The Terrible Tues...day?

Oh that title is amazingly cheesy! Whew.

This is going to be a rant blog – sorry. But today has been freaking rant-tastic. (If you want to read a funny rant blog, check out Matt's blog.)

First I was fully awake for no reason at 5:30. OK, I think. I’ll just roll over and shut my eyes and have another glorious, warm, peaceful hour of sleep. Orrrrrr, I’ll just lay there awake until 6:27 or so. The last time I looked at the clock it was 6:15, and then the alarm went off at 6:30, and Adam instantly suctioned himself to me.

I don’t know what happens while I’m sleeping, but when I wake up in the middle of the night and go to stretch my leg out or just find a colder area of the bed to lay in, Adam SENSES this, rolls over, and attaches to my back. I sleep on my side but slightly curled. I don’t want my legs to be straight down because then I wouldn’t be able to balance on my side. But Adam likes me to lie perfectly straight and unbalanced so he can wrap himself around me. Plus he has subconscious ESP. Like if I move slightly to reposition my arm or something, he will be stuck to my back in like one second. So I say, “Umm…Adam dear? It’s too hot, can you move back like four feet?” But he can’t hear me until like the fourth time, and by then I’m just like “BABE!! You’re suffocating me.” So then he thinks I’m sort of evil, because who just yells at you while you’re asleep? And in the middle of the night you can’t really be like, “No no, you misunderstood. There’s a back story here – I’m dying of heatstroke and I tried to tell you like nine times." Or at least I can’t, because I might be killed. Also, since I’m already on the subject, I used to be an insane sleeper, OK, but I’ve changed my ways. I was a frequent and unpredictable sleepwalker. See this blog for details.

But I never stealthily tucked the blankets around myself like a burrito and rolled away with them! And it’s always when I’m AWAKE, so it’s not like I just don’t notice and sleep on until I’m freezing in the middle of the night. I’ll be laying there fully under the blanket, awake and kind of mad about it because obviously I’m not asleep but at least I’m warm, and suddenly the blankets slide away. I sleep on the right side of the (queen size) bed with a foot of room to work with, because Adam can only sleep in the direct center of the bed. And I don’t like if my feet or hands or knees are hanging over the side because as a child I thought wolves were under the bed and I just get an uneasy feeling if they’re hanging out there. Anyway, so Adam will be lying there on his back totally passed out and unmoving, and then suddenly for no reason he’ll quickly roll to the right, gather the blankets with his legs, and roll back to the left with the entire blanket/sheet ensemble. It’s almost like he practices it. It’s maddening, but also really funny sometimes. I try not to laugh though because the Before-Coffee-Adam might kill me.

Anyway, today when my alarm went off, I was like OK, Tuesday. That’s cool. I forgive you for jacking my sleep because it’s sunny already, my classes are early, and I have the day off work. Take that. And I went to school, got a good parking spot, and put 2 hours and 45 minutes worth of change into the meter (I know, I know. Biking will commence soon. But I’m going to complain about things having to do with the car anyway right now because I’m stupid and drove my car). Then I walked to my classroom and then immediately all the way back to the car again to retrieve my coffee. My first class, Marital and Family Therapy, went fine. Well, except I wanted to sit in the back (because my hair is down today, and I have ripped out too much of it recently but I still wanted to wear it down because it feels nicer), so I chose a seat in the second-to-back row. I would have chose the back row but everyone else was sort of up further and I didn’t want to be rude and sit farthest away from the teacher. And then someone came in like 10 minutes late and sat in the seat directly behind me. There was a whole row!!! How was she going to see the blackboard RIGHT BEHIND ME?? I know perfectly well how irrational it is to care about my hair, but I just sometimes want to sit in the back of the classroom. Is that so bad? If this paragraph was perplexing, read this.

But in reality you’ll probably still be perplexed. I am.

Anyhow, then I had the class that I like the best but am most terrified of, because it’s “seminar-style” and there are only 15 students. Which apparently means the teacher just calls on you anytime he wants and sometime I’m going to have to lead a class discussion who knows how many times? Like stand up and present. At random. I mean can it get any scarier? Sheesh. The teacher is funny and talks about relevant things to 2010, which I like. When teachers use phone cords as an analogy like my chemistry teacher last term, I worry that almost everyone else in the class won’t get it because phone cords are before their time. (Except at work. Where we have long phone cords and I do the most moving and talking on the phone ever. I totally clothes-lined the relief pharmacist yesterday. It’s like those laser rooms in movies, where you try to get to the diamond but there are secret lasers every which way and you have to contort your body to get around them, and for some reason you have to wear very little clothing if you’re female and when you're dodging the lasers it's always a lot more racy than when the guy is).

Anyway, this guy talks about video games and cell phones and basketball and gorillas and uses youtube.com to show us fun videos. And then grills us on some totally new concept he’s just presented that day! Like the word ‘endogenous.’ He just said the word for the first time like one minute ago, and then he calls on someone and says, “So what does endogenous mean and how does it relate to misdirection of attention?” Huh? Thank God he asked the kid in front of me, who managed to extrapolate the meaning from the parts of the word. He’ll ask the question, and then say, “Yes? You in the green?” like you just raised your hand or something, and then you’re like, “Wait, me? Or…” It’s nerve-racking. I don’t even care about my seating arrangement in that class because I’m too busy scrambling to think of something that makes sense in any way. When I answer questions in class, even if I know the answer, I still manage to misspeak somehow, turn red, and correct myself. In the process I realize that what I said doesn’t make sense and then I just trail off. Today I asked a question about a project, and I said something like, “Our group was wondering, and I’m wondering I guess can we use, because I’m asking, is this, I mean are we, for the hypothesis, am I on the right track here? If I say, I mean, um, for the hypothesis?” And he stares at me sympathetically like, “What IS your hypothesis?” And I’m like, “Oh of course, sorry.” And then I get some kind of answer, hopefully, after I’ve actually asked something that even resembles a question. It’s horrifying, but I’m used to it. Moving on.

During the last 15 minutes of class, we split into groups for a project. Oh, JOY! We were supposed to bring an idea for an experiment today to share, and 3 of the 4 of us had it. And of the 3, I am the only one who followed the directions. I actually thought of it during my hour of non-sleep, which was awesome. So we had to use mine for the main thing, and so of course I was like, well I guess I’ll type it up and email it to the teacher early this afternoon!! Yay Tuesday! This teacher is crazy with his impromptu stuff. God I hate group assignments. The people in my group were smart – I could tell by the way they defined words they’d never heard. So what the H?

So I went to the computer lab, with the knowledge that I had approximately 34 minutes to get back to my car/write the thing and email it. But obviously I didn’t make it in time because there was a nice green ticket on the windshield. I think the parking meter maid Apparated, because I swear he or she should have still been writing the ticket as I walked up. Probably my meter had been blinking for like 20 seconds. I mean, I try to be a conscientious citizen. I don’t throw things out my car window, and I try not to take up eight spaces with my car (don’t even mention Mazzi’s, those of you who remember), I don’t run into people with my car, I don’t go 45 mph on Hwy 126, and I always pay the meter. Unless I forget. But this time I didn’t even forget!! And no one will ever know that I TRIED to pay it, because there’s no record! I tried, city.

I think it’s appropriate to insert a mini-rant about the Portland parking meters. They are innovative because you can use credit cards or paper bills or change, which is glorious. But it drives me crazy that you can’t add time onto it once you’ve printed out your sticky note thing. Like, if you’re at one that has a one-hour time limit and you put in a half hour’s worth of money, and then remember you need to go do something else for ten minutes, you have to print a whole new sticky note (you stick them on your window and they say the time you should return to the car) that doesn’t take into account your old sticky note. So then you have two dumb notes taped to your car window and one says you have to come back in a half hour, and the other says you have to come back in ten minutes. That drives me insane for some reason.

No matter, I decided, I’ll just go pay it and be on my merry way to enjoy Tuesday. Tuesday is frankly awesome right now by the way, so this blog is just a means of processing all the injustices that happened in the morning. I’m in a spectacular mood, and I’m not being sarcastic. Wednesday might be even better, who knows? So I put 30 minutes worth of change into a new meter outside the parking ticket office, which is also conveniently the Municipal Court, so I feel like a freaking criminal going in there, but anyway.

As I’m waiting for the lady to praise me for being so prompt on my ticket payment, she’s like, “Hmm, you have an outstanding balance on here from 2008.” So I go, “Oh. Shoot.” And she asks if I remember parking on 13th and Moss. And I’m like, “No way lady.” But she said it was only $24, which was a giant relief since I thought those things double by the month or something. Turns out they don’t even care if you don’t pay your ticket for two years. She even said I didn’t have to pay that one today! But I did, because if this happens again in 2012 I will freak out. So 16+24=$40 later (actually about $43 if you count all the change I PUT IN THE EFFING METERS), I was free. Free to go home and return a phone call from a couple days ago.

The lady on the phone said, “Is 1345 Ferry St. your current address?” And I said, “No. That’s where I lived in 2006 though.” And she goes, “OK, we’re a collections agency trying to collect a debt.” And I’m like, “OK. For what?” Because I can’t remember anything problematic in the last five years. Honestly. Don’t those people try to contact you like mad if they want money? I mean it’s been four years apparently. And she asks if I still have my Comcast modem from 2006 and I’m like, “No!” Who knows where that thing is…probably in JD’s stepdad’s garage for all I know. And she goes, “OK, you owe $99.99 then. Would you like to pay that today?” Yeah I’d LOVE to! Gahhhhhhhhh!! So I paid it, and then the lady was happy. I just wonder how they let these things go for like four YEARS, or two for the parking ticket, and then suddenly you have to pay it by Wednesday? I mean, I just want to know if something is wrong – and then I can take care of it. I’m trying to be a good citizen, I swear. Look, I just paid $139.99 before 11 a.m.!! Or more like $142.99. And then the lady, even though I thought she hung up because the phone went dead for like five seconds, as it had been doing periodically the whole conversation, says, “So is 1345 Ferry St. a current billing address for this card?”