From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXXI

Introduction

This is the thirty-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, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, Volume XXVII is here, Volume XXVIII is here, Volume XXIX is here, and Volume XXX is here.

If you’re new to the Bits & Bobs series, it’s really not that complicated: they’re snippets of past correspondence that I think could amuse any audience. Back in the olden days—before blogs, doomscrolling, podcasts, streaming, Youtube, and TikTok—certain oddballs, such as myself, actually took the time to correspond with friends and family. As you yourself may recall, people used to write letters, on paper, and send them through the mail. And originally emails were more like letters and were widely exchanged among humans, before email became mostly useless (e.g., solicitations from a retailer you bought something from five years ago). And get this: people used to actually read emails, or at least that’s what I told myself when I worked pretty hard at writing them. Now my old correspondence has a second chance at an audience, as I string old snippets together into these Bits & Bobs posts. The different volumes are varied in time and place and can be read randomly, rapidly, repeatedly, reluctantly, resentfully, resignedly, reverently, ruefully, and/or religiously.

Today’s Bits & Bobs are in chronological order, and I specify where I was living when I wrote them. You can try to guess whom I wrote them to (but honestly, good luck with that). And as you will gather from the dates, these were typed, printed, and mailed.

March 8, 1990 – Santa Barbara

[My brother] Geoff came down and visited last weekend to watch the races our UCSB cycling team hosted. A couple of years ago, some racers complained that our criterium course was boring. Well, we showed them! This year we set up a course on campus with eleven corners, including a hairpin. Traditionally, not my kind of course. (Aren’t you glad I have health insurance? I’m not—the premiums just went up to $60 per month!) It seems like maybe all the weight training I did over the winter came in handy: the race come down to a field sprint and I took fourth. Somehow the team had conjured up a speed radar with a giant display that was positioned at the finish line, and we broke 40 mph in the final sprint! I’ll confess I was extra motivated trying to impress this girl who came to watch me, but it turns out she got bored and left before the finish, unbeknownst to me. Oh well, at least I got a good race out of it, and Geoff was stoked for me. I have no idea how else to try to impress that girl … I’m kind of out of bullets now.

October 1, 1990 - Oakland

The main reason I’m writing you is that I have a puzzle which I think you may be able to help figure out. Suppose that for dinner I make six servings of mashed pota­toes (hypothetically speaking of course; I would never eat such a boring meal in actual life, at least not without also making a huge burrito . . . okay, we’re getting less hypothetical here) and in making these six servings I use two cups of water, a cup of milk, and two cups of potato flakes (which, through a miracle of science, turn out better than real potatoes, just like Cool Ranch Doritos taste better than anything that actually exists in nature). The question is, how can my six servings only be 1/2‑cup each, like the box says? I mean, I should have five cups of potatoes, which would be ten 1/2‑cup servings. Where do the extra two cups go? Steam? Heat? It would have to make five cups. Hell, it looked like five cups, and it’s sitting in my stomach like five cups (and a burrito).

Anyway, I thought you might know the answer. But don’t feel like you have to rush a response back to me or anything; I mean, you mentioned how self-conscious writing makes you feel, since you’re worried about your spelling and punctua­tion. So (whoops, this box of potatoes just leaked flakes all over my lap) if I get too accurate with my grammar, etc. in this letter, will you get stressed out and decide writing is too much hassle? I don’t want that to happen, so I is gonna start scrweing up my spelings and grammers so if and you will deside that mabey its all cool and I’m perty stuppid and not so dangrous to rite to at alll. Maybe that won’t be convincing since this is still a typed letter instead of casually scrawled like yours, but obviously there’s plenty of really dull typed stuff out there that wouldn’t intimidate anybody and I should try that mode. In fact, maybe I should adopt a scientific writing style:

Certainly it is noteworthy that the dust, lint, and flakes of dehyd­rated potatoes in this Oakland resident’s apartment tend to gather around the exterior surface of his high‑fidelity stereophonic audio speakers. This is doubtless due to the static charge effected by the main B‑type DryWatt FlipFlop magnets in the speakers, combined with the relatively dry air of the Oakland region. The tendency of the speakers to simultaneously repel said dust and lint as a result of the air displacement, effected by the vibrating speaker cones, is also notable. The point at which the magnitude of the sound (adjusted by the resident by means of the volume control knob found on his receiver) repels the dust and lint to an area beyond which the static electricity will attract it is left as an exercise for the undoubtedly intelligent science enthusiast reading this article.

Is that boring enough for you? It’s still risky—my dad and one or two of my brothers would probably be fascinated by that whole paragraph. Actually, my dad would probably be really disappointed in me due to some inaccuracy.

I have to say, your letter was pretty confusing. What are Little Debbies? And what’s Greasy Tony’s? I can’t believe there’s an all-u-can eat joint I don’t know about. And are Spener and Spencer the same guy, and am I supposed to know who this guy/these guys is/are? Maybe I met him/them at Nationals and forgot, since I tend to do that. When I was in Boulder this summer on my way to Wyoming for a bike race, I was at a restaurant and a whole group of people called me over, and I didn’t recognize a single one of them. They were talking to me and everything, using my name even, and all I could do is play along and think, “Who the hell are these people? I’ve never seen then before in my life!” What do you do when that happens?

December 1, 1990 – Oakland

One of my English professors, for my Chicano Literature class, decided to be a dick and make our big paper—80% of our grade—due on the Monday after Thanksgiving. I had planned to spend the long weekend writing it, but somehow managed to let my brother Geoff talk me into driving to Boulder for Thanksgiving instead. The worst part is, it took him a good while to convince me, so by the time I embarked on the trip (starting with a Greyhound bus to his place in San Luis Obispo) I not only hadn’t made good headway on the paper, but hadn’t even figured out my topic and thus hadn’t checked out the books I’d need. I figured I would have to wait until I got to Boulder and borrow my brother Bryan’s University of Colorado library card; check out the books there; and write the paper on the Friday before driving back home. So, Friday afternoon, I go to the CU library with my friend P— (a student there) and wander through the rows and pull out every book I can find. Then I read the table of contents of each book to figure out a good topic to write my paper on. Suddenly, there it is, a shimmering topic shining down on me from above: the social growth of the Chicana (Chicano female). I found like ten good books.

So I study those a while, until this library staffer comes and says the library’s closing early, what with the holiday and all. So I go to check out my books and the dude at the circulation desk tells me, “Sorry, it’s after 5:00. I can’t check anything out to you. Regulations.” I tell him how bad I need the books (though I can’t mention I’m leaving to go back to Berkeley the next day since I’m supposedly this card-carrying CU student). He won’t budge so I go back into the depths of the library, which is dark now, and tell my friend P— to go down and wait under this window. Without a word, he understands my situation: my back to the wall, I have no choice but to drop the books down to him.

Unfortunately, in putting my brilliant plan into play I feel less like Sean Connery and more like Peter Sellers. The windows are literally welded shut, with grates over them. I go down to the second floor, stumbling around in the dark, and all the windows have padlocks on them. Colorado Maximum Security Corrective University. So I devise another plan: I’ll make a run for it. So I find an exit, with a red door handle and a huge sign, “EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY! ALARM WILL SOUND!” and a smaller but equally ominous sign beneath it, “Those misusing this exit will be prosecuted.” I have no idea where the exit will dump me, and what direction I’ll have to run in. Plus, I’ve got a duffel bag with 10 hardback books and a bunch of other crap in it, and I’m not much of a runner. But on the plus side, I’ve seen the guy who’s patrolling the library and he’s a big fat guy with only one arm. Seriously. So I take a deep breath and push through the door.

I’ve always wondered what those alarms sound like—and I’m still wondering because nothing happened. For a second I was really stoked because I thought I was home free. Then I realized I was still indoors, in some storage room or something. I stumble around in there but it’s seriously pitch black and I can’t find an exit. So I go back into the stacks and look for another exit, really stressed out by now, and then I make a wrong turn and the one-armed man sees me. He’s even less sympathetic than the circulation desk guy, and makes me put all my books on this little cart and leave. And that’s why before I left for California on Saturday, I had to go back to the library and check all those books out, and bring them with me to research and write my paper on Sunday, after the trip.

Of course we managed to get on the road late. Right around Utah, I figured I’d done my share of the driving, and turned the wheel over to my brother’s roommate, J—. (Geoff doesn’t have his driver’s license.) I got maybe half an hour of sleep before J—woke me up and said, “Dude, you gotta keep me awake. I keep hallucinating trees on the road.” I guess I can understand that, since he hasn’t slept in a while, and it’s dark out, but he goes on to say, “They’re sage trees, and they’re talking to me. Talking trees, I’m serious. You know what they keep saying?” I guess I nod or mumble “uh-huh” or something, because he says, “You do know? What did they tell me, then?” I play along: “They said that sleep is a myth, and that you don’t really need sleep, just lots and lots of coffee.” So we keep talking, and after a while I’m only half awake. Suddenly J— shakes me real good and says, “What did you just tell me?” I confess that I can’t remember. He says I was talking about a green hotel where I was writing Christmas cards, and this huge doorman with a big zipper who kept harassing me. I remember the part about the green hotel, because in Las Vegas we’d passed this creepy looking Holiday Inn, painted white but bathed in green floodlights (neither of us could figure out why). Finally J—’s driving shift was over, by which point Geoff was awake and able to help keep me awake for the final leg.

I finally got home at like 11:00 p.m. on Sunday and started my English paper at about 11:30 p.m., giving me about twelve hours. I was definitely hurting, this being basically my second all-nighter in a row. On a hunch, I phoned my friend H—, who’s in my class. She picked right up. “Working on your paper?” I asked. “Of course!” she laughed, “I just got started!”

During the night as I pounded out the paper I hallucinated about people in the hallway outside my apartment; talked to them a bit before realizing they weren’t real; and discovered that coffee, UpTime, and NoDoz are altogether inadequate for postponing sleep. The only thing that could help now was adrenaline. I got that by accidentally falling asleep, and waking up twenty minutes later thinking it was morning already. Once the panic subsided I found I could function again. At about 8:00 on Monday morning I remembered I had a paper in the works for my 9:00 Rhetoric class; finished it; went to class; and ended up falling asleep during my small group discussion. Evidently I was talking in my sleep, because I awoke to this girl laughing her ass off. Then I headed home and finished the big paper. It was due at noon, and I finished it at 12:35 and brought it to class. Nobody was there: class had been cancelled. I managed to track down the professor and he took the paper. Whew.

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

From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume IV

Introduction

This is the fourth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, and Volume III is here. If I were a famous writer, these posts would comprise passages from previously unpublished letters or lectures that I’d bring out just to basically print my own money. But since I’m only a blogger, I’m providing similar such collections for free because I think they capture moments in time (in this case my latter college years) that I think are amusing and/or universal. All of these below are from letters written to a friend, in chronological order, and the setting is the Berkeley area.

October 1, 1990

I really like the old ladies in my apartment building. It’s an old, very elegant building in one of the best parts of Oakland, with radiators that hiss and click all the time because the landlord keeps it as warm as a sauna in all the units, for the old people. They spend most of the time indoors, since they’re really quite frail and possibly afraid of the cruel, harsh society outside. Their perception of reality is based on precious few data: if they only make it outside once a week, and happen to see something unpleasant, they may assume that’s what happens all the time.

Case in point: today I was on my bike cruising down College Ave toward home, and some old geezer pulled out of his driveway without looking. A redneck type in a big pickup truck had to slam on his brakes, and started cussing real loud. The old dude seemed unfazed, and after the truck got by, the old guy kept backing out, and almost clobbered a taxicab coming up the other way. I was almost sandwiched in the middle since I’d been trying to pass. So I started yelling, in vain of course because the old fellow probably forgot both his hearing aids, and as I escaped by hopping my bike up to the sidewalk in front of my apartment, one of my elderly neighbors was standing there watching the whole thing.

I was struck by her look of fear because until that moment, I myself hadn’t really perceived much danger (my foul language and evasive action having been entirely automatic). So she asked what happened, and I tried to play it down, but it’s obviously made a big impression. As we walked toward the building, she said, “My god, you could have been killed!” Since the front door into the building lobby is awfully heavy, I opened it for her, and she said, “Thank you! I was so close anyway but you’re really never safe until you’re home, you know?”

So I try to be as polite as possible to my neighbors, to help them live out their lives in a tranquil and pleasant fashion. This one old lady, Ruth, obviously loves having college age people around; she seems to hang out in the lobby a lot and strikes up conversations. Once I encountered her on the stairs while I was descending at about a hundred miles an hour, and she had to step quickly out of my way. I apologized and said “excuse me” and everything, and she said, “Don’t worry, I won’t mess with you,” but then, with a wink, added, “But if I were a few years younger, I sure would!”

Nov 2, 1990

I was trying to study Latin yesterday and it ultimately overloaded my brain. We’re having our second midterm Monday and I’m hoping not to eat shit like I did last time. We learn so much in there it’s not even funny. Well, we’re supposed to learn it, anyway. Recently the instructor said, “Okay, we’ve been going too slowly so now we have to speed up to catch up with the curriculum.” Yeah, right. We’ve already covered more in Latin 1 than I did in studying through French 6 at UC Santa Barbara.

Today the instructor gave us two entire pages of vocab and irregular verb formations (all tenses, and in both indicative and subjunctive) to memorize, along with three pages of exercises over this new structure. “This should only take you five minutes,” he says. Yeah, right … I’ve been at it two hours and I’m still not done. The other day we “learned” something even the instructor conceded was really difficult, and afterward he said, “You’re all very smart. It took me months to learn this.” I said, “And we get a day?” He replied, “Well, you’re Berkeley students.”

Dec 5, 1990

Thanksgiving with what’s left of my family was pretty fun, but I paid a price. On Saturday I drove straight through the night from Colorado to to Geoff’s place in San Luis Obispo and then had to take Greyhound back up to Oakland, and then I started on my research paper. This was at about 11:30 on Sunday night. I called my friend A— to see if she was still up; she was, as she’d just started on her paper too, for the same class. This paper was due the next day, and would be 80% of our grade … so this was pushing it even by our shameful standards.

I finished at about 8:00 the next morning, and rode to campus basically in a trance, after the back-to-back all-nighters. In class we broke into little discussion groups, and I fell asleep in mine, and I guess I must have started talking in my sleep because I woke up and everybody was laughing. This one girl was just shrieking with laughter and couldn’t be calmed down. The professor came over saying, “Hey, what’s going on here?” and everybody was laughing except me. I looked at the professor and shrugged: no, I have no idea what’s come over my group.

June 4, 1991

So this dipshit college kid comes into the bike shop with a broken front quick release skewer and asks how much for a new one. I tell him $9.95, and he rolls his eyes and asks if I think he can glue it back together. I tell him no fucking way, but he says he’ll try it anyway. I tell him to be careful since his front wheel is going to roll off, and that I’ll see him a little later. I should’ve clamped his head in the vise.

September 10, 1991

I’ve finally got my health back after a bad bout of strep throat. But I still have this one queer symptom: I can’t open my jaws more than an inch because of the residual swelling down there. So I’m eating a bit more slowly lately. Like I had to eat this roast beef sandwich the other day, at which point I could only open my mouth about a centimeter, which was kind of embarrassing. A friend had me over for lunch and it turns out she lives in a sorority house now, where all the meals are prepared for you, so all I had to choose from to eat was the roast beef sandwich or a salad (which, as you know, is ideal for rabbits but not guys like us). So I’m there dipping this roast beef sandwich in the “au jus” and kind of smashing it into my lips and sucking it through the gap. Real suave.

I just got home from class. I was sitting in there listening to the professor reading her notes, and it sounded something like this:

It is easy to see to what species of entities Ullmann’s description does apply. Certain entities exist the full meaning of which can be said to be equal to the totality of their sensory appearances. For an ideal perception, entirely devoid of complications resulting from the interference of the imagination, the meaning could only refer to a totality of sensory appearances.

This comes out in my notes something like this:

Ullmann has some sensory perception thing devoid of complications from imagination interfering with sensory oh fuck this shit.

November 25, 1991

I went for a mountain bike ride in the morning before work yesterday. I wanted to leave early enough to have time, upon my return, to shower, eat, et cetera, so I didn’t invite my roommate Eric along. You see, by the time he shaved, shat, pumped up, put on his clothes, and filed a report with the bureau, the morning would be gone. The only flaw in my solo attempt is that Eric always carries the spare tube, patch kit, pump, and other survivalist gear. They would have been handy today. Imagine that the ride is basically a loop, of diameter d. The bike shop is exactly d away from where I had what we in the research and development program call a “happy accident.” A rock placed by the powers that be in a strategic location began an experiment in Reduced Inflation and Pressure (RIP) of the front tire. This led me to some impromptu analysis of the handling characteristics of a standard mountain bicycle with a front tire having absolutely no inflation. On the standard dirt sections, I noticed a remarkable change in the tracking of the front wheel. It wasn’t until the single track, however, that I experienced the most dramatic ramifications of the Handling Enhancement Characteristic Kinesthesia (HECK), a sudden increase in the muscular toning of the upper body due to special bicycle control requirements. Especially on rocks and large branches, the new technology provided a Divergent Arrangement of Multiple Navigations (DAMN). Because the feel was so dramatically different, I found it necessary to actually reduce my speed, although I expect that a little practice will see the RIP being a great improvement. A thirty second shower saw me open the bike shop only ten minutes late this morning. Happily, and amazingly, my American-made Sun Metal rim sustained no damage whatsoever!

April 20, 1992

I got this Chinese fortune cookie fortune that said, “His heart was yours from the moment he met you.” How much happier I would be with that forecast if I were a chick. If I were superstitious I reckon I’d lose some sleep. The newer Square Wheel location on University Avenue, where I work about half the time, is next to a Chinese restaurant, and another fortune literally blew in the door. It read, “To you maybe too greatness, especially love adventures.” It’s the best fortune I’ve ever gotten. But so far it hasn’t come true.

I just love it when things are lost in translation. My mom bought this “Electronic Mosquito Repeller” mail-order, and it has the greatest instruction manual. I offer you this excerpt:

Mosquitoes frequently infect you place in Summer, especially at night, They are externely irritating as they disturbed our sleep and the most annoying of all is the difficulty in getting rid of the itch & soreness. After, ordinary mosquito increase or “Electrified Mosquito Killer” are used. However the odour is unbearable and the abuse of some of them may become dangerous. . . . According to the research of insect ecology, most of biting mosquitoes are female ones in spawning period. A Spawning female mosquito is very disgusted at the approaching of male mosquito. Therefore, the trequency of Repel It’ is made to imitate the sound signal of male mosquitoes to repell female mosquitoes away.

Under the heading “Applications” are six pictures of possible uses of the Mosquito Repeller. They are: Sleeping, Camping, Dating, Hunting, Livestock Farm, Farming. Where the manufacturer got these ideas is beyond me. Dating? I can’t get over that. Yeah, when I go on a date, my biggest concern is how to keep those damned mosquitoes away. The picture shows this young couple sitting on a park bench, with the guy in the process of putting his arm around the girl, about to bust a move. The Repeller is sitting on the bench with little cartoon lines to indicate its sound. My mom sent back the thing back because the noise was unbearable. I wish she’d given it to me instead, since I could have used it for my dating. Of course, if female humans are anything like mosquitoes, and become “very disgusted at the approaching of male,” I hardly think it would help.

October 8, 1992

I’ve got a midterm in my Milton class tomorrow. As far as I’m concerned, Milton is a zit on the face of English literature. (Here I’m paraphrasing Turgenev, who was referring to Dostoyevsky, another writer I’ll be reading at length this semester.) If you ever have to write a paper on Milton, you can start it off with that quote from me. Footnote it by saying, “Dana Albert, Letter of October 8 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 1.” Whether or not you note the Turgenev origin is between you and your god. But actually, it’s probably best not to malign Milton, because you can usually presume that a grad student who is a T.A. for a Milton course really likes him … so you better brown-nose a little bit. Here, for example, is the first paragraph to my last paper:

When I first approached Milton’s “Sonnet 7” I found it a confusing, ambiguous mess given to complicated phrasing, difficult metaphors, and pronouns without antecedents. However, on second analysis, I find Milton to be the dopest, flyest, O.G. pimp hustler gangster player hard core motherfucker who ever lived.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
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.

From the Archives - Diaper Meltdowns

NOTE: this post is rated PG for very mild strong language and insinuations of antisocial acts.

Introduction

The other night was rough. First, our cat Misha—despite getting her typical middle-of-the-night breakfast—continued meowing plaintively and scratching at the kitchen door, a short flight of stairs down from our bedroom. Then our six-year-old, Lindsay, climbed into bed with us, having had a nightmare. (The nightmare was probably my fault; my bedtime story was a bit on the scary side, involving an ancient girl who was terrified at mistaking a helicopter, which she’d never seen before, for a giant dragonfly.)

In our bed, Lindsay did her semaphore routine, all elbows and knees, continually jabbing me, all the while loudly sucking on her fingers. Countless times I dropped back off to sleep only to be reawakened. She kept resituating herself, smoothing down her special blanket or adjusting her special pillow, which she’d brought in with her. When morning came and my alarm went off I was pretty much awake anyway, but far from rested. Of course, following all this Lindsay slept like a baby all morning. Here she is, still lounging in bed with Misha, our other nighttime nuisance, hours later.

Not that I’m complaining! These are the salad days, after all, sandwiched between the terribly difficult infant/toddler years and the dreaded teen years (which I’m told are particularly hard on parents of daughters). What’s a bad night of sleep here and there compared to the rigors new parents face, of night after sleepless night, and all those diapers on top of it? I’ll never forget the shock of bringing our firstborn, Alexa, home from the hospital and faking it as parents as we tried to learn the ropes.

The following stories are taken from an e-mail I wrote to my brothers and parents, probably as a plea for sympathy, when Alexa was about three weeks old. I reread that e-mail with a shudder, and a delicious sense of relief that those tough times are behind me.

Diaper Meltdowns – October 1, 2001

Erin, to my surprise, is handling the lack of sleep much better than I am. Perhaps it’s a new-mother hormone thing, or perhaps she’s just a better person than I, but she has a lot more patience. She does complain a lot about the cat, though, or so it seems. Every few hours she points out another thing the cat is doing wrong, the poor cat who micturates in her catbox and thus requires no changing, and never cries but instead meows rather demurely and sweetly, who is trying to adjust to the new household situation, which includes cruel banishment from the bedroom because she won’t stay out of the baby’s bassinet. But other than her complaints about the cat, Erin is pretty stoic. (Actually, she probably doesn’t complain about the cat all that often, but in my deranged, frazzled state, it seems to me that she does.)

Yesterday morning I pretty much boiled over. I was trying to change Alexa, and the towel we’d put down on the changing table was wet from an earlier changing (she tends to let loose right when you’ve got her diaper off), and so I wadded it up so that I wouldn’t soil her still-dry outfit, and set her down on this wadded lump, and then saw that she had this major boogerage in her eye (clogged tear duct), so I ran to the bathroom, jumping over a massive pile of bedding that was right in my way (it had been torn off the bed the previous night when Alexa had a diaper blowout).

The reason I ran to the bathroom, instead of walking, is that Alexa was screaming her head off, as though I were shoving bamboo beneath her fingernails. Then it took forever, like it always does, to get hot water out of the tap, and the screaming continued, loud enough to drown out my cussing, and then when the hot water finally came out, I knew that the washcloth would never hold the heat long enough to be comfortable because it’s a “baby” washcloth with less fabric in it than a Post-It would have it were made of molecule-thick cloth. Then I realized that the baby was in a precarious place because of the way I’d wadded up the towel on her changing station, and I feared she’d roll into the space heater we have on the table (to keep her warm during changes) and burn herself.

I leapt over the pile of clothes again, cleaned up the eye, changed the diaper, then realized that despite my best efforts, hazardous as they’d been to the welfare of the child, her outfit was in fact soiled, so I had to leap over the pile again to find an outfit from the bureau near the door. We have approximately 300 outfits for Alexa, many of which won’t fit for weeks or months, some of which haven’t been washed yet (we always wash new clothes lest the chemicals used in their manufacture irritate her skin), and some of which are the wrong type (i.e., sleeveless vs. sleeved) for a chilly morning. I finally found one, after a frantic period of searching (frantic because of the screaming, and because of the knowledge that my lovely daughter at any moment might roll into the space heater, which had become a half-ton ball of burning thermite in my mind), and again hurdled the giant pile of bedclothes.

Now I realized that I couldn’t change her on the changing table because of the vast flood of urine that had soaked everything despite my most irresponsibly dangerous wadding measures. So I moved her to the bed, and tried to wrangle her into her fresh garment. It had about 300 or so snaps, and not all of the male pieces are on one side of the garment. You need a degree from MIT to figure out how to snap everything into place. It’s not symmetrical either, and of course no two baby garments have even a remotely similar design. My fury at this point had invaded every cell of my body except from the wrists down, which I managed to control lest I accidentally harm my child. Finally I gave up and shouted “F––– THIS THING!” and hurled the offensive garment to its death. Actually, it didn’t even suffer from the landing, the damn thing, and I couldn’t pick it up and rend it into a thousand pieces, which would have been my choice, because it had Erin’s friend’s initials on the tag, meaning it’s only a loaner and has to go back, clean and intact, to its rightful owner, who can bloody well have it back right now as far as I’m concerned, perhaps soaked in my own urine since this godforsaken garment from hell will never touch the skin of my precious daughter.

So instead of rending the garment into a thousand pieces I did the flip-off dance. [Note to albertnet readers: you’ll just have to imagine this dance. I’m not posting a video.] It only helped a bit. Then I had to hurdle the fiendish pile of bedclothes once again, find another damn outfit from the 600 in the drawer, evaluate it not just in terms of size and laundering status but also in terms of the likelihood that I’d be able to properly fasten all the snaps along its bizarre appendages and whatnot. I found one, hurdled the pile of bedclothes yet again, and put the new garment on Alexa, who had been continuing to scream bloody murder the whole while, at a decibel level that guarantees she has a V0₂ max surpassing Lance Armstrong’s.

Having finally got my daughter changed, I picked her up, carefully ascended the Col du Bedclothes, made it safely down the other side, and brought the squalling youngster downstairs to her mother, who I hoped would be sitting on the couch, boob out, ready to nurse the baby into silence. Instead, Erin was vacuuming, further rubbing my nose in her superior ability to withstand lack of sleep. I sat down with Alexa and bounced her on my knee, trying to calm her down, and then Erin says, “Well, the cat is ruining this expensive rug.” This pretty much put me over. “Well, should we just put her to sleep then?” From my standpoint at the time this response was perfectly justified. Of course, from Erin's perspective—the more lucid one—my utterance must have seemed utterly bizarre. After all, she had given me the night off by sleeping with Alexa in the guest room, and was occupying her short period of respite from the baby by vacuuming, and had made a fairly innocent comment about the state of our handmade Turkish rug, and got shocking vitriol in response. Not a perfect domestic scene.

That’s not my first blowup, nor perhaps my most spectacular. The other night, I was trying to assemble the Diaper Genie, and could not get the damn thing to work. I don’t even want the Diaper Genie, and we’re only using disposables for a short time, but I figured we have it and should go ahead and use it. But I absolutely could not figure out how to install the bags that are supposed to hold the soiled diapers into a long linked-sausage configuration. Finally, after what was really only a couple of minutes, I became furious at it. It had no instructions, and didn’t seem particularly intuitive. The “refill,” which seems like a stupid name for the bag cartridge that was really the very first one ever installed, had directions on it, but they become obscured in step 2 out of 5 when you put the cartridge into the Genie. Now there’s a smart design! I had to keep pulling the cartridge out and reading ahead. It just didn’t make sense. I figured this thing had to be intuitive enough for the least educated, least intelligent trailer trash Diaper Genie owner to use; why couldn’t I, a college-educated Network Design Engineer, get it to work? I beat on the top of it with my fist, and then hurled it noisily down the stairs, much to the amazement and amusement of Erin and her friend, who’d come over to cook us a meatloaf and help out.

I phoned a couple of other new parents, for whom we bought a Diaper Genie years ago, and after a long period of intense discussion and troubleshooting we determined that what I have is an old, small-mouth DG in the box of a new, large-mouth DG, with the “refill” for the new, large-mouth DG. This is why it wouldn’t fit. Probably somebody re-gifted us a barely-used but obsolete DG, throwing in the modern-style refill to make it look new. But that won’t stop me from marching into Target with it and demanding a replacement. If they don’t pony up, I’m going to spread model airplane cement all over the damn thing and torch it right there on the showroom floor.

Baby peripherals aside, child-rearing is a hoot. Alexa is great. She’s getting cuter by the day, and is generally a very sweet baby. She’s a bit gassy, which is a bummer for everybody, and we can’t seem to burp her. But she’s eating up a storm nonetheless. I love to hold her and offer up my index fingers, which she grabs in her fists. We’ve even figured out how to get her, sometimes, to take the pacifier. That’s a big help because I can’t just sit there 24-7 with a finger in her mouth, and she does love to suck.

dana albert blog