I’ve been running errands and working all day that I just sort of let the day slip by without posting something. My bad! I am not in want of topics—I have ideas shooting out of my ass like I’ve been food poisoned—so it isn’t that; I just don’t really prep my posts or actually take the time to write them sometimes, despite my knowing when I want them published.

Sigh. Reminds me of my old college days, when I’d leave a writing assignment until the very last minute, and I’d sit at my computer in the wee hours of the morning, waiting for my dot matrix printer to print out my 20-page story for my Experimental Writing class. Oh. My. God. I know that when the fax machine was new, people the world over were astounded at the speed in which they were able to transmit type over a very long distance—a whopping 15-20 minutes per page. I’m sure my dot matrix left that sort of record far, far behind, but even then it moved too slowly for me. In the time I print 20 pages now, I’m sure my dot matrix printed just the first page. Half an hour to print a story, and I’d be muttering curses at my printer the whole time, willing it to print faster so I can catch an hour or two of sleep before getting up again. I’d go to class with my story all completed but with half my hair pulled out by the roots from the frustration.

Argh!

Kids say they have it so tough these days, not like when I or my parents were kids. Whiny babies. They have all the coolest, most time-saving tools today, I can’t for the life of me figure out why they complain so much. I didn’t have a cell phone growing up. Hell, I didn’t even have a pager. But my mom still wanted me to call when I got somewhere, when I was on my way home, or if I was going to be late. This meant searching for a phone somewhere, and this meant having enough money on me to use said phone.

When writing a research paper, I had to leave home and use a building called a library, and I had to use what was called the Dewey decimal system to search for the books on the topic about which I was writing. I had to read those books to find what I wanted because the index pages sucked ass. Sure, I had the use of a photocopier, but I still had to retype citations. Google? World wide web? Copy and paste? I would have given anything for those. It would have meant more sleep for me.

Oh, and what I wouldn’t have given for electronic books back then. I often had five heavy tomes on me, all in my backpack, weighing on one shoulder and distorting my spine because it wasn’t cool to wear both straps as backpack manufacturers intended. Calculus. English Lit. Biology. History. French. Why in heaven did they all have to be two or three inches thick and in hardcover? And this doesn’t even count my gym clothes or shoes … because my cheersquad didn’t get to have space in the locker room. We changed our clothes in the home economics classroom where our cheer adviser taught. Plus, there was my lunch and the bags of candy I peddled to raise money for my cheer uniform. I must have been carrying about 50 pounds of crap in my backpack, all told. They didn’t allow the use of the hallway lockers back then because my school was in the ghetto, and the lockers were constantly vandalized. I was thrilled when I started driving to school—I used the trunk of my car as my locker and would switch books during the lunch period.

Dude, and I had to walk to school in six feet of snow, six miles away, uphill both ways!

But I digress. I’m here, again writing something last minute in the wee hours of the night. I don’t like that. So I’ll stop.

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