shelbinator.com

For the last few months, I’ve had randomly recurring insomnia — sometimes once a week, sometimes four nights a week — that I thought was going to be the death of me. Literally. It isn’t just lying there all night staring at the ceiling, it’s waking up at 3 a.m. and getting stuck in a panic attack that you can’t shake till dawn.

Having my desk in my bedroom — no matter how I try to hide it with a crappy little curtain — probably doesn’t help the situation. So tonight it was time for a little chakra cleansing, or something, and the desk will live in the kitchen, where I’ve always worked better anyway. My fake little “pub table” wasn’t big enough for serious writing and I don’t eat at the damn thing anyway.

And what better excuse than to screw with the camera’s time-lapse setting.
UPDATE: new version, with music.

We’ll see how often I sleep through the night now.

Sarah behind the entertainment center, originally uploaded by shelbinator.

May you have no storm clouds to hide from on your special day.

Who’s gettin’ steak for dinner?!

Through no one’s fault but my own, in my typical scatterbrained, procrastinating, irresponsible way, I have become uninsured.

Yeah, Fall semester, when I’m not a student? That starts in two weeks. But Summer semester? That totally ended two days ago (like I’d notice; I haven’t taken a real class in years). And along with a bunch of undergrads’ final exams, my student health “coverage” [sic] is nothing but a memory.

I have submitted my online application for short-term coverage to Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Georgia (which, in an excellent example of Good Old American Family Values in a Culture of Life, declares quite boldly, Pregnant women are not eligible to apply. Reconcile that for me, you pro-lifers?).

And now, I will sit here very quietly and not touch anything.

I think I smell smoke.

Did you hear that? Sounds like a truck is coming right at my building.

Are you sure this powerstrip is properly grounded? That coffeepot has a shifty look to it.

I have to use stairs to get to the bathroom in this building. I think my nalgene bottle will do for now; I can buy a new one when I’m insured.

Okay, it’s been six minutes, why haven’t they called me with the good news yet? I’m really starting to worry about this chair collapsing right out from under me. Hello? Vive le France?

Well, I’m older than dirt and about as exciting these days, but I can still sing you under the table with my Britney Spears renditions. If you think you can rise to such a challenge, plan on pencilling in some serious karaoke action this almost-holiday weekend as I commemorate my big double-3’s and try to distract myself from the fact that being so old with a still-incomplete dissertation probably warrants ritual suicide, not public butchery of 80’s and 90’s pop tunes.

My birthday falls on a Monday this year, which pretty much sucks in and of itself, but its sucktacity is compounded with the floating mid-week 4th of July holiday, which will most likely be handled 17 different ways by different people’s employers, thus rendering birthday plan optimization rather challenging, to say the least. So I want to have it both ways (you’ve been waiting to hear that, haven’t you?). I’m still pondering details, but the likely Saturday venues are the Vortex Midtown followed by a stumble up to Twisted Taco if they do in fact have karaoke on Saturdays (forget the DD-challenged commute to Mary’s); Monday is quality retro crooning at the Star Bar in L5P, but I know some of you are real “But I have work in the morning” whiners with your stupid salaries and health benefits, so take your pick. And for God’s sake don’t get me anything, just put a PBR in my hand and point me to the stage — and dole the Percocet out carefully, if I manage to have root canal in the interim.

Update Friday morning: Podcast & details from the townhall coming this weekend.

A rather alarmist flyer has been taped to the front door of my apartment building, which apparently once upon a time long ago served some purpose for nearby Grady High School, urging residents to visit the terribly long URL DontLowerOurPropertyValues.com to file a complaint and protect our rights.

Apparently, the Midtown Neighbors’ Association is contemplating the establishment of a Local Historic District, and the anonymous website registrant with a PO Box at a UPS Store doesn’t like that idea. According to the all-caps shout on their page, our property values will plummet if the activist associations put historic regulations on our personal homes.

I can see their argument; a number of tycoons have driven up their property values in these neighborhoods by buying small, old (but charming) little bungalows, flattening them like a pile of toothpicks, and throwing up McMansion monstrosities. It’s all about location, location, location, right? So just because you want to live in our quaint little neighborhood doesn’t mean you need to be stuck with a 3/2 from the 1930’s. Establishing a historic district I imagine would change that dynamic to something more like buying a Saturn: what you see is what you get, take it or leave it.

However, I really don’t understand the anti-historic activist’s marketing strategy in taping such flyers to the doors of apartment buildings, where a bunch of working-class stiffs have settled for no dishwasher, no central air shoeboxes just to live in this part of town. The page that cites examples of the stagnant price of homes in nearby historic neighborhoods (that are also primo places to live) shows some lovely homes in the mid-200’s that I’d be thrilled to live in, and then asks us the goofy rhetorical question, “When was the last time you saw ANY house in Midtown or Virginia Highland sell for under $400,000, let alone $300,000?”

Um, what kind of answer do you expect from people who would love to own property in Midtown but can’t afford $300,000, let alone $400,000?

There’s a townhall meeting about this tonight, and I wonder if our anonymous property rights advocate will have the nads to be there — and whether it’ll be worth me skipping the Atlanta Press Club event to be there. (To learn about or to commit citizen journalism, that is the question….)

I’m trying this new health kick thing. Sort of.

For one, I’m eating a lot more vegetables. Most of the time, I think vegetables are to be thrown at people or used sparingly to enhance dishes based primarily on meat and cheese. Chicken quesadilla? Yeah, put a little salsa in that. Salsa = vegetable serving, only four more to go. This might be why I should really go see my doctor about the way my heart does the cha-cha when I try to exercise.

But more importantly for graduation purposes, I’m trying to break out of the cycle of stay up late, have a couple beers to get sleepy, wake up too early by fighting with alarm clock, drink a pot of coffee at work, sludge through unproductive zombified day, go home late and repeat. My friend K just managed to defend her dissertation without any assistance from an alarm clock, so why not me?

I’m four days into the less-beer, more-greens, more-sleep diet, and I’m as yet unconvinced. You would think that letting the body wake up gradually and naturally wouldn’t come with this totally doped-up feeling like your system hasn’t flushed the serotonin yet, but even after a few nights of 8+ hours, I have to furrow my brow and concentrate on the kitchen cart before I can remember what I need from it.

Coffee filters. Oh. Right. Now I put this
No you idiot, throw out the old one first. I knew that. I was just testing…me. Now I put the water in here, and, voila!
Is there any coffee in the filter? Oh. Right.

And while I was so proud of myself for getting up unassisted after 8 hours of sleep yesterday, that’s just not always going to work for me. I am a very vivid dreamer, and my brain has learned to use this to thwart me. Instead of getting up and hitting the snooze button, I now just dream about it. I know I was awake at a decent hour this morning, having grown too disturbed with being stuck in the wrong hotel room taking a shower with no clean towels before a wedding in the desert. I opened my eyes and the sun was up, but something in my head told me it was still too early for work.

It’s only 7 yet. Go back to sleep. How do I know? I can’t see the clock. Sure we can. It’s over there, see? 7:05 it says. But…but…isn’t it behind the desk partition? How can I see it from here? I need to get up and look. No, that’s right — but see, all we have to do is move the curtains aside — and see? Now we see the clock! Oh, yes, that’s a neat trick. Yep, 7:05. I guess I can go back to sleep.

So, having telekinetically moved things around to see a clock that existed only in my head while quite awake mind you, I mistakenly believed I would not be late for work and got back to the business of hiding from monkeys. In the Great Smoky Mountains. Where they abound.

Monkeys that turn into Akitas.

Really, it’s always crunch time in grad school, it seems. But crunch time has moved full force into my mouth.

My whole head hurts.

This happened a few weeks ago, when a dull, throbbing pain grew worse and more widespread, emanating from my lower jaw up through my face and into my skull, and I thought it was just a sign of having neglected a cavity my dentist was worried about for far too long. But then the pain subsided for a while and, hating dentists, I never called to make a follow-up appointment.

The pain, she is back. But the fact that its return coincides with a new nocturnal phenomenon confirms my suspicion that the real culprit is the fact that I’m clenching my jaw during the few fitful hours of what passes for sleep each night. This time around, I take a break each night from grinding my teeth to wake up sometime before dawn and enjoy the fact that I am absolutely drenched in sweat.

Grody, I know. Like I have time to do extra loads of laundry on top of salvaging bollocksed research, writing hopeless chapters of literature review, and keeping my fingers in too many political pies that I consider “investments in the future.”

It ain’t insufficient air conditioning. It ain’t too many blankets. Four nights in a week and the feeling that I’ve been whacked in the face with a cricket bat really point to the fact that I’m steadily losing my mind.

I can’t wait for the night terrors to come.

Interesting and Fun-to-Know Fact About Me #47: I spent the first two decades of my life almost exclusively going by the nickname “Chip.” Surprisingly enough, I still have people who I consider pretty good friends look around my apartment and suddenly blurt out, “Who the hell is ‘Chip’ and why do you have a poster signed by Dave Barry to him?” So I might as well get it overwith for the rest of you: yes, they call me Chip at home; I’m a Jr., and that’s apparently what you can do with that, so go on, get it out of your system and let’s get back to behaving like adults. Done?

I’m not really sure when I decided to eschew the campy nickname for my more formal legal name — okay, that’s a lie, I know exactly which straw broke that camel’s back, but I’m not sharing the story right now. I did, however, gradually deprecate its use like an obsolete piece of HTML, primarily by no longer correcting new professors on the first day of class when they went through roll call and asked for corrections and nicknames. As I transitioned from the class of ‘96 to ‘97 in the Aerospace program (thanks to the five-year liberal arts double major), most of my new not-quite-my-friend classmates knew me only as the professors knew me — Shelby — and I myself got used to my new-old grown-up name.

The final nail in the coffin for the notion of ever going through life under a diminutive nickname was when my new department receptionist for my first Real Job asked me exactly how I wanted my business cards: did I want the Jr. on there, or a nickname, or what? I thought about the work ahead of me and decided that the last thing I felt should be associated with advanced turbomachinery that might one day fly on something as formidable as a Comanche or a
UCAV is the signature of a guy named Chip. Golf, tennis, or surfing lessons? Go see Chip. Ceramic turbine blades or forward-swept shrouded fans? Call Shelby. Simple as that.

Now, as I steer my career toward the political, I keep seeing the best and final reason to drop the whole nickname nonsense once you pull the punk rock posters off your wall.

Randy “Duke” Cunningham sentenced to eight years for bribery and fraud.

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on trial for obstruction of justice during CIA leak investigation.

Ex-CIA No. 3 Kyle “Dusty” Foggo indicted in corruption inquiry

I don’t know what the hell is wrong with all of these people, but there’s something about their douchey nicknames that brings extra douche to their criminal douchebaggery. If I get caught up in some crapstorm someday, I’m going down with my proud, legal name, no-middle-name and all.