Friday Five, or "Five crappy little non-posts does not a proper post make"

I could provide several good or lame reasons why my blogging's been even more sparse than usual lately, but none of them are terribly interesting, and I don't suspect anyone cares to hear me rattle off excuses or explanations anyway. The past week or so, however, it seems my main problem is that every thought that comes to me as a potential blog post is just that: a thought. Sometimes, it's entirely possible to take a single thought and run with it (hello, Darren managed to pull one of his best stories yet out of the simple and yet fascinating discovery of a box of nudie pens in his new desk; surely I can work a blog post out of the fact that my substitute yoga instructor hoisted and man-handled me into a pose in a most indelicate and graceless way...); other times I get out the single thought and realize, "Huh. Guess that's all I've got to say about that."

In keeping with the shoddy blogging that's been my norm of late, then, here are five things I almost wrote about recently but didn't (until now, of course)...

1. The fact that a certain friend of mine's job is hopelessly and immeasurably more interesting than mine. A single example should suffice, I think... One of us, as part of her employment last week, edited a proposal trying to convince someone to hire her company for a public safety consulting project. Another of us had drinks with a couple who wrote a book about Tantric sex. Want to take a wild guess which was which?



2. The bizarre ways my subconscious is trying to mess with me in my sleep. I don't think I'm eating any more poorly than usual lately, and yet I cannot in any way explain the absurd dreams I've been having in recent weeks. It started with this gem starring one of my recent eHarmony rejects. Then last week, I had a dream that I was kissing a good friend's ex-boyfriend--an ex-boyfriend who, no offense to the fabulous woman who used to kiss him herself, is a scrawny little thing that I have never felt in any way amorously drawn to. Don't get me wrong--he was a fine person and a lovely addition to our social circle for a while. But kissing him? No. Not something I was planning to do. Finally, the other night, a college friend I haven't seen or heard from in likely six or seven years showed up in my dream. In the dream, I hadn't seen her any more recently than in real life, and yet, the first thing she asked me was if I could take off of work to give her a ride to the airport. The hell??



3. My car died after work the other night, leaving me stranded, 23 miles from home, in the health club parking lot. Luckily, the one person I know in that town who is not my ex-boyfriend was home when I called, and I was able to stay with her for the night and get a ride to a service center the next morning. As I waited for my car to be towed in and the mechanics to tell me what inconvenient malfunction they'd be overcharging me for that day, all I could think of was how annoyed I was that I didn't have my book (or even one of the many magazines that's been piling up and collecting dust on my coffee table) with me. When I left the house the previous morning, I hadn't anticipated sitting anyplace where I'd have time to get in some reading. Didn't Rory Gilmore teach me anything?? (aside from "don't sleep with your married ex-boyfriend," I mean?) That girl brought a book with her to the Chilton semi-formal dance, for fuck sake. Rory Gilmore would never be caught at the GM dealership for three hours without her own reading material. I shall add this to the list of TV lessons immediately.



4. Since I am, apparently, not quite sick of this dating nonsense just yet, I had two dates last week. Both were named Mike. Both are IT managers by trade. Both ride motorcycles and enjoy martial arts. Both seemed to lie about their height by at least an inch, although that is really neither here nor there and not particularly important to the comparison. I fairly quickly eliminated the Tuesday Night Mike, which is most definitely a good thing, as my Inbox was getting to be entirely too confusing a place. Incidentally, the elimination had nothing to do with the fact that he tried to order a Smirnoff Ice and, when told the bar didn't carry it, instead nursed a pink lemonade for two hours. I promise that was unrelated to my disinterest, though I can't say it helped his case a whole lot.



5. And finally, perhaps the most pointless and non-post-worthy of all these random and disjointed thoughts, have you seen the ads for Keebler's new Town House Toppers? The one where a cracker with a raised edge goes careening aboard a roller coaster as a means of proving that the tiny bumper will quite safely keep your cheese spread intact? Has this really been a problem up to now? Is anyone actually off-roading it with their crackers in extreme-speed environments and shouting "Cheese overboard!" left and right? Are not-so-steady-handed snackers really demanding an advanced cracker innovation as their remedy? Even if this had been an issue up to now, would that one-eighth inch guardrail really solve this little conundrum? I can think of no more ridiculously and unnecessarily over-engineered product than the Town House Topper, and this comes from someone who has regularly perused both the SkyMall and the Lillian Vernon catalog. Clearly I need to stop thinking about it, however. There is a reason I rejected this as a possible post, after all.