Last night, Josh and I had the most brilliant idea of all time.  At least it was brilliant for us.  You are likely brilliant on a daily basis.  Josh and I… not so much.

Last night we went to bed before 1 am.

It all started with a robo-call from the school system outlining this idea that is going to vote soon on changing the school start and end times.  We chuckled as we listened, and I said, “sure, make the school day earlier.  I’d love to be 20 minutes late instead of 10 minutes late.”  You see, our family does not wake easily.  We are cranky in the morning; naturally late risers.

Later in the evening, the thought still in my head, I commented that I’d like to go to bed early.

“What do you mean by early?” Josh asked.

“Like 11 pm.  Okay, 11:30.  Or… like before midnight,” I told him.

A little bit after that, Josh proposed that we go to bed immediately.  Right then and there.  At 10:15.

What the hell?  It was an idea that rocked me more than Taco Bell creating that Dorito-flavoured taco shell.  Going to bed at 10:15?  That just may be the craziest, most creative, most challenging idea presented to me all week.  I immediately agreed.

It took us almost 45 minutes to close up shop; washing dishes, putting away laundry, getting distracted by a Key & Peele sketch, getting ready for bed.  But still.  We were in bed before 11 pm with the promise that we’d wake at 6 am and be incredibly productive.

I didn’t think I’d fall asleep that early, mostly because I have a lot of trouble falling asleep and staying asleep.  But the somnolent stars aligned, and I fell asleep quickly (it helped that I didn’t play Candy Crush at all yesterday) and stayed asleep until the multiple alarms we set around the room went off.  Yes, we didn’t trust ourselves to actually get up so we set three different alarms.

This morning, I wrote two articles and finished a third before I took the kids to school.  I then launched directly into yoga and was showered and ready to edit a manuscript before 10 am.  This never happens.

I don’t think every day would go like today if we always went to bed early and rose early.  But I think I can trick my brain into going to bed early and waking early one day per week.  I think I’m going to choose Wednesdays into Thursdays.  And then I’m going to be a machine on Thursdays, cranking through work and other productive activities.

I mean, that is, unless we oversleep.  Which is a definite possibility.

What is your bedtime and waking time?

I swung by the local vegan-friendly grocery store to pick up a salad and some autumnal minestrone soup before I got back to work.  I picked up an empty salad container and got behind a nice, clean-cut, middle aged couple who were filling their own salad containers.  They looked like they had come from a nearby office on their lunch break.  Once I was committed to purchasing a salad, once I had placed my grubby hands on that empty container, that is when I listened in on the conversation that was happening next to me.  The one happening between the two people who were blocking my access to the romaine.

“Yes, there are so many options at a salad bar,” the man told the woman.  “They’re really one of my favourite things.  Let me tell you about it.”

At this point, I assumed that the woman was not from the United States or perhaps she had never left her house before and therefore had no clue how a salad bar worked.  And because I am a kind person who was only moderately in a rush to get back to work, I arranged my face into a mask of understanding and waited patiently for the couple to notice that there was someone right behind them who would love to just grab some lettuce and edamame and beat it on out of there whenever it was convenient for them to open up a little space at the bar.

“So what you have here are lots of different options.  And if you decide you want something, you pick up this thing here: it’s a scoop.  And you just dig it on down in the vegetable and scoop; you scoop it up.  And then you move the spoon over your container and drop the vegetables inside.”

“Wow, lots of options.”

The woman’s accent was definitely American.  So she must be a recluse.  Except she had a nice healthy glow about her.  And she was in normal, business-style clothing as if she had come from an office.  So now I decided that — poor lamb — she must have had a head trauma and forgotten about salad bars.  And now this nice man was reteaching her how to pull together a lunch.  If she could bravely relearn salad bars, then I could wait patiently for two minutes so she didn’t feel rushed.  I also had to wait patiently because even though they acknowledged my presence with a nod, they weren’t moving aside to let me put my speedy salad-making skills to use.

“So, yes, you just pick up the spoon, scoop it on down in the vegetables, and then place them in your container.  And you can choose anything here.”

“This is great!” the woman said.

“I like to start with lettuce,” the man admitted.

“Oh, me too.  Actually, Gary, I’ve been to a salad bar before!”

“You have?  Well how about that.  Have you ever put English peas in your salad?” the man asked.

“I just hadn’t thought to do that.  That’s so clever.  Have you ever put peas in your salad?”

“No, I’m not a big fan, as they say.  No thank you on peas!  What about carrots?  How do you feel about carrots?”

“Well they have certainly sliced them very thinly here,” the woman commented.  “How do you like that?  Little matchstick carrots.  How clever!”

“Okay, Helen.  Tell me.  What do you think of cooked foods in a salad?”

“Like these clever little tofu strips?  I don’t really know, Gary.”

They realized that I was staring at them in disbelief, and they made a big show of stepping back from the bar so they could let me have a turn while they debated out the merits of every single offering at the very extensive salad bar.  As I quickly filled my container, they talked about whether or not to add croutons at the end, how they felt about salad dressing, and the best way to close the salad container.  I decided I would do the rest of my grocery shopping and come back to get the soup from the soup bar at the end because I was about to lose it on Gary and Helen.

I did all my other grocery shopping and then swung back to the salad bar, certain that even though my first trip to that area of the store took 8 minutes, that Gary and Helen would be gone by this point.  Back in their office with their very carefully constructed salads.  BUT THEY WERE STILL AT THE BAR.  And now they were debating all the soups.  How to fill a cup.  Which soup to get.  Which soups remind them of their grandmother’s house in the middle of winter and which soups are really ones they’d rather never have again.  And how the lentil soup at the store is so clever because it has little bits of pasta in it!

I was able to bust in there and grab a quick container of soup and dash into line.  They ended up two behind me in my row.

This is the point in the story where I’m supposed to say that I was the monster and how sweet Gary and Helen were that they could find such joy and deep thought in considering vegetables and how no one has patience these days.

But the trip to the grocery store that is within walking distance of my home took 40 minutes.  40 minutes.  So no, I don’t have a sweet, after school special, one-to-grow-on type ending to this story.  Just the knowledge that I probably finished eating my lunch before they had drained their wonder and impeded many other people from stuffing some salad in their pie hole.

If you think slow driver or slow walkers are annoying, you need to spend some time between slow salad makers.  It’s a different playing field.

I finally got to see the Fun-o-meter on Candy Crush.  It popped up while I was playing level 254 online.  There wasn’t a setting for “makes me feel as if I’m in the Goonies with Mama and her boys chasing me and the rocks are falling while we’re trying to get out of the cave.”  If there had been that option on the fun-o-meter, that’s where I would have set it.  Because level 254 of Candy Crush sucks.  It sucks hard.

Make and explode a two-doughnut combo, a two-striped combo, and a two-wrapped combo.  You are probably already seeing the problem here.  It is highly unusual to ever get two doughnuts to fall next to one another.  They are also immovable unlike other pieces.  If you try to shift over a wrapped candy or a striped candy, for the most part (unless the pieces you are switching it with lines up three of the same colour or is an opposite combination) you can move them into a different space.  But if you try to move a doughnut, it will explode all of the candies that are that colour.  So you can’t move them.  You can only hope to have another doughnut fall next to it.

The game board provides you with a single striped candy, doughnut, and wrapped candy encased behind a wall of whipped cream and reinforced with jelly.

I tried all sorts of things.  I tried getting rid of all the whipped cream and then trying to make a doughnut.  I tried making a doughnut and THEN getting rid of all the whipped cream.  I tried making a wrapped combo first using the wrapped candy encased in whipped cream.  I tried making the wrapped combo before I touched the whipped cream at all.  I tried exploding the whipped cream away, I tried gently moving the whipped cream away piece by piece, I tried lovingly talking to the candies and begging them to align.  I tried walking away from boards that felt as if they had a bad aura on the first move.  I tried talking really loudly in front of the game, telling people in the room how I was likely going to walk away from Candy Crush if I didn’t win right away.

This level made me jumpy.  I would finally make two doughnuts and they would be a candy or two apart.  And then the whole board would explode because I accidentally dropped a candy that set off a wrapped candy.  Every time the board would accidentally explode, my body would tense up.  This happened several times each round, so that by the time I reached my fifth life of the evening, I had listened to a 25-minute cacophony of bursting candy.  And while exploding candy usually is a sweet sound in Candy Crush, in this case, it was the sound of erasing hard work.  Okay, so “hard work” is perhaps a bit generous.  But still, it can take many moves to manipulate a wrapped candy to form.  And then to lose it because a striped candy formed too close to it?

The whole thing sucked.

I finally won it while waiting for Josh to get our drinks at Starbucks.  I decided that the hardest one for me to make was the doughnut.  So I cleared the whipped cream and then focused on that center line of candies, trying to find a situation where there were two on one side or the other of the same colour, and then manipulated candies of the chosen colour into the other slots, finally moving down the fifth, middle candy to form a doughnut that I was able to move down the column until I exploded it with the other doughnut.  I then lucked out and made two candies next to each other (I think I used an egg for one of these).  The striped one was the easiest one, but I only had 10 moves left.  I was going to lose it in a big way if I messed this up, so I took my time and within a move or two, had exploded the striped ones.

And then I almost wept as the game told me the level was complete.

Strangely enough, to calm my frayed nerves, I’ve had to set the game aside for a bit.  I felt like I could do that because it was my choice vs. the game’s choice.  So suck it, Candy Crush.  You’re on notice.

Linda Ronstadt had an interesting quote in a recent People magazine article. (Cover-to-cover, baby; I read that magazine with the same care I bring to Foucault.) When asked if she misses being a pop star, she answered, “I miss singing, but not performing.  I don’t miss fame — it’s unnatural.  I like having my anonymity.”

Fame is one of those things that people assume everyone wants, even though that’s not the case.  It’s sort of like blog readership; people assume everyone wants a wide readership, and certainly there is enough advice floating around out there to support why people make that assumption.  But there is something unnatural about your words reaching a wide audience; in speaking with people you would have otherwise never encountered.  That goes for all celebrity, whether it’s reached through music as a pop star or through writing as a blogger.

I guess I know what I mean by unnatural, but I’d love to know what Ronstadt meant.  Does she mean that fame taxes the system?  That in an ideal world, favours and attention would be asked of and doled out to everyone on a fairly equal basis.  But when fame enters the picture, too many favours are asked for a single person to deliver and too much attention is focused on a single person to feel good?  Or does she think our national pastime of reading about celebrity’s lives is unnatural? (They’ll pry People magazine from my fingers when I’m cold and dead!)

With all of that, I have to admit that the recent Daniel Radcliffe article in the New York Times got under my skin and made me feel blue the rest of the day.  What sort of life is that?  Reading a day in his life made me feel trapped, and I’m not even living it.  I don’t think anyone likes to think about how depleted we could become from fame.  Most of the time when we talk about it, we only consider the advantages; the perks.

I guess I’m interested in this unnaturalness, mostly because for all the good points of blogging — bringing together people who would otherwise never meet, spreading ideas like wildfire, influencing another person’s life —  there are also all the drawbacks of a person’s words reaching beyond their small community of family and friends; namely, bringing together people who would otherwise never meet, spreading ideas like wildfire, influencing another person’s life.  Everything positive about blogging can be inverted into something negative about blogging when seen through a certain lens, especially when it comes to certain topics or online behaviour.

A case in point being the recent government shutdown.  Sometimes I think ignorance is bliss when it comes to social media, and I wish I hadn’t read what some people think.  A case in point being that gorgeous post by Blood Signs.  If she hadn’t posted that, I would have never known her thoughts; been so moved by them.  Without blogging, her words would have remained in her state, and I would have remained in mine.  And the barrier of space would have been between us rather than a connection.

Your thoughts?

I’m not really one to change my look.  A case in point: I am turning 40, still shop from the children’s department at Old Navy, and am wearing a coat that is so old that it realistically could have grandchildren by this point.  But I bought a new pair of glasses on an impulse this weekend.

My friend told me this week that she thinks the glasses choose the wearer in the same way that the wand chooses the wizard.  There are a pair of glasses out there meant for your face; you just need to try them on to find them.  And then you know.  You know in a major way that this particular pair of glasses (with a core of unicorn horn and phoenix feather) was meant to be matched with your face, and only your face.

I’ve never had that experience.  I’ve had more of the “are these good enough?” conversations in my head.  That’s how I ended up with my last pair of glasses 12 years ago.  It was this time of year, and I needed a pair of glasses to wear when I walked down the aisle.  So I bought the pair you’ve normally seen me in.  Barely-there rims.  Small ovals.

Please ignore the squint…

This weekend, I was in a glasses store and my eye kept going up to a particular pair on the wall while I was speaking with an employee.  So after I finished my conversation, I tried them on.  And they felt so right on my face that it was like that moment when Harry Potter grips his wand at Ollivander’s and feels the power of the tool.

I had Josh take a picture, and I texted it to my sister from the store.  From several states away, thanks to the beauty of technology, she was able to reassure me that the glasses fit my face.  And even though they were very different from my normal pair, it was worth branching out and trying something new.  We had money leftover in our flex spending account, so I went for it.

Glasses in the store without my real frames, but better than the selfie I just tried to take.

The point of my old glasses were to fade into the background and beg people not to notice them.  And these glasses practically scream at you, “look at my subpar myopic eyes!?!?”  I had a moment of doubt right after I put them on for the first time with my prescription in place.  I mean, my modus operandi is to go through my day without being noticed, so why would I choose something loud and solid that reminds the world that they’re there?  I don’t know.  I guess it was just time for a change.