Category: Stuff

A Dark in the Light

~ riggledo ~ 3 Comments

I don’t like the dark.  I’m not afraid of the dark.  Not really anyway.  I just don’t like the dark.  It’s more of a “fear of the unknown” thing.  And it’s not really fear, exactly, I just don’t like it.  And since I don’t like the unknown, and there is a lot of “unknown” in the dark, I don’t like the dark.

But I should also say that I’m talking about utter darkness.  Complete darkness.  Can’t see my hand in front of my face darkness.  I don’t like that.

These days it’s not really something I often have to worry about.  And I’ll bet you don’t either.  Turn off all your lights and look around.  With modern technology being what it is, I bet you’d be hard pressed not to be able to see clearly enough to get around easily.  So many appliances and devices in our homes these days have some sort of light on them, even when they’re “turned off”.

In my living room, there are two lights on the front of my printer.  The modem which sits on top of my DVR on my TV stand has five lights lit or blinking at all times.  There’s a clock on top of my mantle that is back-lit with an orange glow.  Even my laptop, when completely powered down has a light next to the port the plug is in.

In my kitchen the stove, microwave and iPod dock all have illuminated clocks on their faces.  When the automatic timer has activated it, my Keurig machine has a back-lit LCD display that is quite bright.

In my bedroom, right now there are three separate alarm clocks, all with lit faces, not to mention the face of my iPhone which is often turned on and lit up.  There’s even still a VCR in there with a lit LED display.

There happens to be a nice soft, blue night-light in the hallway which was there when I moved in and I never bothered to unplug.

Add to all that, the street light right outside my front door which shines through the windows in the kitchen, living room and bedroom, even through the closed plantation shutters on all the windows.

I have ambient light, all the time.  Not enough to bother me, but enough to keep me comfortable in my surroundings.

I am also not a morning person.  I do not rise easily.  I do not spring out of bed at the first sound of the alarm clock and I am not raring to go with my day.  It takes time for me to be awake enough to get out of bed.  (This is the reason there are multiple alarm clocks  in my room.)  The clock on my night stand goes off at 6:30 and tunes to my favorite morning radio show.  The clock on the dresser across the room goes off at 7:00 with an obnoxious beep that gradually grows louder until it is acknowledged.  I throw the covers back and slowly push myself into an upright position before dragging my self just far enough out of the bed to reach across and snooze the clock.  Then I plop back down on the bed, pull the covers over my body and I’m out cold again in seconds.  Nine minutes later we repeat this process and I crawl back into bed slightly more awake than the last time.  Nine minutes after that we go through the whole thing again and nine minutes after that and nine minutes after that.  With each interval I am a little bit more awake.

At some point, I lie in bed, listening to the radio show, 75% awake and 25% not while I wait for the alarm to go off again and I debate whether this will be the time I get up and stay up.

And that’s were we were today, sometime in the second quarter of the seven o’clock hour, when suddenly the radio show went silent.  I opened one eye and reached out to turn the radio back on when I noticed that the clock face was blank.  That’s when I realized that when the radio went silent I had also heard a downward sliding groan of noise outside.

There was a momentary resurgence of power and then the downward sliding groan again and everything was silent.  The power in the entire neighborhood had gone out.  I called PG&E to be sure and they were already aware of it.

At 7:20 in the morning it is not exactly dark around here.  The sunlight pierced the louvers of the shutters and the house was sufficiently illuminated.  And yet, with out all the random ambient lights and without all the soft hums of electronic components, it seemed oddly dark.

Not spooky.

Not scary.

Just… Dark.

Vaguery and Metaphor

~ riggledo ~ 1 Comment

The world in which I live today is vastly different from the one in which I grew up.  In fact it’s so vastly different that, at times, it feels like a different planet entirely.

Most of the time I embrace that difference.  I coddle and nurture it, will it to blossom and grow into something more.  More beautiful.  More healthy.  At least more real.  Because sometimes, at the most inconvenient times, that different world crashes in on me and feels like a lie.

Not a lie.  An illusion.

Suddenly, I’m certain that the different world is not for me; It’s for other people.  It’s fine for other people, but not fine for me.  And when that happens I feel like I’m standing in some sort of spacial plane, sliver thin, and all my own.  I’m the only one here and on one side is the world from which I came, on the other side is the would I want to go and I am trapped in between.  I can not return to the world from which I came.  The barrier has solidified and I can not break through, not that I would want to.  I want to be rescued, pulled from this plane and brought into the desired world, only, I don’t think I can be rescued.  Only I can cross the barrier and bring myself into the chosen world…

Except, I don’t know how.

 

WOE: Mentor

~ riggledo ~ 4 Comments

The Write On Edge prompt for this week was simply the word “mentor”.  Now those of you who’ve been around for a while and already know a thing or two about me, might have suspected I would write about Lil’B and my mentor-ship with him.  You might be surprised that my relationship with him is not the first thing that popped into my mind.  Those of you who have really been around for a while, I think I might have written about this experience once before and if this is old news, I’m sorry.

Do you have a mentor, or are you a mentor for someone else?

Now write about an experience with your mentor (or the person to whom you are a mentor) that shows us what that relationship means to you.

500 words maximum, please. And remember, this is a non-fiction prompt.

 

My family moved three days after my seventh grade year started.  I walked into the school office where I was enrolled in the school and given a class schedule with mere minutes to spare before the tardy bell on my first class and the secretary told me how to find my first classroom.  Somehow I was expected to make my way from class to class entirely on my own after that.  I really don’t even know how, but somehow I managed to get from one class and classroom to the next that morning.  And I either managed to do it without ever being tardy, or I looked sufficiently shell-shocked that my teachers had pity on me that first day (I never had detention.)

Finally, after my third class of the day, it was time for lunch, or so the NCR copy of my class schedule told me.  The problem was, unlike the rest of the line items of my class schedule, this item listed no room number other than “CAF”.  It seemed simple enough though, I would follow the rest of the students in my class.  Surely we would all be going to lunch at the same time.  Surely we would all be going to the same place.  Only it wasn’t just my class in the hallways.  And it wasn’t just time to wander to the cafeteria for those who were in the halls and very soon, I lost track of the heads I was following as they bobbed through the crowd.

I found myself back in the hallway near the office, completely lost.  I held the grubby paper in my hand knowing that I was supposed to be in the Cafeteria, but having no idea where that was, when I heard a voice form behind me.  “Are you lost?” she asked.  I turned, expecting to look up at the teacher but surprised to look her straight in the eye.  She looked grandmotherly to my twelve-year-old eyes, with curly hair and big square framed glasses.  After pointing me toward the cafeteria, which happened to be just down the hall and sending me on my way with a pat on the back, I was grateful, but thought little else about the kindly woman who had helped me.

I ate my lunch as quickly as I could, having spent half my lunch period looking for the cafeteria, then made my way to my next class, Music.  Lo and behold!  I walked into the kindly teacher’s classroom.  Music very quickly became my favorite class of the day and I spent many afternoons after school in that classroom, helping clean up and organize.

The next year I spent my first class each day as a student aid.  I chose the music teacher as the one I would assist.  Though my family lived only a few blocks from school, I was always a few minutes late to class (some things never change) – and yet, I never had detention.

 

Not The Only One

~ riggledo ~ 4 Comments

I read a post on another blog this morning that I thought bore some sharing.  The post is, at least in part, about the civil and economic unrest in Greece, which, to be honest, I’m not very well informed about, but more importantly to me, the post included this paragraph:

I did not like the word faggot used there. I don’t like it that it’s acceptable by somebody in the public eye to use words like that to berate others in the year 2012. I don’t like it that well-known people can go on TV and use this and other similar words without anyone complaining about it. I don’t like it that racist and homophobic language are equally acceptable. That people can feature in mainstream media, using words like faggot (poustis), sissy (aderfi), nigger (arapis) and ape (pithikos) to describe others. Whether it’s done in a serious or a ‘humorous’ way. I loathe that no one calls them out on it.

I say, here, here!  It’s time more people stood up to this!

The entire blog post can be read here.

Another Quiet Week-End

~ riggledo ~ 4 Comments

Not too much to report this week-end.  After work on Friday, I stopped by Karin’s house to drop something off for her and ended up staying for three hours, hanging out, having dinner and, of all things, talking religion… go figure.

I slept late on Saturday and then took my recyclables to the recycling center.  I buy way too much Diet Pepsi, so I pay way too much in California Redemption Value (bottle deposits), not to take them in and get my money back.  Every few months I load up my car with trash bags full of aluminum cans and plastic bottles and take them in.  Yesterday, I got just a few cents shy of $45.00 so I’d say this is a worthwhile exercise.

After I dropped those off, I went to Popeye’s Chicken and Biscuits to get some… well, chicken and biscuits.  I was feeling the need for a little comfort food.  It helped a bit.  I spent the rest of the afternoon just relaxing and hanging out.  Watched all the regular television on my DVR.  Watched a Netflix DVD, original Doctor Who, the episode where Peter Davison relinquished the role to Colin Baker (not that anybody knows or cares about that), and then I watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog.  It was pretty good and funny, right up to the end, and then it got a bit weird.  Oh well.  I even got some recreational reading done.  And in spite of all that resting I still managed to stay up way too late last night.

I slept in this morning, but woke up to a very nice voice mail message from Gene who, sadly, returned to San Diego today.  I got up and watched last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, hosted by Maya Rudolph (very funny) while I ate my lunch and then it was time to get ready and head out.  Today was Lil’B day and we went to the movies.

I occasionally ask him if there’s anything in particular he’d like to do and he almost always says, “I don’t know”, which comes as a surprise to exactly zero people, I’m sure.  But last Monday night, when I was taking him home after dinner, I asked him if he had anything in particular in mind that he’d like to do this week-end and after a moment’s contemplation he told me he wanted to go see Journey 2, The Mysterious Island.  This is not a movie I would have opted to go to on my own, but Lil’B rarely expresses a specific desire of any kind so when he does, I like to try to make sure it happens.

I posted this on my Facebook page:

About to watch Journey 2 with my Little Brother…  I may have to watch this movie through my fingers!!!

I thought this movie was going to be filled with over-sized creepy crawly things and that my skin would be crawling by the time it was over.  There were a couple of instances with enormous centipedes, some massive spiders and a couple bee’s large enough to ride (I’m allergic to bee stings so they always oog me out!) and of course a lizard as big as a house, but all-in-all the movie wasn’t terrible.  It actually had a pretty good story that should have been pretty entertaining but it was not as well executed as it could have been.  Too bad.

I spent the rest of the evening cleaning up my Twitter account.  Deleting people who have either been inactive for a long time, or who do not follow me back and therefore aren’t interactive.  Or at least I did until Twitter started having technical difficulties and now here we are!

It’s a long week-end and mercifully I do not have any big plans tomorrow.  Officially, it’s not a holiday for me, but my company is kind of weird.  We have multiple entities that all co-exist, but the employees are on different payrolls.  Since my office building is owned and operated by the Northern California Region which considers Presidents Day to be a holiday, the building is closed, but since I am not a Northern California Region employee and Presidents Day is not a holiday on my payroll, I am required to take the day off and use one of my four float days for it.  I don’t really mind though.  I used to be a Northern California Region employee and I had the holiday but no float days.  Now I have four float days but lost this one holiday.  So I choose to look at it, instead, as though I have three float holidays and continue to have Presidents Day off as a paid holiday.

I texted Michelle earlier today to see if she wanted to go see This Means War tomorrow but as it turns out, it’s not a holiday for her.  So I guess I should just be grateful.  And I am!