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Friday, September 19, 2003

nap, and the Friday Five

T shifted his work schedule today -- went in two hours early so he could get off two hours early as well -- and when he came home, he was going to take our trash to the dump. Both kids inexplicably wanted to go with him. As an aside, garbage time is one of those times I am SO glad to be a woman, married to a big manly man. It's his job, I don't have to go to the stinky smelly dump and throw bags of nasty trash into a hole or a huge dumpster or whatever they have set up for the purpose for that trip. Hey, I'll bear the children and do the cooking and cleaning up and child-teaching and nose-wiping and 2:30 a.m. tending and stuff, if he'll be the one to get up at five every weekday and go work his hiney off 40 minutes from home so that we can have a roof over our heads and food to eat and stuff like that... if he'll go to the dump too. That's the deal. Anyway, I digress. The kids both wanted to go with him, so I got an unexpected nap, which was just what I needed. I lay on the couch with two cans of diet Coke, two Advil, an Outlander book, my heating pad, my three pillows, a blanket, and a deep sense of pervading joy. I took the Advil with the first drink of diet Coke, and pretty much slammed the whole can right down; then I drank the second can slightly more slowly while I read for a while. Meanwhile my heating pad was not cooperating -- I'm not sure it was even reflecting my own body heat, let alone producing its own. Granted, it's a very old heating pad, and you know how they all say on that read-this-or-thou-shalt-surely-die warning label thingie that you should never lie on them? Well who pays any attention to that? Of course we've been lying on it for the entire nine years of our ownership of it (and I think we got it from my parents when they got a new one, so it was probably well-used before that also). Anyway, maybe there's a reason you're not supposed to do that; maybe they just sort of stop working after ten or twenty years of being laid upon. Who knew. I ignored it though, and figured I could sleep without the extra heat, but I'd snuggle my lower back up against it really nicely just in case it decided to do its job. Then just as I was about to drift off, I started getting this bizarre tingly-fingers feeling, and my heart rate acted a little funny. Now, in retrospect, I know that this was most likely just the effect of having drunk 24 oz of caffeinated soda just prior to lying down and attempting to sleep -- all that drug-induced energy had to go somewhere, so it was just kind of fizzling through my body looking for an outlet, is my thought. At the time, however, just on the verge of sleep (last night at this stage I had a long and detailed semi-dream about meeting Diana Gabaldon on a shuttle bus in Yosemite, for example), I was relatively certain that it was that heating pad seeking revenge for having been relentlessly laid down upon for so many years by slowly electrocuting me. Hey, I was on the verge of sleep, shut up.


At any rate, I was too tired to care, and I had such a nice long solid nap, so solid and long that I woke up with that dreadful slept-in-the-daytime feeling just as T and the kids arrived home. I consoled myself with another diet Coke and a chicken caesar salad, and everything looked so much brighter.


Tomorrow T and LT are heading for San Diego overnight, and C and I will be having a ladies' weekend in, for the most part. We'll play "dress-up princess" (in other words, she'll try on all the hand-me-downs I just got from my aunt for her, to see which ones will go in her drawers/closet and which ones will go in a box for next year), and I have made us a reservation at our favorite semi-fancy restaurant, where we'll wear nice dresses. This is to make the time special for us too, since we couldn't go with the boys on their Charger-sheet-metal pickup trip. I've been looking forward to it as much as T has been looking forward to acquiring his rear quarter skins, or whatever they're called.



Here's the Friday Five.


1. Who is your favorite singer/musician? Why?

I am awful at this question and I can never pick one person/group/artist. I like such a variety of music. If I had to pick one artist to listen to for the rest of my life, I'd probably pick, hmm, Mozart.



2. What one singer/musician can you not stand? Why?

I don't know any names, and one benefit of adulthood is that I don't have to listen to music I don't like, so I'm not highly qualified to answer this question. I don't like rap, I can say that for sure.



3. If your favorite singer wasn't in the music business, do you think you would still like him/her as a person?

This is a bit of a strange question. Liking someone as an artist doesn't imply liking him or her as a person to begin with. It would vary with the person.



4. Have you been to any concerts? If yes, who put on the best show?

n/a, never been to a concert. I have been to The Phantom of the Opera during its extended run in San Francisco a few years ago, and it was just incredible.



5. What are your thoughts on downloading free music online vs. purchasing albums? Do you feel the RIAA is right in its pursuit to stop people from dowloading free music?Well, I think this is not necessarily the artists talking. It's the recording industry, and they do have a lot to lose if people don't buy CDs. But I see them as a middle-man with a foot on the neck of the public, exploiting artists. If I were a famous artist right now, I'd cut my ties with the recording industry, offer my music for free or really cheap online, and give really awesome concerts that drew large crowds.

One possible solution as I see it would be for the artists to arrange to have pay-per-song downloading. This way you could get a CD you liked for $15, instead of one that has two songs you like and a dozen songs you're ambivalent about. I think that problem is the reason for a lot of the downloading that goes on -- I know it's been mine at times.

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