And now?

Here we are.

With any kind of luck at all, we have a clear winner in the U.S. Presidential election. I’m writing this as the returns are coming in (what? you think I get up at the crack of dawn to do this?)

At just about midnight, all the major networks have called the race for President Obama. However, the Romney campaign is not conceding, at the moment.

It doesn’t look like they have a path to victory where the math is possible, but they’re holding out. This seems to be part of a trend. Facts don’t count. We don’t believe data. We don’t believe science.

I wonder today, on this Wondering Wednesday, why anybody wonders why we have a problem with education.

However, it is fair to make sure that the votes have been counted. I’m okay with that, although I’d like to be able to go to bed knowing it’s settled.

And I wonder if this—once it is settled—means that we might get an actual working government where people realize not everybody can have exactly what they want and compromise is not always a bad thing.

Because there’s one thing I don’t wonder—and that is that we cannot go forward if people don’t get out of the way.

I’m going to bed thinking and hoping that this is a good day for the United States of America.

(UPDATE: It’s 1 am and Mr. Romney has conceded. It is over, and it is a good day for the United States of America. I still wonder if we can move forward, but I have higher hopes than I did yesterday.)

Now what happens?

I’m seriously wondering.

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Welcome to the horror show this Wondering Wednesday has become. Because I am seriously wondering this, and it is a serious thing to be wondering about.

What’s gonna happen to our election in the wake of Hurricane Sandy?

Many, many states have early voting. 32 plus the District of Columbia. Reports, so far, are that 15% of voters have already voted with an additional 18% estimated to vote prior to election day. That’s a lot more than have ever used early voting previously, but it’s not everybody.

A majority of states—all but 2—are supposed to have in-person voting on Nov. 6th. (The 2 are Washington and Oregon. They vote entirely by mail. Who knew? Other than, I guess, people who live in Washington and Oregon.)

And a majority of states should have no problem with their in-person voting on Nov 6th.

But there are a few states that have been hit hard by Hurricane Sandy. Major damage to infrastructure and transportation. As I write this, there are twenty to twenty-five thousand people trapped in Hoboken surrounded by flood waters and downed electrical lines. The mayor has asked for the National Guard to supply some equipment that might make rescues possible in places where the city’s payloaders are too big to fit through narrow streets.

It doesn’t sound like they can find tens of thousands of their citizens let alone provide polling places for them by next Tuesday.

New York City and parts of Long Island are without power with some restorations projected to take 7 to 10 days. The polls had massive voting machines when I lived in NYC—and I seem to remember hefty power cables snaking around the church basements and high school cafeterias. (I also remember a very heavy and loud clunk when you pulled the lever, though, so maybe it was all more mechanical than electrical?)

You used to sign in to vote in massive bound books which had a copy of your signature from your previous occasion of voting. Were all those books on high ground?

So what happens? If the records are soggy? If the subways can’t get voters where they need to be? If there’s no power for the machines? If the voters are missing in Hoboken?

Is there anything in our Constitution that covers this?

We can’t disenfranchise enormous swaths of the electorate. Or can we?

And who gets to answer this question?

I think we should all be wondering.

Upside down

dn ǝpıs ʇɥbıɹ*

So, I’ve been wondering about this for a few years. My family is sick of hearing about it. At the risk of looking crazier than I already do, I’m going to go ahead and see if any of you have become aware of this phenomenon.

Have you noticed that people—restaurants, that is—are making sandwiches upside down now?

Not every place, I’m sure, but enough so that I can call it a phenomenon. I’m talking mainly about fast food franchises, but I’ve noticed it in some more upscale places.

Once upon a time, in my giddy youth, if you ordered a burger it came in the following order:

Bottom half of the bun
Burger
Lettuce
Tomato
Pickle
Other garnishes
Top half of the bun with whatever condiment was requested or usual (Special Sauce, anyone?)

And when I first started buying roast beef subs at Subway, it was kind of the same thing. The roll was split down the middle. The roast beef went on the side closest to the bottom of the roll, and all the extras went on the side closest to the top of the roll.

When you ate your sandwich, the taste buds at the top of your mouth dealt with all the flavors of all the extras, while the bottom of your mouth savored the meat of the matter.

But now, it’s all backwards. And it happened quite suddenly. One day, all my sandwiches were right side up, and the next they were being assembled upside down.

I don’t understand it.

What could possibly be the reason for this?

Is there something intrinsically less expensive in building a burger backwards? Surely a lettuce leaf costs the same whether it is on the top or the bottom of the sandwich? Is it more efficient to layer in this—let’s be honest—wrong order? But, really, how much faster can it be to slap a tomato on one side than the other?

I think it’s the thin edge of the wedge. A slippery slope. Standards are slipping. People aren’t doing things right anymore.

Or maybe, it’s a symbol of a new freedom. We are no longer to be bounded by outmoded conventions. Put that pickle anywhere you want! (Somehow, that didn’t really come out the way I meant it.)

I don’t know whether to be happy or disturbed by this turn of events. I do know that my mouth is confused. I’ve tried to go with the flow, and eat my burgers however they are handed to me, but it just doesn’t work.

Old dog. New tricks. You see the problem.

I’ve taken to rebuilding my sandwiches on the spot. Sometimes, I even just turn them over, and eat them upside down.

But I sure do wonder.

* upside down text courtesy of fliptext.com

What is it…

…with me and doormats?

That’s what I’m wondering.

When we lived in New York, we had an odd thing happen with our doormat. One day, it was just missing. Gone.

Who would steal a doormat?

That’s what we asked ourselves.

It was kind of a nuisance, but no big loss. It wasn’t like we had invested a lot of money, time or thought into choosing the doormat. We just shook our heads over the astonishing triviality of the theft and went about our day.

Next time we crossed our threshhold, the doormat was back.

What could this mean? Was someone playing a particularly pointless prank? Was the building’s porter moving it when he mopped the floor? Moving it out of sight?

We had no idea. A day or two went by, and then the doormat went missing again. It continued to vanish and return at odd intervals.

Eventually, we discovered that a homeless man was entering the building late on cold nights, collecting doormats and carrying them up to the stair landing next to the door to the roof. I guess they made some sort of bed, and he carefully returned them to their rightful doors in the morning. And, as usually happens, eventually he moved on—to a better place, as they say—which may or may not have been of this world.

Now, I live in Florida.

And my doormat has taken to moving in the night. Again.

It’s not disappearing. And heaven knows, it’s not cold enough for any homeless person to need it as insulation. It’s just migrating a foot or two.

Is it bears? An armadillo? A lizard the size of a Buick?

Maybe it’s a raccoon, or a dog with a strange liking or disliking for doormats. (If it’s a squirrel, that’s it. I will get that water cannon if it’s the last thing I do.)

I see no possibility of solving the mystery without time-lapse video.

But I’m wondering.

The rules don’t apply to me

Except they do.

I was wondering yesterday, for the umpteenth time, why it is I think I can go without eating?

I get all involved in something, and I don’t want to stop. Just let me mow this one more patch of grass, pull this one more weed. Let me check Facebook and then answer this email. Let me figure out why this WordPress plugin isn’t working the way it should.

Just one more minute.

And then it’s two o’clock, and I haven’t had breakfast or lunch.

My head hurts, I’m tired, I’m making mistakes, and I am grouchier than a grizzly bear.

Everybody has had that happen, right?

Only, I am way old enough to know better—so why?

There are laws of physics, biology, gravity. Nobody is immune.

The truth is I—and every other human being on the planet—function better with a blood sugar level that hasn’t dropped below 70 and some reasonable amount of sleep.

It’s a fact. We know this. Why do so many of us ignore it?

It’s like we’re walking around thinking, Okay, I know if I drop this anvil on my foot, it’s going to crash down and break my toes, but today, I’d rather throw it up in the air and watch it float away, and it’s going to do that because that’s what I want it to do.

Yeah. Right.

One of the things they say in AA—I’ve heard—is you should never let yourself get too hungry or too tired. It undermines your sobriety.

Here’s another thing.

It undermines your creativity.

Art takes energy. Your brain needs to be sharp and alert when those brilliant ideas come along. At the very least, you can’t afford to make the dumb mistakes like not saving your novel before the computer crashes or having your hand tremble as your paintbrush is just about to finish the hat.*

So, why is it that I think I can go without eating? I really do wonder.

* Stephen Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George

It’s only slightly related to this post, but I wanted you to understand the reference. Enjoy!

Holy Moly!

Where has my mind gone?

It’s Wondering Wednesday, and I’m wondering how—after 118 days in a row and 119 blog posts—I got to 10:15 pm last night without remembering that I had to do a post for today!

Kind of frightening.

And I even had a topic all picked out.

It’s going to have to wait, though, because it’s a much more important “wonder” to wonder what has actually happened to my mind.

Here’s what I hope it is. I hope it’s just that I haven’t spent the time needed to triage all the projects I have going. Consequently, everything is of equal importance and urgency. So, I jump around from one thing to another in a less than organized manner. It’s a kind of situational ADD.

The answer, of course, is to stop rushing around doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that. The answer is to slow down, figure out what’s really important–as opposed to what is urgent—and focus on those things.

It’s counter-intuitive. It feels like I really have to try to make progress on as many fronts as possible. The truth is the only way to make progress is to concentrate both attention and time in a concerted effort. It’s not that I can’t accomplish more than one thing in a day. It’s just that I can’t accomplish more than one thing at a time.

Serial tasking, not multi-tasking.

For that to work, however, I have to have some systems in place. I have to triage and prioritize. I have to have lists. I have to actually look at the lists.

Because all that getting to 10 pm without having done a blog post means, really, is that my systems failed me. Clearly, this is one of those tasks that needs to have a reminder set, with a loud and recurring alarm.

Because the answer to the question “Where has my mind gone?” is that it hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s standing in the middle of chaos, bouncing from one thing to another.

I just need to take a deep breath and go back to the basics.

I hope.

No easy way

…to measure your carbon footprint

I’m wondering about this today, because we are considering buying a freezer.

The freezer that came with our refrigerator is too small. We bought a side-by-side. I don’t think I would do that again. We didn’t have a big freezer in New York but it seemed to hold more. And it was much easier to locate and extract things. (The sound of the freezer door opening here is usually accompanied by thumps, crashes and muttered curses. That’s if it’s the MotH that opened the door. If it’s me, there’s usually an “Ow!” in there somewhere, frozen sausages being somewhat bruising to bare feet.)

We can probably clear out space in the laundry room for a small freezer. Research indicates the cost won’t blow the budget. It would be nice to be able to stock up on frozen pizzas. (Currently, they have to be cut up and re-wrapped, and there are only so many pizza quarters that will fit. [They aren’t any softer on bare feet, either.]) It would be nice to be able to take more advantage of the BOGO* offers at the local Winn-Dixie.

And I understand the risk involved in having a freezer full of food during hurricane season.

But. . .

What I am wondering is this. Does it take more energy to run a freezer year-round or to make more trips to the grocery store? Wouldn’t it be great if cars—and electric meters—came with more specific indicators?

Instead of that vague analog dial, why can’t a car have a digital display of fuel used down to tenths of a gallon? You’re not going to tell me the technology isn’t available.

And shouldn’t my electric meter have something more useful than five dials whose pointers all spin different directions? We ought to be able to see how much electricity we’ve used during any given billing cycle and what it’s costing us—not only in terms of dollars about to be billed but actual carbon footprint.

Awareness and attention. The first steps to a balanced budget and energy conservation.

How hard can it be?

I wonder.

If I could save time in a bottle,

the first thing that I’d like to do…*

…is shake some of it out.

I need more time. Doesn’t everybody? But the most extraordinary thing about being “retired”–for me–is that I can’t figure out how I ever had time to have a job.

Granted, I have a much bigger house now–and a yard. So that housework takes more time than it used to take–and yard work is a totally new addition to the schedule. On top of it all, I’ve added blogger to the mix–and, sadly, have gotten way too interested in Facebook. But still…

Where does the time go, I wonder.

I think part of what I’m dealing with here is Parkinson’s Law in which work expands to fit the time available for its completion. When all your deadlines are self-imposed, renegotiation is easy. I can always do that tomorrow, you think. And then you’re sunk.

Another part of it, of course, is that now that I have permission to do what I want to do, it is clear that I want to do a lot. I have websites to build, plays to write, novels to read (and write), Chinese to learn, cakes to bake, and on and on and on.

So, in addition to wondering where the time goes, I’m wondering how best to recapture it. I think my progress bars have helped a lot. A visual representation of what I’ve achieved lately goes a long way toward incentivizing (sorry, I hate that word–but it does fit) further achievement.

I’m also wondering how best to prioritize all my projects. No real progress there. (I wish somebody would invent an app that would take all project input and do a cost-benefit analysis on the intangibles of career enhancement, happiness production, contribution to humanity, etc. Pretty sure I’m going to keep on wishing for that one.)

One thing of which I’m fairly certain is that my usual preferred method of diving into something and getting it done and knocking it off the list is just not practical in this new space-time continuum of “retirement.” (I have this impulse, every time I write the word ‘retirement,” to follow it with “LOL!”) My life is now much more like the juggling act it used to be at work when I had dozens of projects to manage. Back then, it was work that required jumping from one thing to another and making incremental progress. Free time was scarce, so it tended to be automatically devoted, in depth and in detail, to whatever I thought was most important.

Now that all time is “free” and everything is important, I’m trying to figure out how best to handle it.

Any ideas? All tips welcome.

* Jim Croce, Time in a Bottle

Writing up “that ravell’d sleeve”

The Scottish Play.

Yikes. I’ve quoted from the Scottish Play.

I’m not sure, but I think I’m okay, since I didn’t say it out loud. I’m going to take the chance, anyway. Especially since the headline and quote are such a stretch to get me to what I want to talk about: why writing makes me sleepy?

That’s what I’m wondering this Wednesday. Writing makes me sleepy, and I don’t understand it. You could be charitable and say it’s because it’s really hard work, but I don’t think that’s it. Because, the thing is, it’s the same kind of sleepy that I get doing a crossword puzzle–and that’s just recreation.

Does this happen to any of you? I write for a while, and regardless of how well it’s going, I start to feel like I want a nap. My eyelids get heavy. My brain gets fuzzy. I want to lie down. ( guess it doesn’t happen when it’s going really well. When it’s going really well, you feel like God on maybe the fifth day. You just want to keep going–whether you ought to do so or not. (I think this explains giraffes.) Under ordinary circumstances, however, writing makes me very sleepy.

I have no scientific proof of this, but I’m wondering if the sleep centers in the brain aren’t near the portions that govern language. Does stimulating the one stimulate the other? Or is it the other way around? Are they so far apart that sending all the electrical activity to one area deprives the other of some much needed stimuli? I guess that would only work if we were talking about the language center and the keep-awake center. Is there such a thing?

You see what a successful “wondering” this is? That’s because I have absolutely no basis for forming an opinion. I can theorize in a complete absence of all data. This is otherwise known as guessing. Or “blowing smoke.”

What do you think causes this phenomenon?

Well, you think about it for a while.

I’m going to go take a nap.

Where have all the whip-poor-wills gone?

Long time passing.

Can’t you just hear that sung to a Pete Seeger tune by Peter, Paul & Mary?

All kidding aside, though, where have the whip-poor-wills gone? When I was a kid, they were one of the few birds I could recognize by their call. The other being a bob-white.

For me to recognize them, they must have been pretty prevalent. Now, I never hear a whip-poor-will or a bob-white.

A little research shows that they are indeed in decline, and no one is quite sure why. Destruction of habitat due to building, pesticides that kill their food source, and global warming are the most common reasons cited for the dwindling numbers.

My uncle has another theory, although I’m not sure it holds good for areas farther afield than Florida. He thinks the egrets eat the whip-poor-wills’ eggs. Whip-poor-wills, and for that matter, bob-whites nest on the ground. And egrets have been known to prey on the eggs of sea birds–so I guess it’s possible. I suspect it is also true that the egrets are a more efficient competition for the same food.

They do seem to be efficient. They have very few predators, and as long as humans raise cattle, their habitat will survive. They do okay. First bred in Florida in 1953, they had spread to Canada by 1962 and California by the mid-sixties. A successful species.

So, I don’t know. A bunch of egrets following a herd of cattle is a pretty sight, but I do miss the whip-poor-will’s song.

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Tag Archives: Wondering Wednesdays