Water and light, pt. 2. (and ducks, pt. 1)

So here's what you need to know this fine morning (I started writing this at 3:56 am my time):

* I'm having a little trouble sleeping. Yesterday I got up at 4:20. Not to be ungrateful to You Know Who, but I feel like I need more hours in a day than what I'm given.

*I virtually never speak of my job on this blog. And why would I, since I find most persons' work stories as something I need to suffer through politely. Listening to them is like listening to others' dreams. Dreams and work-stories are both important for the one who experiences them but relatively uninteresting for the listener. I find most shop-talk (outside the workplace) not only deathly dull after a while but also extraordinarily repetitive and a lame excuse not to stretch one's conversational imagination. There have been multiple times when I've had work colleagues over to my house and one of them has asked my wife what she thinks about some major work brouhaha, to which she replied that that's the first she's heard of it. The reaction: an abrupt silence, a swiveling of heads to her, and then to me. Whuuuhh?! seems to be the reaction. My response: Why bring work home, I say? We have other stuff to talk about.

None of the above is an absolute, of course. There are stretches of time (and now is one of them) in which work talk is the consuming topic at home and elsewhere. But these are unfortunate moments, I think, and as I said before, these moments eventually just bore the unfortunate victim/listener.

Oddly, I enjoy talking about my wife's work experience, but perhaps that's because she has so many funny and amusing stories.

But all this was preface for me to provide you with my job description, not as it was originally written but as it should have been written: Reading and responding to work emails. This is more true than I wish even during the best of times because everyone at our work is inundated with a flood of emails. It's as though emails have permitted us to remove the internal interlocutor in our brains that helps us decide whether what we're thinking is worth the sharing. The basic email rule seems to be this: If you think it then surely you're obligated to send it out as a work-wide email. Or so it feels. And when controversy raises its icky head at work, then the email downpour shifts from a chronic Seattle rain to a deluge of Biblical proportion.

So let's recap my work story: I read and write lots of work emails.

Pretty interesting, eh?

HEY!! No snoozing on my blog.

* People love to brag about how little sleep they get. On a future post I'll discuss why this is. But for now allow me merely to apologize for my own transgressions along these lines this morning.

* One of the nice things about a blog is that it provides a nice forum to be self-indulgent. No one feels obligated to look at it (except for this blog, where my 80,000 daily readers understandably feel they're letting themselves down if they don't read it daily), and one can be as silly or trivial or confessional as one wants with relatively little guilt. It lets the writer to selectively share with the world what he or she wants while giving the reader a chance of learning more about someone else in the comfort of anonymity.

Here are a couple of blogs I randomly came across but look at from time-to-time (once a week?) and quite enjoy. One is http://whowhatwhenwhereandsometimeswhy.blogspot.com/. It's genuine and insightful and funny--the reflections of a single mother trying to make sense of life in the face of craziness.

Another one I like is: http://www.dooce.com/ I don't read it often or thoroughly, but whenever I check it out I'm really wowed by her fabulous writing and really nice photography. I suffer from a real case of blog envy with this one.

*I like Regina Spektor. She's s perceptive if perhaps slightly unbalanced soul whose unbalance fuels terrific creativity to produce unusually thoughtful and sensitive songs. She's coo coo for cocoa puffs, but we're the beneficiaries of her coo cooness. I guess that's true with a lot of artists.

And why would that be? Maybe 'cause artists are all about seeing things differently, and depending on how one looks at it, being coo coo for cocoa puffs helps you see things differently or seeing things differently is what makes you coo coo for cocoa puffs.

I'm talking to YOU, Vincent Van Gogh's ghost!! You heard me.

* I hereby go public with my opposition to milk.

My stand isn't absolute or comprehensive. Milk is like sex--there's a time and place for it. It can be fabulous, but only in the right contexts. Milk is different than sex, however, because they have different trajectories in our life. Whereas with sex one must grow into readiness for it, with milk one should eventually outgrow one's use of it.

I am a hypocrite. I drink a few glasses of milk a week, but I can only do it when I don't think about what I'm doing.

Because it's just gross. Disgusting. If you don't believe me then just think about it for a while. I can wait. (tap tap tap. yawn. tap tap tap.)

See? Disgusting. I am not making this up at all: if I think about milk long enough I begin to gag. Like right at this instant.

True, I didn't always hold this stance. But others were out there leading the way. I had a good friend from Brooklyn who helped. (David was the opposite of me: perfectly sociable; practical; nonathletic; sweet; optimistic; steady in habits and disposition.) We were once eating dinner at our dorm, and I sat at the table with a slice of pizza and some milk. When he saw the food crime I was committing he literally gagged.

What the....??

And it was then that I first learned of how adults must eventually shift to non-milk beverages: water, tea, coffee, wine and beer. (Snapple is not adult but acceptable in moderation.) Sadly my white-bread culture didn't provide for me a Bar Mitzvah life-preparation course to teach me the ways of adulthood, so I lingered in the land of childhood beverages for far too long. Embarrassingly long. Even today I slip into old habits now and again.

Here is an incomplete list of milk-related words that make me uncomfortable when I hear them to the point of freezing up and shuttering: pasteurize; sour cream; coagulation; spoilage; sterilization; "udder"; nipple; milky; creamy; curds and all curd-related words; lactic; butterfat; sour; mammary; lactose; emulsion; "expiration date"; weaning.

And let's not forget "mammal." And "milkman." And "suckling."

Not to mention "goats."

I better move on. I'm feeling ill.


* I suspect that I am an African-American. Or Jewish. Or Italian. Maybe all three. Or something--anything--besides 5/8th English, 5/16th German and 1/16th Polish. And everyone who knows me agrees that I'm the most soulful white man this side of Bill Clinton. They don't say that, but they think it. Well, they don't think it either, but they should. Because that's who I am despite my sallow or ruddy skin tone. Consider my aptitude for quick and easy conversation. My dislike of the t.v. show Friends. My confusion about NASCAR. My cringing when the t.v. camera lingers on a lone (and lonely) African-American face at the GOP convention. My aversion to James Taylor. My choice not to live in Idaho. My fear of crickets. Okay, that's not a soul thing, but it is a Marlon Brando thing in "On the Waterfront." And Marlon Brando scores about as low as it gets on the whiteness scale for a white man.

* Just a few shameful oldies I love:

Hooked on a Feeling. B.J. Thomas. It ain't right, I agree. But I am who I am. If I could change it, I would. I just love that chromatic move up the scale in the background when he sings, "All the good love, when we're all alone."

Most anything by The Carpenters. I hear Karen Carpenter's voice and instantly weep wracking sobs of sorrow and yearning.

I'm a Believer--The Monkees

Blue Moon--Sha na na

I got you babe--Sonny and Cher. Out of tribute to my in-laws, Groundhog Day, and my youngest daughter, who love this song.

Joy to the World--Three Dog Night

Time of the Season--The Zombies.

Lots more oldies later.