Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Pathetic

I got seven hours of sleep Sunday night. I got seven and a half last night. And what have I been lusting after since about eight o'clock this morning? That's right-- the weekend. When (maybe) I can sleep, hopefully a lot. It's Tuesday, people, Tuesday! One word-- pathetic. I wrote problems for the exam today, and the boss had a few minor comments. So if I fine-tune these tomorrow, and they are approved, maybe I can have a short day on Thursday and get some sleep then. I tell you-- pathetic.

Equally pathetic is that I am only now getting to the meme I was tagged for by two(!) excellent bloggers-- Kalakly and Tash-- over three weeks ago. So the rules:

The rules:

1) Link to the person who tagged you.
2) Post the rules.
3) Share six non-important things / habits / quirks about yourself.
4) Tag at least three people.
5) Be sure the people you tagged KNOW you tagged them by commenting what you did.

Since it's been a while, I won't make you search for the very illuminating lists of my taggers through their blogs, which you should totally check out. Here they are: Kalakly's and Tash's.

1. Jumping off of Tash's, I, too, like dark beer, although it's been years since I had a whole bloody thing of one instead of a few pathetic sips. Thank you, PCOS. JD, on the other hand, prefers blonds. Blond beers, not what you thought (hm... come to think of it, according to his best friend from high school, he did use to like mostly blonds). There was one time when we were having dinner at a restaurant that was also a brewery, and we ordered local beers, each to our preference. A different waiter brought our drink order out and proceeded to put the blond in front of me, and the dark in front of JD. We proceeded to switch our drinks right in front of him. The waiter got very embarrassed and apologized. We laughed.

2. My taste in beers is not really surprising given how it started. Senior year in high school I was invited to a party thrown by the kids of the friends of my parents. After I got back I mentioned to my mom that I decided that I do not like beer. She was very surprised and wanted to know what kind they were serving. This is how I found out that Bud.weis.er is not really beer. And this is how come a few days later my mom took me to a wings place that also served many a dark, mostly German, beer. This is beer, she said. And I was enlightened. My dad, by the way, does not drink beer. Dry white wines is what he drinks.

3. As long as we are on the subject, I have only been drunk twice in my life. I have unusually high tolerance, not in that I do not feel the alcohol, but in that I air out very fast. This is, I believe, thanks to the same pesky PCOS with its oversupply of insulin. Poor JD had to listen to me bitch and moan about how I am nearly through college and have not yet been drunk. Then, one day, there was a get together at a friend's house. We all showed up at the house around the same time, hosts included, and so all of us were put to work making food for dinner. As I peeled and chopped, I may have mentioned a severe hunger due to not having eaten since breakfast. JD then proceeded to pour me two giant goblets of port (yes, I got drunk for the first time on port) to drink in rapid succession. The second one did it.

4. Switching gears. We used to drink milk still warm from a cow. My grandfather's company had a bunch of summer cottages by the water some 60 mi away from the city limit. You had to sign up to use these, and there was a fee, but nominal enough that we could afford it. When we were there, every afternoon we would walk to the nearby pasture where the old women were getting ready to milk their cows. We would wait by "our" cow while "our" old woman milked it, and then get a cup of fresh warm milk to drink. Not pasteurized or enriched or anything. It was considered to have the most health benefits that way. We would also get a container to go. It went into the fridge as soon as we got back to the cottage, for morning kasha. I have a picture in my photo album of us with "our" old woman and "our" cow. I can still hear the sound of the first splashes of milk hitting the metal bucket. The sound changed, got a lot duller, the more milk there already was in the bucket. Funny, I never particularly liked that warm milk, and truth be told, there were on occasion stern words used to make me drink the stuff. But that sound? For some reason, the sound is firmly associated with good things in my mind. Those being lazy summer afternoon rather than warm milk, I would wager.

5. Monkey can do a lot of things that I couldn't do at six. There may only be one thing I was doing at her age that she isn't yet-- playing chess. Ironic, considering JD and I met playing chess. Actually, we showed her chess a few years ago, and she immediately decided that the object of the game was to put the pieces into their starting positions. Totally our bad for showing her the setup. Both of us completely forgot that the way you start to teach chess is back to front-- endings first. Checkmate techniques, checkmate in one, two, three... So we decided it would be wise to let her forget about this board setting obsession in order to try teaching her the right way. It may be time.

6. My dad, who taught me how to play chess, never let me win on purpose. He played full strength, always. Sure, he would play several pieces down, but he wouldn't handicap his play for me. When I finally won, fair and square, both of us staring with all the pieces on the board and everything, well, I can only imagine that being up all night all hopped up on uppers feels something like a muted version of what I felt then. I actually have recollection of being physically bouncy. The fact that it took me years to get to that point probably had something to do with me developing the idea of my dad being able to do pretty much anything and everything. Not until fairly recently did he tell me that when teaching me to play chess he was just learning himself. His trick, he claims, was to stay one chapter ahead of me in the book he was using. That and, I assume, a somewhat more developed ability to reason. Still, nice trick.

I am not tagging anyone, because I am so late doing the meme (see: pathetic) that I am not sure there is anyone left who hasn't done it yet. But if you are such a blogger, please consider yourself tagged. In fact, if you would rather I formally tagged you, please whisper in my ear comment section, and I would be more than glad to pretend I knew what I was doing all along. And if you are inspired to do one of these, please leave a comment too-- I would love to read yours.

11 comments:

EmmaL said...

Oh boy, I am right there with you on the sleeping/weekend thing. All I can think about is going home and putting my pjs on and laying there. I think mine might be depression related, or something. I've been fantasizing about it since Monday morning!

Lollipop Goldstein said...

I love these memes because they give you this peek into another world. Warm milk from a cow is this really cool image.

Unknown said...

My mom always talks about warm milk from the cow, too. And my husband's family owned a dairy farm; the labels on their (glass) milk jars said "GUARANTEED NOT LESS THAN 5% MILK FAT." Ah, those were the days. I liked reading these little glimpses into your memories/personality.

Magpie said...

So he got you drunk intentionally just so you'd stop whining?

charmedgirl said...

i almost puked when i read about warm milk! but i hate milk, so...

it makes me think, though, about something that i never understood- why are people so grossed out about breastmilk but not about drinking milk from a dirty farm animal?

niobe said...

Your chess stories remind me of something that happened to L.

When he was about 8, he learned how to play chess in school. He came home and taught his 5-year-old twin brothers, who immediately became fascinated by the game.

A few weeks later, L learned one of the standard openings (I think it's called fool's mate) where you reach checkmate in two or three moves. He used it to win a game with one of the twins. That was the last time he ever beat either one of them at chess.

meg said...

Cool list. I love the idea of the fresh milk, how cool is that?

c. said...

I learned to play chess one summer when I was 26. It's not like riding a bike though. I'd have a helluva time trying to play now.

Unknown said...

I haven't played chess for years! Your post makes me want to start playing again. Maybe H and I can sit around in the evenings and drink port over a chessboard.

I always dream of the weekend to sleep. Every week.

Tash said...

crap, i've been meaning to comment on this for days now. Yay dark beer! You know, I HATED beer until grad school in a midwestern state where I discovered that what I had been drinking was fizzy water with yellow-brown crayon dipped in it, and this frothy tasty stuff was BEER. Now sadly it's apparently not good for me (wah) but a girl must treat herself, and so I do. If you can, locate Dogfish Head Raison d'etre (made with raisins), which I swear to you will change your life.

My drunken stupors are also limited to one hand because my tolerance is so *low*. I excuse myself and go fall asleep somewhere near the bottom of glass number two. Pathetic.

Mr. ABF has sworn to take a similar tact with Bella and games, but they are both cut from the same hyper-competitive mold, so I see this getting very, very ugly, and soon.

When do we get together to drink beer and watch soccer, hmm?

Tash said...

Disclaimer: the surgeon general warns that you might not want to drink extremely delicious dark beer while, um, in your current condition. But says nothing about your husband drinking it, and you enjoying a sip. And let's not forget that horizon in which beer-drinking is allowable again, and you may just want to stock up. Just a thought.