Back-To-School

Like many of you, I celebrate New Year’s on the first Tuesday after Labour Day. Nothing says fresh start, new beginnings and the first day of the TRUE calendar year like Back-To-School. Even though I have been out of school for longer than I was in school, I still get that tingle of glee when the first cool breeze blows by telling me it’s time to break out the pencil case and book bag, and to stock up on tights and dollar-store stretchy gloves.

If you’ve read my previous entries -  and I know that you all have and have committed every word to memory - you’ll recall that I totally loved school and continue to be the biggest back to school geek on the planet. School supply shopping sends me into raptures. It’s true. This Tuesday I will be wearing a plaid skirt and wool pullover despite the fact that the forecast calls for a humidex of a billion. I’m too excited to sweat.

Parents everywhere join me in the spirit of the season, heaving a giant, collective sigh of relief. The return to structured time, to achievable goals (how many of you actually even started War and Peace this summer?), and school friends returning from holidays means a reduction in pronouncements of “I’m bored”.  Yes, it really is the most wonderful time of the year.

Brian says I need to include something here about Rodney Dangerfield but won’t fully explain why.  Something about a movie he’d done. 

   

   Oh,and that it was the cat that made that smell. 

Right.

Anyhoo, back to the whole back to school thing.

I used to read Seventeen Magazine to see what all the girls in the United States would be wearing for the new school year. It was always plaid skirts and blouses with bows that they could wear and make look hip and not dorky. Pheobe Cates worked magic, I tell you. 

They used Bonnie Bell toner on their perfect skin and Stridex pads on their non-existent pimples. I slept with Stridex pads on my face sometimes. It didn’t get rid of my zits, and left angry red circles imprinted on my chin and cheeks. Does anyone still read Seventeen Magazine (if it exists)? Teenage girls probably get their fashion advice from Maxim these days, if Queen Street is any indication. 

We didn’t wear plaid skirts at our school. In fact, you’d get laughed at if you had worn a skirt. I wanted to wear plaid skirts, like Pheobe Cates. Instead I wore gross cords that were too tight and had ink explosion stains on the back pocket. By choice. My mother wanted me to dress better. Implored me to, even. I resisted her every attempt to make me look presentable. She still tells me a little lipstick wouldn’t hurt. After she tasers me.

Sometimes I just want to go back in time and give a big fat hug to that girl and tell her to hang in their because things will improve and that she really doesn’t need to sleep with Stridex pads on her face.  And the pimply faced dude she has a crush on is an absolute and total douche. And I might also tell her that she doesn’t really need more Nestle’s Quik.

I love the clear expectations of school. Do your work, suck up to your teacher and you will do well. 

This was/is my mantra.

Repeat daily and you will succeed in everything you try.

This, my friends is the real “Secret”. Never mind that crap about putting out “positive energy” (whatever the hell that is. Does that mean I am electric and that I should try to shock people?). The truth is, brown-nosing is your Weapon of Mass Achievement. Use it wisely, use it well, use it often. This is the best back to school tip I could give any young student. Suck up. Practice this and it will serve you well in your adult life. 

Good morning!

I am, without a doubt, a morning person. I have always been a morning person, with the exception of a short period where I worked as a bartender and my natural sleep schedule was altered so that I could work between the hours of Happy Hour and Gutter Puke.

Otherwise, I have been a devotee to the day, immune to the siren song of the night time party bar action rock out. I’ve never been much in to parties, unless there was a lot of soda pop and some kind of cake involved. And I didn’t have to talk to people I don’t know. People who might not have cake.

The best parties I’ve ever attended have been the ones I’ve hosted because I can always busy myself with slicing cheese and cutting cake if I can’t focus on any of the myriad conversations around me (see previous blog about my difficulty locking in on a tete-a-tete). Plus, my parties always end by 10:30 pm. A half hour past my bed time.

Anyhooooo

So, I am early to bed, early to rise. There is research that shows that our bodies natural alarm clock is set in our genetic code (Brown, et al. 2008; Ramsey & Bass, 2009); being a morning person or a night owl is not a choice, but rather an imperative. Further, being an early riser is, apparently, the result of a genetic mutation (He, et al., 2009).

I have always suspected that I was a mutant. 

I am the only one in my immediate family who prefers sunrise to moon shine 

(No one in my family likes the one-word variety of moonshine- long line of abstimonious Methodist ministers. Then again, my mom has been known to drink up to two rum punches in an evening. Drunkard.). This is interesting because recent research suggested that people who are extreme night owls, but are forced to function outside their biologically coded best hours, are more inclined to smoking and drinking (Whitman, Paulus & Roenneberg, 2010 ) Maybe this is why there are no super cool day time dance clubs. And why my parents and brother had such huge match book collections and weird friends sleeping on the couch all the time.*

 My parents thought I was quite the little oddity, marching to the tune of my own circadian drummer. When I was not more than three, my mother would set out a bowl of Cheerios and a blanket before bed, so that when I woke up at the crack of crazy on Saturday mornings I could feed myself, keep warm and watch cartoons without waking up the others who invariably slept in until 11. 

I was not allowed to have milk (would have spilled it) or touch the thermometer (would have burned the house down) or turn the tv volume past whisper level (would have awoke the beasts).  I am sure that this instilled in me my love of peaceful mornings and carbs and excessive blanketing.

Ergo, I blame my Vector addiction, my constant state of being chilly and huge, gory feet on my mother. 

J’Accuse, Mickey. J’Accuse!

By the time you are 18 you have a pretty good idea whether you are a lark or an owl. But you might not, at that tender age, know what you want to do with your life. So here are a list of career options based on your chronotype. 

Morning person:

gardener

personal trainer

folk rocker

teacher

Minister

dental hygienist

Accountant

Volunteer

Milk Maid

Scientist.

Police Detective, Comedic

Night Person:

art thief

international man of mystery

bartender

card dealer in Vegas

celebrity

painter

performance artist

Tavern Wench

rock star

Satanist

security guard

Drag Queen

Funeral Parlour Director, weird type.

Scientist, Evil Type

Police Detective, Sexy, Hard-Boiled Type.

It used to be that conventional wisdom stated that those who rose with the dawn were more productive. This may or may not be true, depending on how you define “productive”. While we morning people might do better on some tests, we are invariably less cool, dress like dorks and tend toward silly things like community theatre and train spotting. I’m thinking the kind of people who listen to  Katrina and the Waves while speed walking.

Typical Early Riser and Typical Night Owl.

Larks might do better initially, but we tend to crash much faster than do our owly friends, who function better in the later hours when morning people are whining and scrounging for coffee. So I figure it all evens out in the end.

I do not do well in the evenings. I tend to start to fade at around 8:30. I get bleary eyed and cranky like a toddler if I am forced to stay up too much past my bed time. I haven’t seen Saturday Night Live in 15 years. Brian and I love when people invite us to things that don’t even start until 10pm. Gives us a good laugh. Then we go back to sipping our tea and making detailed lists about what we are going to do for the next 40 years.

On the rare occasions when I have to stay up late, I feel like I’m being subversive and part of some grand mysterious club that only university students and drug dealers are a part of. Maybe I’m a little bit cool. Maybe I’m going to party all night.

 I’m not fooling anyone, I’m sure, with my stifled yawns and squinty, pathetic attempts to follow conversations that AREN’T  about how we really should be leaving now, everyone is fully aware that I am a morning dork and while they are planning which after hours clubs to hit, I’m thinking about drinking my morning coffee after I clean up the raccoon assaulted organic waste bins.

Because this is the kind of thing morning people do. 

I have in my mind that Germans and Swedish people are all morning people. French and Spanish people are night owls. 

Nobody knows what time the Dutch get up. I’ve Googled it, and it’s a bit of a scholarly dead end. Maybe they just don’t go to bed.  Dutch non-sleeping zombies with their bikes and windmills and awesome cheeses. They can’t afford to sleep. Their words are so super long that they have to stay awake 3 extra hours a day just to say “Good morning” to each other.

Anyway, back to sleep cycles. 

Or not. I’m tired.

Goodnight.

Brown, S., Kunz, A., Dumas, A., Westermark, P., Vanselow, K., Tilmann-Wahschaffe, A., Herzel, H. & Kramer, A. (2008). Molecular Insights into Human Daily Behavior, PNAS, 105 (5), 1602-1607.

He, Y., Jones, C., Fujiki, N., Xu, Y., Guo, B., Holder Jr., J., ROssner, M., Nishino, S., & Hui, Y. (2009). The Transcriptional Repressor DEC2 Regulates Sleep Length in Mammals, Science. 325 (5942), 866-870.

Ramsey, K. & Bass, J. (2009). Obeying the Clock Yields Benefits for Metabolism. PNAS, 106 (11), 4069-4070.

Wittmanm M., Paulus, M. & Roenneberg, T. (2010). Decreased Psychological Well-Being in Late “Chronotypes” Is Mediated by Smoking and Alcohol Consumption. Substance Use & Misuse, 45 (1-2), 15-30.

*Never happened.

I Hear You

Maybe you are on a bus or streetcar, or in a cafe with a friend catching up over burnt tasting lattes. Or perhaps on a train with your sweet, sweet lover, trundling through the German countryside touring castles and pastry parlours. You might be on a plane with your co-worker, discussing a new project at work and how your boss makes it obvious he goes commando. 

It doesn’t matter where you are.

It doesn’t matter what you do, or what you are talking about.

If I am in earshot, I am eavesdropping on you.

I promise I would never reveal your identity.  But I CAN’T promise that if you say something interesting, awful or stupid, I won’t tell people about it.

I’m just not that strong.

I find it impossible not to eavesdrop, even though polite society dictates that it is in bad form. Can’t help it. I could be sitting with  a friend who is telling  me about their engagement, their new baby, their incurable illness,  but if someone else is in earshot talking about, say, the Kardashians, or sandwiches, or lumber - well, I’m incapable of following my friend’s story and instead focus in on the prattled buzz of strangers.

Don’t be too angry at me. Eavesdropping is the highest form of flattery. It means that your discussion about your new jeans is way more interesting than anything I could be thinking about in my own brain.  I think it’s pretty clear from this blog that that is the honest to goodness truth.

Here are a few random conversations I have overheard and recall now for your dining pleasure:

I was in the ER room waiting with my neighbour. It was about 5 in the morning. A rather odd looking couple in their late twenties were enacting their own private soap opera in a very public venue. They were totally high on something. They vacillated between being madly in love and striking each other in rage. Security kept shushing them (And we all know that crazy crack heads HATE to be shushed!). At one point they were quiet for a moment and then suddenly the woman looked at her lover-man, with tear brimmed eyes and shakily said:

No. No you really can’t. They were at fisticuffs in the parking lot 15 minutes later.

Traveling provides not only an abundance of eavesdropping opportunities, but also, just weird interactions. At the  front desk of a hotel where we’d stayed the previous night, I was checking out and paying my incidentals, and the trainee who was serving me turned to her supervisor for guidance on the transaction:

Truck stops are nothing but hilarious. They have so much candy and so many people who were dropped on their heads repeatedly as children (by accident, of course). In a Kentucky Truck stop bathroom for example: 

In Tennessee, a truck stop cashier, friendly as can be: 

you have to say it out loud to get it.

Overheard in airport waiting area; Porter Airlines, by the way (which is a freaking awesome airline):

We had made a pitstop in Nashville at a Starbucks. A young woman bolted in, looking panicked and hair akimbo. She was breathing heavily like she had been chased. I asked her if she was ok:

 Relieved that it was nothing major, and, as usual, trying to be jokie I asked her:

I stare at her. Count about 5 beats here. Girl says:  “You’re kidding right? 

I respond:

This other time, a million years ago when I worked in a bar I overheard a guy telling a girl he was hitting on:

-Overheard outside  after a Crash Test Dummies show: 

sigh

Clearly if I am within 100 yards of you, you need to be hyper aware of what you’re saying because I am totally listening and forming an unflattering opinion of you based on the small snippets of conversation I can hear. To my friends, if you really need to talk to me, it’s best to hold my head and force me to look in your eyes while you are talking to me. If my eyes glance sideways, that means I am focussing in on a peripheral conversation about someone’s disappointment with their work schedule at East Side Marios this weekend and not really taking in that you are telling me about your car accident.

Maybe me friends should start talking to me only in rhymes. And holding up sparklers. That would probably help. I could wear blinders like a horse.  Or just communicate via the internet where my friends can’t see that I’m descaling the coffee maker before I get back to them about their house burning down. 

I have no idea how I have any friends at all. Thank you for tolerating me.