Thursday, August 15, 2002

Why Is Everything So Hard? Maybe it's just the late summer doldrums or maybe the world is just full of flakes. In either case case, doing the couple of things that I need to get done at the moment is proving unnecessarily difficult. First, I called the Secaucus Home Depot this morning to see if I could get them to install a dishwasher and some countertops in our new apartment. I checked their Web site to see that they do in fact offer what they they call "At-Home Services". But the person in Secaucus had never heard of that or anything that sounded like it (though the recording I got while I was on hold told me to ask about Home Depot's At-Home Services). Maybe this site has it right. And then there's the effort to pick up our car (which at least seems to have been properly repaired). There is a New Jersey Transit bus that goes out there. That much is certain, but I can't seem to figure out exactly which bus it is. Looking at their schedule, it seems to me that we want to take the 197 to Route 46 and Riverview Drive. But my wife's friend, who lives near there, said that we should take the 193 to Willowbrook. To verify that, I called New Jersey Transit, and the woman that I spoke to said that I should take the 194 to a stop that's not listed on the schedule. How hard can this be? 8:50:02 PM     What do you think? ()

Is Firewater Next? The other night, I saw an ad for Big Indian (a low cost smokeshop on a reservation) on television for the first time. I first heard mention of this concept in an Onion article last week, but I just assumed it was a joke. It's not. So now we can visit reservations for gambling and cheap tobacco. You've still got to go to Nevada for prostitutes and New Hampshire for cheap liquor, but I wonder how long that will be true. Before too long, Native Americans may be the only ones legally allowed to undermine our country (well, aside from Microsoft). If that's not irony, I dont know what is. 7:54:30 AM     What do you think? ()

Doesn't Everyone Think Summer Sucks? My therapist and I have actually discussed the possibility that I suffer from some sort of reverse seasonal affective disorder, but I had never heard of any formal mention of such a condition. It turns out that there is such a thing, and I definitely suffer from it. (I think it's great that they illustrated the article with an Edward Hopper painting--I always believed that he best captured my experience of the hopelessness and relentlessness of a summer day.) This quote about sums it up for me: "I actually feel kind of attacked by the sun," the designer said. "I feel like it's piercing into me, and I start to feel more and more desperate to escape it. I have a hard time organizing and managing daily life. By August, I'm barely able to function and don't really recover until autumn. "October is reliably a good month. I'm waking up, and I feel like I'm being released from my summer, what I would call, jail cell." Ah October, when we turn back the clocks and go inside for six months. Reading that, I wanted to yell, "That's it!" like Charlie Brown did in A Charlie Brown Christmas when Lucy asked him if he suffered from pantophobia (the fear of everything). What person in their right mind prefers cold to warm, cloudy to sunny, dark to light, enclosed to open? Well, someone who suffers from this, which is to say me. 7:51:28 AM     What do you think? ()

© Copyright 2003 Morgan N. Sandquist. Last update: 11/2/03; 10:25:46 AM.

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