a Gallon of Water a Day for a Week - Here’s What Happened

Introduction

What follows is a work of fiction. All characters, situations, observations, and insinuations are fictitious, coincidental, or accidental. The characters were pulled out of thin air and have nothing in common with any human being who ever lived, nor any zombie or otherwise undead individual. Nothing that happens in this story ever happened to a real person, or ever will. In fact, this story is practically science fiction, except that it’s totally unscientific and doesn’t have spaceships or aliens or anything. That said, any similarity of any character to an actual space alien, past present or future, is (obviously) purely coincidental or conjectural.

I drank a gallon of water every day for a week – here’s what happened

I was casting about for a New Year’s Resolution but nothing was coming to mind. Last year I resolved to dance like nobody’s watching, and I even bought a new Bluetooth speaker, but I found the dancing made me sad, because I live alone and there was nobody to watch me. A one-man dance party doesn’t feel much like self improvement.

So this year I decided to try drinking a gallon of water a day. Supposedly hydration is really important, and after all, what have I got to lose? Because I’m in an apartment building, my water bill is the same no matter what I do.

I thought about buying one of those graduated gallon water bottles with motivational phrases on them—you know, starting at the top with “GOOD MORNING” then “HYDRATE YOURSELF” then “REMEMBER YOUR GOAL,” etc., down to “ALMOST FINISHED” and then finally “YOU DID IT” at the bottom—but then I’m like dang, that’s $25 I’d rather not spend. Plus, I know myself, and I respond better to the whip than the carrot, if you catch my drift. So I washed out an empty gallon milk jug and wrote on it with a sharpie:

7AM GET COFFEE
9AM NO EXCUSES
11AM THIS IS NOTHING
1PM DON’T BE A LOSER
3PM NO PITY PARTY
5PM OOH, BIG MAN
7PM EVERYONE GETS A RIBBON
9PM BIG WHOOP

I set everything out the night before, feeling pretty excited. I hadn’t felt such keen anticipation since I started charging my new Bluetooth speaker at about this time last year.

Day One

At 9am I filled my big jug and then poured about a pint of it into my teakettle. This is the hardest part since there’s some sloshing and trial-and-error involved but I think it’s the genius of my method. See, others who do this drink only out of their $25 graduated jug and drag it around with them, like wearing a badge of honor so everyone will ask about it and they can start taking credit for their awesome resolution in advance. That’s not for me, I don’t need to brag. Plus, I don’t need the ruggedness of the Motivational Bottle … I don’t worry about leaks since I’m mostly at home. When I go out I’ll fill some smaller, more reliable vessel from the main one and then return for refills.

Some say it’s bad to hydrate with coffee but if I gave that up, I’d be doing two New Year’s Resolutions and I don’t want to boil the ocean here. I’m trying to tackle something I can actually achieve, so as to be more compassionate with myself (my Resolution from two years ago that I’m still struggling to keep).

Well, things were going fine until about 11am, when I’d peed so many times I felt like I was wearing out the carpet between my armchair and the toilet. I was peeing so much it seemed like the bowl would be completely full by nightfall. I’m of the “if it’s yellow keep it mellow, if it’s brown wash it down” school, in terms of flushing, except “keep it mellow” never made sense—I mean, what’s non-mellow about flushing? So I think of it as “if it’s brown, flush it down, if it’s jaune leave it alone.” (I am considering putting that on a placard above the toilet, with a little translation of “jaune” from the French.)

Just to divert my mind from the constant awareness of my pestering bladder, I went to the park and sat at my favorite bench for a while, watching life go by, and then this man came up to me, sat down, and said, “Hey, are you one of the dads?” I was like, “No,” and he said, “So you just like sitting and watching kids on a playground?” and I just stared at him, like, isn’t that obvious? He went on to say, “Look, a couple of other parents and I have talked about this and we all agree, we’re gonna have to ask you to leave.” So I shot back, “I was leaving anyway, I have to pee!” I have to admit, it was nice to have a really good comeback for once.

In terms of the more tangible benefits of all this drinking, I have to say that by 9pm, I’d never felt so good. My skin seemed better, I felt stronger in my body, my posture was more erect … even my hair felt better. Totally worth all the peeing.

Day Two

My bladder woke me up from a dream in which I was touring this old Victorian mansion that they’d turned into a museum, and I had to pee (yes, even in my dream) and found this tiny little half-bathroom, but instead of a toilet it just had a little portal to pee into. Halfway through my business the whole room started to move, slowly lowering toward the ground floor, and I realized it wasn’t a bathroom, it was an elevator! Yikes! I was like, “When I reach the next floor, the door’s gonna open and I’d better be finished!” Then I woke up.

The drinking itself was still pretty easy today and I nailed the pour into my teakettle, first try. If anything the constant peeing was even worse, though, and beyond that, by lunchtime I started getting pretty bored of drinking plain water. I’d been warned by drink-a-gallon-a-day websites not to have any sugar, though, because it’d throw off my electrolytes. Then I realized hey, if I make Top Ramen soup and drink the broth, that’s two cups of water right there! So I did that.

Big mistake! OMG, all the salt in that ramen totally bloated me! I should have known! Salt is an electrolyte! I stood in the mirror looking in horror at my bloated (and unfortunately hairy) belly (though not hairy due to drinking water, I hasten to add). I looked kind of like ET. Out of habit, I also scrutinized my face in the mirror, and as I looked closer I realized hey, my eyebrows are looking good! I flicked them with my finger a few times and realized, wow, drinking all this water has totally cured my eyebrow dandruff! Bonus!

All the afternoon water drinking eventually brought down the bloat, and after my final 9pm pint—nailed it!—I was ready for some yoga. I put in my video and (literally) went through the motions. I still can’t even come close to the Yogi Squat, but it’s only the second day of my new hydration regimen.

Day Three

I have hit my stride. The more I drink water now, the more I love it. In fact I doubled up on my 9am pint, drinking a whole quart, and it felt so good. I paid a price, though: I immediately had to pee, and then afterward, the sensation of water on my hands as I washed them made me have to pee again immediately, and for a second it looked like a vicious cycle I’d never break out of.

I went for a little hike and had to pee so bad halfway through. Alas, the outhouse at the trailhead was still at least thirty minutes away, which was like two pees worth, and there were so many hikers! I couldn’t find any privacy! I bushwhacked off-trail for a bit, and then my sneakers lost traction and I slid down into this ravine, and at the bottom I discovered—to my shock and horror—a dead body! It looked like some young adult hiker, halfway claimed by the earth. I scrambled up that slope so fast I couldn’t believe it. Surely my excellent hydration gave me wings. Problem was, just before reaching the trail again I slid on some leaves and tumbled all the way back down there. Then I looked more closely at the body and realized it was just an old shirt tangled around a fallen tree limb. Silly me.

Day Four

Another peeing dream woke me up and for a terrifying moment I thought I’d wet the bed. But I hadn’t … just a little leakage which is totally normal when you drink a gallon of water a day.

In addition to the better skin, relief from back pain, and higher energy, all of which I’d secretly hoped this hydration would give me, I got a big surprise: I got a job! My first in years! It’s selling tickets at the Events Center. The ticket window opens hours before the game and things start off really slow, so peeing wasn’t a problem at first—I’d just put the “BACK IN 5 MINUTES” sign out and go do my business. But once the rush started, no dice. I could not leave my post. It got worse and worse to where people were asking, “Are you okay!?” I guess my face was getting contorted. But then I realized I could just pee in this wastebasket without even getting out of my seat! Don’t worry, the wastebasket has a liner. All the wadded-up paper napkins in there dampen the sound down to almost nothing. I did have to sit pretty far forward in my chair to, well, eclipse everything, but nobody was the wiser.

Now, if you think I’m trying to connect the dots between drinking water and getting a job, I totally am. Those may seem unrelated but if I hadn’t been so hydrated, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to accept the offer.

The health benefits continue. I did an experiment: I looked in the mirror, located a zit, studied my face carefully to remember exactly where it was, drank a pint of water, and then looked again. Sure enough, the zit was gone! Water is like a miracle elixir!

Day Five

Other gallon-a-day blogs had warned me that I’d get bored of drinking water. Well, so far they’re wrong, but you know what is boring? All this peeing! It’s getting so old! Also, even though practice normally improves one’s prowess at practically anything, I seem to be getting worse at not spattering the rim. Either that, or I’m just more observant. I have to mop up the rim pretty much every time now. And my hands are starting to get a bit raw from all that washing, like with OCD people. The rest of my skin is positively glowing from all the water, but for some reason not my hands. I was reading on this one blog about smearing lotion on my hands and then putting on disposable rubber gloves, right before bed, so I’m considering that.

I showed up to work today but nobody was there. I searched everywhere and finally found my supervisor, and it turns out I misunderstood about the job: it’s not a daily thing, but only as needed, when they have a big game and somebody calls in sick. Oh well. I have a small passive income and it’s better to focus on my blogging anyway.

I fell asleep today and had one of those marathon naps where it’s hard to move afterward, so I missed one of my drinking sessions. I chugged a quart after that and was back on track.

Day Six

Not so much to report, actually. Drinking water, even a gallon a day, turns out to not actually be that complicated. One highlight: the hydration is helping my vision. If I really squint, I can read the kitchen clock from the kitchen nook table without my glasses.

Day Seven

This has gone so well, I woke up this morning thinking about continuing my gallon-a-day habit for the whole month, or more. This would give me a good blog topic while continuing to improve my health in umpteen different ways! But I’ve also been thinking a lot about the new Avatar movie, which is over three hours long. I really want to see it in the theater, and I’m sure the crowds have thinned out by now, but there’s no way I could make it through without getting up to pee at least six times. Who knows how many plot points I’d miss. And I’ve been looking forward to this movie for a long, long time.

And that got me thinking that, just like with last year’s dancing, achieving this Resolution is making me a little sad. Why, you may ask? Well, at some point I’ll have reaped all the health benefits, and then I’ll have nothing left to look forward to. So I think after I polish off my last pint tonight, I’ll call it quits, and keep the optimal hydration project in my back pocket for later. It’ll be like my ace-in-the-hole, my Plan B, the card up my sleeve. Next time I’m feeling really low, I’ll just start back up the gallon-a-day, and things will start to get real, real good again!

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—

Further reading

• New Year’s Resolutions
• One-Size-Fits-All New Year’s Resolution
• New Year’s Resolutions - Dental Hygiene Edition
• New Year’s Resolutions - Let’s Get It Right This Time
• A Wide Net Approach to New Year’s Resolutions
• The DUMB Approach to New Year’s Resolutions

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - Sleeping Through College

Introduction

Having hosted teenagers in my home recently, I was astonished by how late they stayed up and how late they slept in, and particularly how late they slept in even if they hadn’t stayed up late.  I try to sleep in sometimes but it just doesn’t work.  In fact, even sleeping through the night is becoming a challenge.  I don’t sleep soundly enough, so the cat disturbs me, or the morning sunlight leaking in past the blind, or a distant passing train.  Plus, I can’t get my temperature right.  Often, the soundtrack to my dreams is one heavy metal song for like four hours, so the sheer repetition bores me awake.

The following essay, written 27 years ago during my college days, is about sleeping.  Back then I often wrote little essays much like my modern blog posts (but not, I hope, as good) and photocopied them, shrinking four pages to fit on one sheet of paper, to mail around to friends and family.  This essay is from a series called “How to Be a UCSB Student.”  (By the time I transferred to Berkeley, I’d become wiser—realizing I didn’t know anything—and stopped writing how-to guides.)

How to Sleep Away Your College Days - October 27, 1989

Part One:  Choosing a major

While this may not seem like a normal category to be listed under “sleep,” it actually makes perfect sense.  Just check the chart below, locate the number of hours of sleep you’d prefer, and choose your major accordingly.

Major	Expected Sleep
Anthropology	N/A – nobody really majors in this
Architecture	4-7 hours per night
Art Studio	12-18 hours per night
Electrical Engineering	12-18 hours per week
English	6-8 hours per night
Rhetoric	0 hours per night because you toss and turn debating yourself
Any other major	I don’t actually know ... go do your own research

Part Two:  When is bedtime?

While I have tried to study a variety of majors, my current data is limited to my college household:  English, Art Studio, and Electrical Engineering.

English major:  You can pretty much go to bed when you want to.  I wouldn’t bother trying to sleep before midnight, though.  Until then, the ambient noise in your bedroom will be in the “ear-splitting” range anyway, either due to a party outside or your art studio roommate trying to teach himself the clarinet.

Art Studio major:  There are few guidelines; the only hard-and-fast rule is that you must never retire before 2:00 a.m.  What you do until this time is up to you:  check out a show, paint, try to teach yourself the clarinet, or even nap.  TIP:  If you nap enough during the day, it’ll be easy to stay up late, so on those days you have morning studio you’ll be falling asleep at the easel.  This can only help your work.

Electrical Engineering major:  Bedtime?  Are you kidding?  Try to hit the sack sometime before you collapse from exhaustion — hopefully as close to this point as possible.  Also, try to turn in before your roommate wakes up so you don’t have to compete for the shower.

Part Three:  Snoring

The only advice I can give you about snoring is the same advice your roommates will give you:  roll over and shut the hell up!  But if you’re suffering from a snoring roommate, you have a more difficult task.

An occasional snorer can be silenced with a shove, a thump on the wall, or being awakened and told to roll over and shut the hell up.  But these techniques are useless on a hard-core snorer.  I have studied this case thoroughly, and I’ve found that there is a passive-aggressive motivation behind repeated snoring.  Usually, the snorer is the one who gets the least sleep, and who must get ready for bed in the dark while his roommates sleep peacefully.  Though he may not realize it, the snorer feels a deep-seated hostility for those who have more time to sleep, and subconsciously decides to ruin their slumber by impersonating a one-cylinder Briggs & Stratton 2-stroke.  The more tired he is, the worse his snoring will be.

Obviously, normal techniques are futile, even harmful, when you’re dealing with a hard-core snorer.  If you wake him up, his subconscious hostility will only increase.  Therefore, you have to startle him to a state of semi-consciousness without revealing yourself.  I have found marbles to work beautifully.  I keep a jar by my bed, and when T.T., my E.E. roommate, snores, I throw a marble at him.  The zinging noise it makes on its trajectory, the harmless sting it gives on impact, and the cracking noise it makes as it ricochets into the wall are all excellent snore-deterrents.  The real beauty of this technique is that after a few assaults, T.T. has learned to automatically associate the sound of marbles clinking against a glass jar with pain and noise.  Now, I only have to clink my marbles and the snoring instantly stops—so I can avoid the guilt of having assaulted my roommate.  Fortunately, this Pavlovian effect took hold before T.T. figured out why he kept waking up with marbles in his bed.

Part Four:  Talking in your sleep

I guess this is technically optional, but it sure is fun.  Having one roommate stay up all night to monitor nocturnal speech is sometimes difficult, but luckily T.T. is almost always awake, and C.S., my Art Studio roommate, was thoughtful enough to equip T.T. with a notebook titled “Secret Sayings from the Kingdom of Sleep.” 

Now, you might think we’d want to leave our unconscious utterances unrecorded, in case we say something incriminating.  But we’re all far too nerdy for that.  The classic incriminating utterance would be “Oh, Wendy” as overheard by your girlfriend, Julie.  But we don’t have girlfriends, and if we did, and they heard us say “Oh, Wendy,” they’d be like, “In your dreams!”  They’d never believe us suave enough to cheat, these hypothetical girlfriends.

Here are some actual utterances from our apartment.  I didn’t make these up—they’re taken right from the bedside journal.

9/26/89	“Ladle!  Ladle!  Ladle!”  (yelling)	C.S.
	“No!  I won’t!  Oh, I don’t care anyway.”	D.A.
9/27/89	“More stories... I don’t have the energy.”	D.A.
	“What number did you pick?”	C.S.
10/09/89	“Orange.  It will really shake the very foundation  of the earth.  Plus, uh, Geoff:  the shirt took sanction.”	D.A.
10/12/89	“Somewhere, someone, the wheels are rolling.”	D.A.
	“What a feeling.”	D.A.
10/13/89	(Hysterical laughter)	C.S.
	“Question:  I’m asking you...?  My phone’s all screwed up.”	D.A.
10/20/89	“Grey, brown, dark blue, gloomy... Walk around, saying things like Sartre.”	D.A.
10/25/89	“Check me out!”	T.T.

Part Five:  Dreams

Achieving the most interesting dream is linked closely to diet.  If you eat a lot of garlic right before bed, or a spicy burrito, that should help.  Of course, the real key to memorable dreams is to have a really twisted mind.  I wish I did because my stories would be better, and C.S. wishes he did because his art would be better.  Only T.T. has disturbing dreams, usually involving a midterm he forgot to study for (which of course would never happen in real life). 

Part Six:  Catching up on sleep

For some reason, night isn’t always the best time for sleeping.  The other day, C.S. and I both awoke at 3:00 am for no apparent reason.  After an hour of talking, laughing, and throwing marbles at our resident snorer, we decided sleep was futile.  I studied while C.S. zoned out.  Of course, this sleep must be made up at some point — usually as soon as possible.  For me, the hours between 9:00 am and 1:00 pm are best suited for catch-up sleep.  It just so happens, my classes fall within the same time interval! 

If you can time it right, you’ll only sleep during lectures.  Typically there are so many students, the professor won’t notice.  Sit pretty far back because most of the professors are nearsighted from a career spent staring at a book, equation, or painting.  But then, targeting lectures is not always possible; after all, sleep makes its own rules.  

I fell asleep in French class last week, my elbow on the desk and my head propped in my hand, and Molly, the cute blonde next to me, knocked my elbow out so I went sprawling, knocking my books to the floor.  Amazingly, the instructor didn’t chew me out or anything.  Either she’s a romantic, and took Molly’s treachery for flirting, or assumed I was up all night phoning my relatives in earthquake-ridden San Francisco.  Or maybe it’s because this instructor is young, and thinks back fondly on how, not so long ago, she herself slept through college. 

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

How Android Wrecked My Morning

Introduction

Ever had your sleep shattered by a way-too-early phone call?  Well, at least that scenario requires an evil or bumbling human at the other end of the phone.  I found out recently that these modern phones can ruin your morning all by themselves, by trying too hard to be smart.  Read on for my sad tale (and the frightening questions it raises).

How Android wrecked my morning

The alarm clock on my Android phone shattered my sleep.  The noise was crazily close to my face and as I struggled to make sense of my situation I realized my wife was holding the phone out to me in a wordless plea to have it silenced.

I keep the phone on the table at the other side of the bed, out of reach.  This is to keep me from groping blindly for it, knocking it off the table, and breaking its face, as I’d done with my Blackberry years ago.  The key to not disrupting my wife is to make this phone my backup alarm.  The primary alarm is a clock radio on my side of the bed.

Usually I wake up before my alarm and can disarm it before it makes a sound.  I felt bad for waking my wife, but also a bit smug at having this backup-alarm system which was so clearly warranted on this occasion.  I now discovered the clock radio was an hour slow! 

As I was running late, I didn’t have time to make tea before my early conference call.  I grabbed a mug to nuke some water for instant coffee.  The microwave oven display, instead of showing the time, had a message scrolling by:  “Enjoy your meal.”

I hate this message.  First of all, it shows a fundamental flaw in this oven’s character.  The oven acts like it knows what’s what, but it’s only guessing.  (More often than not, it isn’t heating a whole meal, but just thawing something, pre-cooking an ingredient, or heating a snack.)  Second, this message means somebody forgot something in there, which in this case meant overnight.  What was it?  Feast your eyes on this!

My wife must be one of the few people on the planet who buys lima beans.  Why does she do it?  Does she feel sorry for the lima bean growers?  Or is she reminding my family that not everything we eat needs to be a delicious taste sensation?  Needless to say nobody missed these at dinner.

But when I closed the door, the oven display reverted to showing the time, and to my astonishment it was an hour off!  Or to be more accurate, it now showed my phone to be an hour off.  I never should have doubted my clock radio.

Isn’t it funny how much authority these smartphones get?  I hadn’t even considered it could be the culprit, because the phone sets its clock automagically!  The phone “just works”—except when it doesn’t.  From now on, I’ll trust the device that doesn’t have an operating system.

I pulled up my Android clock and noticed two weirdnesses:

The obvious thing was that it was an hour fast.  But the other weirdness was the second clock, labeled “Home.”  Somehow my phone had decided I’d traveled to another time zone:  Mountain Daylight Time.

On what basis did it decide this?  Beats me.  I keep the GPS turned off.  The “Automatic” time zone is based on the “network-provided” time.  Well, what network?  The WiFi network, some Internet server, or the 4G/LTE?  It’s vague in the accountability-avoiding “mistakes were made” kind of way.  I turned off WiFi but the phone didn’t revise its time zone.

As it turned out, I had a way to see if the culprit was really “the network.”  We happened to have a houseguest with an Android phone on the same carrier, and its clock was correct.  She theorized, “Your phone must have been keying off mine.  Mine’s set to Arizona!”

Great theory!  I hypothesized that one phone is always dominant, and will cause others in its vicinity to fall in line.  Kind of like how the menstrual cycles of female roommates will tend to sync up.

But there was a flaw in this theory:  Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Saving time.  This time of year, Pacific Daylight is the same as Mountain Standard.

I’ve given up devising an alternate theory; we’ll just have to chalk this up to a software bug, which perhaps only crops up when this specific OS is loaded on this specific phone with these specific apps and during these specific moon phases and when the phone’s owner is of this specific Zodiac sign, etc.

Rebooting the phone fixed the clock, until a few nights later when it slipped back to Mountain Daylight Time again.  The only real solution is to disable “Automatic time zone,” at least until Google fixes this bug.

Of course, I sussed all this out hours later.  At the time, I had a short-term problem:  I was up an hour earlier than I meant to be, with nothing to do, and was bleary, sleepy, and also pissed off.  It’s hard for me to fall back asleep after even a minor skirmish with hi-tech devices, and moreover when I’m angry.  So I lay in bed wishing I could be either asleep or fully awake instead of in this purgatory.  I tried to remember the dream I’d been having before being jolted awake.

I’d had this dream in my head—I mean my waking head—before going downstairs.  The whole thing was there intact, but now it was completely gone.  The great dream eraser had make a clean sweep.  But I tried and tried and suddenly my dream came back to me.  I’d been dreaming about my phone, coincidentally enough.

In this dream, I’d decided to head to San Francisco for some Christmas shopping.  The streets were all flooded to within a few feet of the tops of lampposts, so I was traveling by canoe.  My canoe started taking on water, and suddenly it was up to my waist.  Oh, no—my phone!  I took it out and it was all full of water.  I went home, cleaned off my desk, turned on a powerful lamp, and began taking apart the phone.  Each piece, once removed, suddenly grew to like ten times its former size.  This made it really easy to dry each piece off.  Before I knew it, I had a massive pile of chips, transistors, capacitors, and printed circuit boards, all comically oversized.  It was a bit like playing with Lego.  I reasoned that the phone manufacturer had set it up this way to facilitate the assembly process.

Now, where had Motorola gotten this idea?  Well, like all truly ingenious ideas, it must have come from an English major.  And suddenly the literary precedent was obvious:  the original Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.  Dr. Frankenstein (the inventor) decides to make his creature large, so that the components will be easier to manipulate:

As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; this is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionately large.

How fitting that this dream should prefigure the failure of my phone:  like Frankenstein’s monster, and like so many other hi-tech products, it has a tendency to break loose from the control of its creator.  How large a problem this becomes may be determined by how large a project Google and its ilk undertake.  It’s one thing to have your morning ruined by a Frankenphone; how much damage could be caused by a Frankencar, a Frankenhome, or a Frankendrone?

Bond Gunned Down

NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for descriptions of violence, mature themes, and mild strong language.

Introduction

I had a dream the other night that I was James Bond. When I told the dream at the breakfast table, my daughter Lindsay said it sounded like a nightmare. I did find it disturbing, but not really a nightmare—not like the three nightmares I had the night I watched “Let the Right One In,” an incredibly, brilliantly creepy Swedish vampire movie. (I don’t remember those nightmares; only that I woke up screaming from each one, and that the bleak flavor of the movie was with me each time.)

In this post I examine the James Bond character: specifically, why all men want to be him, and what his greatest vulnerability is. I also describe my dream and how it gave me a whole new angle from which to look at … things.

What we like about Bond

In describing my dream, I said, “It started out really well. I was the Daniel Craig Bond—” and here my wife interrupted to ask why I’d dream of being that Bond. It’s a fair question—everybody seems to have a strong opinion of which actor was (or is) the best Bond. (When Siskel and Ebert did a special on Bond movies, one of them said he thought Connery was the best, and threatened to throw the other one over the edge of the balcony if he didn’t agree.) I asked Erin, “Why wouldn’t I want to be the Daniel Craig James Bond?” She replied, “He’s not even good looking!”

Of course that’s a matter of taste; obviously Craig wouldn’t have been selected for the role had MGM not felt he would help draw women to the theaters. But he’s not for every taste. (As Erin’s mom famously said during a conversation with her daughter and me, “Erin never went in for hunks.” I replied, “Well that’s for sure,” and the exchange instantly became family lore.) I’m sure my wife isn’t alone in finding Sean Connery the most attractive of the Bonds. But all this is beside the point. Bond’s looks don’t matter whatsoever to men.

I’ll go out on a limb and speak for all men here: we don’t want to look like Bond; want to be Bond, because he’s so capable, decisive, and unflappable. There’s nothing he can’t fly, drive, ride, shoot, or otherwise instantly achieve complete mastery of. He never gets lost; far from it, in a chase situation he always knows the side roads and ad hoc escape routes. He doesn’t forget things. He doesn’t futz with the seat adjustment in a rental car. He doesn’t get routed all over the place by Customer Service. He doesn’t fight with the ice cube tray. He never whines or complains. And not only does he always get the girl, but you’ll never find him embroiled in some deep discussion about a relationship. He may brood, but usually only after somebody has been killed. (And hey, brooding is kind of cool.)

Bond’s vulnerability

It would be absurd to think that Bond has a vulnerable side, that he ever needs a shoulder to cry on or admits (least of all to a woman) that he’s scared of something, or is uncomfortable, or anything like that. His character puts me in mind of a quote from Shakespeare: “O lady, weep no more, lest I give cause/ To be suspected of more tenderness/ Than doth become a man.” Bond has the traits men admire in one another, which are often different than the traits a woman might admire in a man. Women might like a man who is sensitive, vulnerable, and helpful around the house. Bond is none of these things, but gets the girl anyway. That’s what we men wish we could have.

And yet, Bond does have an Achilles’ heel: bad scripts. Let’s face it, no matter how suave and capable this character is, he’s powerless to prevent himself being stuck in a bad movie, and there have been a lot of them. It’s tempting to blame the actor playing him; I tend to hold Roger Moore accountable for the wisecracking, dippy, often constipated-looking Bond of the ‘70s and early-to-mid ‘80s. (Of his performance in the awful “Moonraker,” Pauline Kael wrote, “Roger Moore is dutiful and passive as Bond … like an office manager who is turning into dead wood but hanging on to collect his pension.”) But if I remember right, Moore started out okay in “Live and Let Die” before the movies got progressively stupider. Was he ruining the character with his own spin, or just following the script and taking direction?

The movie creators surely deserve most of the blame; consider that Pierce Brosnan was a fine Bond, but after his first Bond movie, the rather cool “Goldeneye,” the movies just got worse and worse. That seems to be the way with each new Bond actor: a promising start, then a decline in the quality of the movies until MGM freaks out and finds a new Bond.

To test this theory I looked at the average ratings for each film from Internet Movie Database users. The average rating of the first three Connery films was 7.6; the average for the next four was only 6.7. The trend repeats with every actor (though there’s some fluctuation due to the overrated “Spy Who Loved Me”—I mean, a villain with steel teeth named Jaws? Bond on a Jet-Ski? Ahem!). Check it out (click to enlarge image):

After the invisible car in “Die Another Day,” I actually decided to stop watching Bond movies altogether; fortunately, “Casino Royale” came along and rescued the series. Maybe the creators chose Daniel Craig—the biggest brute of all the Bonds—to make sure they’d completely flushed Roger Moore out of the franchise’s system. Or maybe Craig had laid out some contractual conditions for accepting the role:

o Absolute minimum of bow ties

o No bright yellow ski suit (in fact, no more ski chases)

o No seven-foot villains with steel teeth who move in slow-motion like they’re physically impaired

o No Jet-Skis or similarly frivolous vehicles (e.g., ATVs, rider mowers)

o No spaceships

o No pointlessly complicated kills, like scooping up a villain’s wheelchair with a helicopter and dropping him down a smokestack

o No supposedly clever but actually quite stupid quips (e.g., “Oh, you want to get off!” before dropping villain from helicopter)

o No remote-control or invisible cars, or similarly far-fetched gadgets

o No dumb floozies as Bond women

There’s so much going for this character, it’s a shame to see things spoiled by bad choices from the moviemakers. Take the motorcycle chase scene in “Never Say Never Again.” It’s pretty cool overall, but seriously marred by a non-cool motorcycle and, more egregiously, having Bond wear a helmet. A helmet? I mean, come on, guys! He looks like a dork! Of course in real life I support the use of helmets by motorcyclists, but Bond isn’t real life! What’s next: a scene of Bond as a toddler being strapped into his car seat? (Fortunately, MGM wised up, and Bond and his girl are helmetless in the motorcycle chase in “Tomorrow Never Dies.”

My dream

Speaking of bad scripts, it’s time I got to my dream. In the dream I wasn’t myself, I was Bond, the Daniel Craig incarnation, and the dream opened in medias res, spang in the middle of a ski chase. I wasn’t on some far-flung Alpine peak, either: I was at a ski resort, with recreational skiers going by every so often. Worse, I’d fallen, and was struggling to get my boot back into the ski binding. There was all this snow packed in there and for the longest time I just kept futzing with it. I was highly annoyed. What was I even doing at a ski resort? And why did everything seem tacky, like the eighties: teal-colored snowsuits and mirrored sunglasses? This was the lamest situation ever. What, did I have a gun hidden in my ski pole again to shoot the baddies with?

And then, suddenly, a villain came skiing by with a machine gun and strafed me. Only, he didn’t miss. In fact, in the fusillade I took like eight hits to the chest. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I never thought I was invulnerable; I’d been wounded before, even tortured, and once almost got sawed in half by a laser … but to just be hit, multiple times, by simple gunfire, at point-blank? Unbelievable. I turned to Felix. “I’ve got like eight holes in my chest!” I whispered. “I’m gonna die!”

Felix dropped to one knee to check out my wounds. He looked me over, intently, puzzled, like he was troubleshooting something under the hood of a car. I realized, probably at the same moment he did, that I wasn’t spouting blood like I should have been. Bulletproof vest? No, I hadn’t worn one. I probably should have. Where had I seen that? Ah, right, it was an episode of “Starsky & Hutch” I saw as a kid. You see Hutch get shot and he crumples to the ground and you think your hero is dead, and then suddenly he's okay because—aha!—he had a bulletproof vest! Why were they showing that on TV? Is that anything our children ought to be seeing?

Finally Felix spoke: “You were shot at such close range, the bullets have cauterized the holes. You’re not going to bleed to death.” I must have looked hopeful because he quickly added, “But you’re still gonna die!”

Unlike the standard plot, where I get myself out of one terrifying scrape after another, now I found myself in a long, slow, depressing dénouement. Q fitted me with a (very basic) heart rate monitor, and over the next few days I watched with bitter resignation as my pulse rate dropped progressively lower. I received no actual medical attention, as it was universally acknowledged I was a goner, but more and more medical researchers began following me around, documenting my amazingly slow death. Now and then one would take my vital signs, and once or twice somebody held a stethoscope to my back and had me cough. Nobody wore surgical masks; after all, my bullet wounds weren’t contagious. The researchers’ overall response was that of fascination. I never actually died; I suppose the dream ended when I (or rather, Dana) woke up.

Interpretation

I’m not of the belief that dreams are actually that useful in gaining an understanding of the self. I truly believe that many, if not most, dreams are completely nonsensical, and ultimately mean nothing. Sure, our subconscious is involved, but so is pure chance. Did my subconscious start meowing outside the bedroom door at 3 a.m. and make me dream about my cat? No, the cat did. Did my subconscious tell me to eat all that spicy Thai food right before bed? Did it tell me to watch “Let the Right One In?”

That said, this dream offers a fairly obvious interpretation. Bond—though intelligent, unflappable, and constitutionally solid—does not know how to die gracefully. Watching himself slowly expire, he is, for the first time, completely powerless. He could insist on having his dignity respected, but what would be the point?

If my subconscious is trying to tell me anything, perhaps it’s that in denying the inevitably of my own death—which I certainly do—I am engaging in pure fantasy, no less so than when I daydream about being James Bond. To which I say, so what? By the time the next Bond movie comes out, the franchise will be fifty years old, but Daniel Craig will be only be forty-four, and I’ll only be forty-three. I’ve still got time.

dana albert blog