Steel toes and tap dancing

Actually there was no tap dancing.  But the toes are of steel.  Why doesn’t anyone ever want to roshambo me for it?

Tromped around the neighborhood in my new Timberland PRO (they’re really in favor of something…) work boots.  I think they’ll be okay.  Not great, and they won’t last forever, but they’ll do for at least a year.  If they turn out to be total dogs I can send then them back to the factory within the first thirty days and get a refund.  But if me and the boots can last at the warehouse for a year, I think I’ll treat myself to a pair of Redwings.  But for now I’ll make do with my Timberlands. 

They’re about as comfy as can be expected of new boots.  Which is to say: not really all that comfy at all.  I’ll have to play around with the insoles.  I always put an extra pair in pretty much every pair of shoes I own (including my mocassins!) so I’ve got some options.  It’s always a game, finding the right level of cushiness, without packing the shoe so full there’s not enough room for extraneous things like feet…

I’m not thrilled with the lacing.  It’s eyelets all the way up.  I like the top two or three to be hooks, so I can get the ankle nice and snug.  I’m having to lace-up hockey style: a full wrap around the ankle before the knot.  So I had to replace the factory laces with longer ones.  Which I probably would have done anyway: they’re skinny little things.  When did laces become so anemic?  I bought a couple different length replacements, and they’re not a whole lot better.  The longer, flat pair is particularly skinny, almost sateen.  Kinda sexy, and would go great in a corset, but not so good for boots…

And purely aesthetic, but I dyed the brown part of the uppers black.  The toe and the heel are made of a leather that’s supposed to be more scuff resistant.  Looks almost like tarpaper, or a shingle.  But the rest of the upper was brown.  Ummm…no, thanks, I don’t much care for saddle shoes.  I mean, how do you know what color belt to wear for crying out loud…?

So, yeah, I was a bit disappointed in them, like I am with most everything, so I modded them up, like I do with most everything.  I’d probably be thoroughly disappointed if I ever bought anything that didn’t need ‘improving’.  How would I make it mine?

I Need A New Want

I’ve been trying to stay real honest with myself lately about my wants and needs.  And recognizing when either of them is already met.  A big part of that is pure economics: I can’t afford to indulge all my whims.  But mostly it’s…something else.  Not spiritual really, because I’m not.  But something like that.  Secular spirituality, maybe.

I’m gearing up, literally and figuratively, for a new job.  I needed steel toed boots.   So I went out and bought them, because you can’t really make do by duct-taping tin cans to your toes.  I also wanted to buy a new set of pants and shirts.  Not to have stylin’ new togs, but because I’ve been spoiled by the uniform at my old job.  I love wearing a uniform.  I don’t have to spend anytime thinking about what I’m going to wear to work.  So I was inclined to recreate that for the new job.  But even shopping on the cheap, I did the math, and I’d be spending at least a hundred bucks on clothes.  To make my life marginally more convenient.  Not a huge investment, but I had to stop and ask myself if I really needed to make it.  I mulled it over, and decided I could manage with what I’ve already got for now. 

My grandfather was a child of the Depression.  So every penny counted to him.  He liked to tell us, “Use it up, wear it out. Make it last, or do without.”  The pre-environmental movement “reduce, reuse, recycle.” 

I’m pretty good about my three R’s.  I’ve got a pait of boots I’ve been using since ‘98.  They’ve been intensely worn. The leather is still basically good.  Beat to hell and back, scuffed, paint spattered, sure, but still sound.  The soles are shot: most of the lugs are worn flat (some are just plain missing), and there’s a split all the way across the forefoot of one boot.   But I’m loathe to throw them out.   With a new sole they’d be good shoes again.  But it’d cost more to resole them than it would to replace them.  And somebody somewhere could probably use them just as they are.  But I don’t know how to get them to that person. 

So I’ll hold on to them, and wear them out some more.  They’ll keep company with the other three or four pair of shoes I have that I can’t bear to get rid.   My lawn-mowing, snow-shoveling, gutter cleaning shoes.  The shoes that all have a little life left in them.  The shoes I make last even though I don’t really need to.  The shoes that remind me that even at the low end of the American economic ladder, I still have it pretty good.  Very good, actually.

The shoes that keep me grounded.

You can’t beat heartburn by eating more tacos.

Well, I don’t know, maybe you can.  Y’know if you eat tacos made out of Tums…

But generally speaking, when you’ve dug yourself a hole, and you’re in over your head, you need to stop digging.  Seriously, put the shovel down.  If you got yourself into a bad situation through a particular set of behavior, you’re probably not going to get yourself out of it by continuing to repeat that same behavior.  

Which, of course, is easy to say, but not always so easy to do.  I get a little bit bonkers when I misplace something.  If I’m feeling relaxed and groovy I can stop and reflect and remember where I had it last and sure enough, there it is.  But if I’m under stress (like, say, looking for my keys when I need to have left five minutes ago…) or otherwise distracted (like say, not having gotten enough sleep for three days running…) the situation is gonna get stupid.  Fast.

I start out okay.  I look where I think the widget in question ought to be.  Not there.   So I move on to the next most likely place it’d be.  Not there either.  And on down the line, usually four or five steps deep.  And still no widget.  So clearly the widget is somewhere I haven’t looked.  But I’m too tired, or stressed out, or whatever to see that simple and obvious truth.  So I go back to location one, where I invariably fail again to find my widget.  So on to location two, still no widget, and on down the line.

By this time I’m angry.  What is obvious to me is not that the widget is somewhere I’m not looking, but that the widget is evading me.  It’s gleefully scampering through the house, always a step or two ahead of me.  Or I’ll get paranoid and decide it’s been stolen, or abducted by aliens, or something equally nefarious.  Obviously it’s vanished.  Obviously.

The incredible thing is, regardless of what I believe has happened to it, I’m still stalking from room to room, getting angrier, and still looking for the widget in precisely all the locations I already know that it isn’t.  And at some point I snap.  And give up.  Then I can breathe and think for a second.  And maybe look under the table instead of on top of it.  Or behind the bookcase and not next to it.  And sure enough, there’s the widget.  Miraculously restored to me via alien intervention.  Or something.

So guess who misplaced his pill minder tonight, and found it under the keyboard, and not next to it…

Sleep Fail, cont’d

I was exhausted last night (y’know after getting only four or five hours of sleep the night before, I can’t imagine why, but there you are…) and only managed to stay up til three.  But I figure it’s okay: I’ll sleep in plenty late, make up a few hours rest, and be primed for continuing my epic journey towards nocturnality.  Parfait.

Good plan, but utterly wrong.  Just a few minutes past 8:30 *bing!*  “Up and at ‘em!  C’mon, boy, there’s a whole world out there!” 

“Fuck off,” I tell my internal alarm clock, “I don’t need to be up ’til one…” and stuff my head back under my pillow and try to go back to sleep.  And try some more, and keep trying for about an hour before I decide a light doze is the best I’m going to accomplish.  Dammit!

Seriously, what gives?  Up until the past week, I was trying to get up at eight.  Or nine.  Hell, consistently getting up at ten feeling ready to go would have been fine.  But I’ve had to drag myself out of bed for months.  And take an hour or more to boot up.  And now I’m ready for action at dawn.  I call bullshit, hypothalamus.  Stop fucking with me, you aren’t funny.

Sleep Fail

I think my circadian rhythms hate me.  I’ve sworn for most of my adult (and quasi-adult) life, that I was fundamentally nocturnal.  I would try really hard to conform to a typical schedule.  But I could never consistently get to sleep before midnight, and usually I would stay up until at least two or three.  Which put my typical waking hour somewhere around ten.  Some nights I wouldn’t sleep at all.  I’ve been pretty good about maintaining a fairly flexible schedule, so that could more or less work for me most of the time.

But I’m starting a new third-shiftish job in a couple weeks, and I’m trying to segue into my new schedule.  I’ll be working from 7p to 3/4a, so I figure I’ll end up sleeping from about 6a to 2p.  So I’ve been moving my bedtime back by an hour or so.  But my inner alarm clock is apparently just cantankerous.  For the past three days I’ve gotten less than six hours of sleep.  Last night I got less than four!  I even hung a blanket over the window to block the light.  But at 8:30a (a time I would ordinarily have to wage a valiant battle to wake at) *ding!*  My inner clock yells “Up and at ‘em!  Nuts, nuts get ‘em!”  Pointless to even try and sleep after all that hooplah…

Apparently my brain has figured out I have no plans of having children, so it’s devising its own nefarious ways to make my life misrable…