Calendar, I Love You

I want to write love poems to my digital calendar.

I am that person who buys a pretty new calendar/planner every year.  I take a long time at the bookstore picking out said calendar, examining all the options (page a day, page a week, monthly view, are the boxes big enough to write in, all that jazz).  I get really excited about it, use it for about a week and then I don’t touch it again until I’m sifting through junk eight months later and it’s time to throw it out.  We just did a major purge of household items last weekend, in which I threw out not one, but three very cute 2011 planners that were empty.  And I’m fairly certain I’ve done this for the last eight or nine years.  I’m sorry, trees.  I’m sorry you had to die in vain.

Clearly, I needed an intervention.  So, even though I’d resisted online calendars in the past (Too much technology! No one uses paper anymore!  I like my cool pens!), I gave it a shot (my husband helped with some light encouragement — perhaps he felt bad for the trees, too) and it’s working!  I can color code various tasks and I can get reminders on my phone, which were a little annoying at first, but now, I enjoy those tiny bells.  They keep me going.  We all need something to yell at us every now and then.  At least I do.

Waiting on News

I’ve been spending a lot of time checking email, checking real mail, checking the status of online submissions, checking the calendar, checking my phone, my iPod, my computer, anything that might provide some link to the world out there, anything I can get my hands on.  I could call it the refresh disease.  Refresh, refresh, refresh.  I’ve got it bad right now.  I have so many submissions and applications out there, so much of me out there.  I just want to hear something in return.  I’m all call and no response right now.

 

It’s Electric

In junior high, in 1990, The Electric Slide was crucial.  Your interpretation of those dance moves could make or break you.  It was all about how unique you could be, which is ironic since it’s a line dance and normally unison would be ideal.  But we were more concerned with who could go down on one knee, who could invent their own way of jumping to the next direction, who could turn their sidesteps into something more funky.

I remember the first time I heard the song — Electric Boogie by Marcia Griffiths.  I was in seventh grade, attending a student council field trip at another junior high, where we were forced to participate in awkward ice breakers and discussions about how to make our schools better.

The Electric Slide hadn’t hit our school yet, so we felt like pioneers.  We couldn’t wait to come home and show everyone what we’d learned.

See?

I’ve already lapsed on daily blogging.  And I don’t have much of an excuse.  We were snowed in most of the day yesterday.  We made dinner and baked cookies, then watched Groundhog Day and the beginning of What About Bob.  Our goal is to eventually expose our son to the entire oeuvre of Bill Murray.