Crap Whose Ass I’m Gonna Kick in 2009

1.  Cords.  Yeah, that’s right.  I’m talking about you, you horrid tangle of discombobulated monsters down by my feet.  Listen up, because I’m about to kick all of your asses.  I’ve done my research.  I’ve been communing with Martha.  I’ve drunk a lot of coffee.  I have purchased a ‘cord closet’ – a glorious piece of fake cherrywood furniture with regularly spaced holes for all of your sorry asses and a sliding panel for access to switch off the power bar that gives you life (see #3).  I’ve made little tags out of little round pieces of card stock, printed neatly with all of your names.  Drea = 1.  Cords =0.

2.  Cordless phones.  (I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t.)  So, yeah?  You say you’re going to let your battery die right in the middle of a call from a cute guy?  Yeah?  You collaborated with your homey, the backup cordless so that its battery would mysteriously die at precisely the moment he called back?  HAH!  Sucks to be you.  I’m thinkin’…’cordless’ = ’spineless’…or something that would make more sense if I wasn’t so buzzed on caffeine, but whatever, ’cause I’m going old school on your ass.  I bought a phone with a cord today. 

3.  Global warming.  Okay, I don’t have anything really clever for this one, I just wanted to point out again that I intend to start being more diligent about saving energy.  And the cord closet thingie is really friggin’ cool.

4.  Time.  I am as well-armed as a 5-foot-tall chick in cute boots can be.  I have:  a wall calendar (which is turned to the correct page, I might add *bow*), a daytimer for my new organized, clean and free-of-stray-LifeSavers purse, brand new pens in assorted cheerful colours (not part of the organization plan.  Part of the ‘make things pretty’ plan) and a new notebook for my extensive to-do list (and it’s pretty).  I have programmed my email account to ping me with reminders of important events.  Look out, 2009.

5.  Inertia.  So, yeah, getting older, eh?  Settling down, huh?  Stagnating in the small town?  HAH!  This is the year of zigs and zags, my friends – you’ll never know which way I’ll go…I’m gonna shake it up.  Go back to school?  Maybe.  Give up all my worldly goods and go live in a hut on the beach in Jamaica?  Possibly.  Swim with the sharks at the Great Barrier Reef?  You never know.  Become an astronaut?  WHY NOT?  I’ll give you settled down.  I’ll give you old.  Up yours, Inertia.

 

I bet the space shuttle could use some really good cord management.

Voice Mail-ophobia

I have a little problem.  I’m afraid of my voice mail.

You see, I have one of those systems that won’t let you retrieve your new messages until you deal with the old ones.  Every time I decide, “Okay, today I’m really going to do it – I’m going to go through all these messages and I’m going to have a pen and paper handy, and I’m going to write everyone’s phone numbers in my date book, and I’m going to call everyone back” ~

I log in and there’s that voice, saying, “The following messages will be deleted from your mailbox:…”

I mean, who needs threats from their answering machine?  Who?  Seriously.  I hate that voice.  I hate her.  With the heat of a thousand suns.  I want to find her and throw a pie at her face.  Don’t judge – she hates me, too, or she wouldn’t keep harassing me like this.

And then the spiralling anxiety kicks in, because I know that messages only get deleted from my mailbox after 15 days.  And so I realize that not only will I have to deal with all the messages from the past 15 days, but also all of the ones from the 15 days before that, which I fast-forwarded through and re-saved 15 days ago because I couldn’t muster it up to deal with them then, either.  So I speed through every single one, skipping them and just re-saving them all so that I can go through them at my leisure at a more convenient time.  And so the cycle continues…

It’s not that I don’t care.  I do.  I really do.  I actually get very sad when there aren’t any messages.  I love it when people call (well, except telemarketers…and stalkers…and my mom when she wants to know why I told my dad something before I told her…)

I mean, I do have call display (on the cordless phone which I tend to lose most frequently, naturally), but it is no help whatsoever, because almost everyone I know lives outside of my local calling area and we’re all using special long-distance services or pre-paid calling cards.  Which look a lot like telemarketing phone numbers on call display.  To which I perform a brief-but-scathing fuck-you ritual when I see them.

The worst part of it all is that I may actually know I owe someone a phone call…but when I try to call, I can’t remember their number, or it’s been disconnected.  And then I get vague stirrings in my memory of a voice mail they left for me and I realize that in order to get their number, I am going to have to venture into the wildlands of my voice mailbox.  It’s like that moment in the movies where you know the chick is going to go into the basement and you just know she shouldn’t.  I hear ominous sharky music in my head.  I acquire tunnel vision with a fiendishly glowing aura at the end, centred on my telephone.

I’m not trying to boast that I’m so popular I can’t keep up with my voice mail.  Oh, no – in fact, I believe it is quite the opposite.  The last few times I actually braced myself and listened through them, it was interesting to note how many of the messages began with “Hey, asshole…”  – which always leads to one of those “BAHAHAHAAAhaha – hey!” moments.  But I’m trying to learn to think of it as a term of endearment (which, actually, in my family, it kind of is). 

The only time I voluntarily listen to my voice mail, really, is when I’m feeling blue.  I act all cynical and sarcastic most of the time, but (don’t tell anyone) I’m such a sentimental loser.  I really am.  If you sing me a song or tell me that you love me in a voice mail message, odds are good it will be saved forever.  My best friend phones me every year on my birthday at the crack of dawn and sings ‘Happy Birthday’ in a silly voice (Betty Boop, Marilyn Monroe, etc.).  I have at least three years’ worth of these calls still on record.  When I feel funky, I go listen to these messages and I feel better.  It’s a cheap, quick fix and it is not below me to use it.

Anyway, how about we just say that this post is an open letter to all those I’ve been neglecting and we start fresh?  Or keep calling.  I promise to stop being an asshole.

It’s not easy being afraid of your voice mail.

The Over-Achiever’s Hangover Handbook

While I frequently boast flamboyantly about my laziness and slackdom (not untruthfully), it is also true that I have a strong history of being productive.  I am living proof that it is possible for a Girl Gone Wild and Brainy Smurf to reside in the exact same psyche.  

Since it is my intent to pack as much experience into my life as possible and to learn everything there is to know, I need to accept that these things cannot be accomplished without some serious time management. 

So I don’t like to waste time completely.  Even when I’m slacking off, I often use manipulative psychological tactics to convince myself that I am ‘multi-tasking’ or investing in some kind of ‘research’ for my writing or whatever nonsense I can conjure to avoid feeling bad about slacking.   

So what this means is that after a night of doing Sourpuss shooters around my kitchen table with my girlfriends, I find myself not quite hungover enough to give up on the day, but not quite lucid enough to embark on any major projects.

Yet, I’m finding myself once again gazing blankly out the window at the water, not even thinking deep thoughts.  Just kinda sittin’.  And my weary little mind can’t even come up with a decent justification today.  Yet I’m feeling restless – like there must be some activity I could undertake, something I’ve been putting off doing that would fit perfectly into my current level of motivation. 

It occurs to me that it would have been handy to have jotted a few such things down on post-its for just such a moment. 

But since late is better than never, I am going to make a few notes for myself (and you, because I know you are desperate to know my every thought and whim).

Bad Things to Do When Kinda/Sorta/Not Really Hungover

• redo the walls in your bathroom (I had planned on stripping wallpaper today.  Not gonna happen.)
• choose a new haircut and/or hair colour 
• clean out your email inbox (decision-making skills not functioning.  Too much temptation to click ’select all’ and then ‘delete.’)
• book an overseas flight (who knows where you might end up?)
• give the cat her wet prescription cat food (Trust me on this one.  Give her the dry for now.  This is not a time to be experiencing that particular scent.)

Good Things to Do When Kinda/Sorta/Not Really Hungover

• watch the stupid Literal Video for ‘Take On Me’ by A-Ha again.  (Laughter has been proven to be good for the cardiovascular system.  This is your cardio for today.)
• take the cat for a walk (Fresh air is good for you.  This cannot be counted as exercise, however, because the fat retarded cat mostly just sits there on his leash – yes, I said ‘leash’, fuck off – and watches butterflies.  Which you can also do.  *multi-tasking*)
• go shopping with your friend who is the same height as you and has the same taste in clothing and likes to shop (I don’t.  At all.  Like to shop.); let her search for clothes and shoes for you while you hang out in the book department.  (Normally I would say any expenditure made while in a hungover state – mild or otherwise – would be bad, but one can never have too many books.)
• speaking of books - now is the perfect time to cut your losses and decide not to continue trying to make yourself get into that crummy chick lit piece of crap you started reading in an effort to lighten up after a particularly long binge on books about politics, civil rights and animal abuse.  (Just get rid of it already.  It’s okay not to finish a book if it sucks horribly.  It’s empowering to make that call.) 
• and of course, the time-honoured classic – take a nap.  (Beauty sleep.  ‘Nuff said.)

So there it is – next time I am in this state, I will have this reference material handy and minutes of my life will be spared.

Guess what I’m going to do now?

Drea M.’s Tips for Procrastination

It is a well-known fact that I, your loyal and endearingly kooky friend, am an adrenaline junkie. What this means is that I do my best work under pressure.

My best painting sessions take place in the wee hours the day before a dead-dead-deadline…by, say, candlelight because the power is out…with one eye closed because I’ve lost a contact lens…painting with tea, grape juice and my very own blood because I’ve run out of pigment…using the tail of the cat to apply said tea/juice/blood because said cat has eaten my only paintbrush. You get the picture.

Unfortunately, in a world with neither the demands of children nor (currently) a significant other, such pressure is not always easy to come by. For the most part, I live by my own rules and my own schedule.

So when I find myself, as now, with a medium-sized stack of art assignments on my drafting table and clients with very flexible time-frames for completion, I tend to also find myself lacking motivation.

The only possible solution is to flamboyantly and decadently fritter and waste the hours that I could be painting until the time remaining is just barely sufficient to complete the projects, thereby imposing an artificially-induced sense of urgency (which will, in due time, become true urgency).

Over the years I have become quite an expert in the art of Procrastination (and its close relative, Time-Suckage).

I have decided to share with you today some of my techniques for tightening the space between Now and Deadline. It is also hoped that by spending this time writing this article when I ‘should’ be painting, I will have helped to make that fire under my ass easier to ignite when the time comes.

Current Fave Time-Suckers

• Creating MP3 playlists made up exclusively of obscure disco songs of the 70s, such as The Singing Nun’s version of The Lord’s Prayer (which leads to my next time-sucker):
• Following the google-trail created by searching for obscure disco songs sung by nuns in the 70s and seeing where it will lead (strangely, it involves Ricardo Montalban.)
• Perfecting my ability to avoid banging my knee on the helmet dangling from the handle-bars of my mountain-bike (carrying the helmet in the unlikely event I should meet a cop on the hiking trail – thus preventing getting a ticket while still feeling the wind in my hair. What a sneak I am). This is connected to the next one:
• Perfecting my ability to swerve and avoid decapitation of insane chipmunk that insists on a game of ‘Chicken’ whenever I ride by on my bike.
• Sitting on various outdoor cafè and bistro patios, people-watching and getting drunk with friends, thus also promoting time-suckage to others (this is indeed one of my favourites – and can lead to a multitude of other useless activities such as drunk-texting, skinny-dipping, befriending complete strangers, and hours of Fooz-ball.)
• Speaking of which, drinking in general tends to be an excellent, cost-effective and readily available solution to most cases of excessive time on one’s hands.
• Sitting outside with an unlit cigarette from the emergency party-pack, pretending I still smoke (smoking is probably THE best waste of time there is…unfortunately, my vanity prevails and prevents me from smoking full-time now – too bad, really).
• Asking my dad to “Sooo,…tell me again what it is you do at work?” (CAUTION: This one can take DAYS away from your life.)
• Clipping cat toenails and feigning deep interest in their grooming patterns.
• Researching the connection between serotonin reuptake and the ingestion of large amounts of LSD (for my thesis…yeah, my thesis.)
• Looking up the meanings of all the new, complicated emoticons that keep showing up on my profile, reminiscing about the good old days when it was just simple smiley-faces, and spending at least 40 minutes trying to design one that actually looks like me.
• Starting to arrange my library according to the Dewey Decimal System, then getting distracted and spending the rest of the afternoon flipping through my favourite books. (WARNING: This double-layer method of procrastinating-about-procrastinating is highly advanced and recommended only for those with superior skills in the field.)
• Mapping out travel itineraries for this fall to visit my peeps in Toronto, England and other logistically impossible places to hit all in one trip – which doesn’t stop me from trying – while understanding in the back of my mind that if I don’t finish these stinkin’ paintings, there shall be no travel at all.
• Plotting for next April Fool’s Day.
• Practicing my psychic abilities.
• Performing new-age improv music on my keyboard – which will then be lost for all time, despite its utter brilliance.
• Taking apart the DVD player just to see how it works.
• Creating little hands out of Fimo to leave lying around on windowsills.
• Returning calls while refusing to consult my address book, insisting on ‘remembering’ people’s phone numbers by dialing various combinations of numbers that I know are in the real number.
• Answering telemarketing calls and insisting that I will answer their survey questions if they answer mine.
• Writing inane posts for Facebook.

That’s all for now – if you have any suggestions, feel free to send them my way. Must go recharge all the batteries in the house now.