So I ordered something. And it shipped. And I’ve been tracking it on the UPS website and am annoyed because it appears as though it’s just been sitting in California for almost 72 hours doing nothing.

I’m sure there’s a logical and logistics-related explanation (scheduled flights, a system for shipments going from west to east, etc.), but for me as a layperson end consumer, I am left wondering why my package is going to arrive on the 25th and not earlier if it’s just been sitting somewhere in California for almost three days at this point and not getting any closer to me.

They really shouldn’t update the tracking info at all if they’re going to tease me like this. Grrrr.

We’ve got some snow here in Northern NJ tonight. It’s not a blizzard, but the heaviest snow and the changeover to sleet occurred after rush hour, so the crews haven’t exactly been out there plowing, salting or sanding anything. My drive down to Morristown at 5pm to drop off/pick up some stuff from my friends’ house wasn’t bad.

The drive back at 8pm? Horrific. The large four-lane interstates that comprise most of the drive there and back - I-287 and I-80, namely - were impossible to see. All the drivers on the road (including me) were making up their own lanes, using blinkers when moving any direction - just in case - and generally driving about 15 or 20 miles below the speed limit.

Of course, there were some people on the road who just LIVE for this kind of weather. Why? Because of damage to their brains caused by snow (I’m grasping here) OR because it gives them a chance to show off the only practical reason they have for driving an SUV as a single person commuter car - they’re heavy, they have 4-wheel or all wheel drive and the tires are usually massive and good for traction in wet and icy conditions. I mean, you could also drive any Subaru, a variety of Volvo models with available all-wheel drive (S40, S60) and many other cars, I’m sure… but that’s another matter.

So, in order to show-off the only thing worth showing off (and send a little F-you to the other drivers), the bastards opted to tailgate and high-beam (with their blinding xenon or halogen headlights) the cars that were staying to the right side of the road (the slow side), just trying to drive in the tire tracks of previous cars to maintain some traction. What purpose does this serve? Well, other than making an already nerve-wracking driving experience even more so. Um… let me think. Ok. I have the answer.

None. None whatsoever. No one is going to speed up in the slow lane when there’s no visibility and a risk of losing control of the vehicle. No amount of high-beam action or tailgating will make that happen - just switch lanes already. And, dear obnoxious SUV drivers (just the obnoxious ones - I know there are many non-obnoxious SUV drivers who need the car for legitimate sport utility purposes) don’t make it a point to pass on the left with only a foot or so of room between you and the other cars. You know you won’t lose control, Mr. SUV driver, but the little car to your right? They might lose control; while you’ll emerge mostly unscathed, they probably won’t.

I understand this isn’t really your concern - as much as the environment isn’t either - but think about your car insurance, if nothing else. If you’re too wealthy to care, then I don’t know - worry about your eternal salvation? If that doesn’t mean anything to you either, think about the inconvenience of having to take the car into the shop for body work or other such repair post minor accident. You might have to get a loaner. And those are usually sedans. That would suck, wouldn’t it?

My car does pretty well in crappy conditions - the standard tires on a Mazda3 aren’t bad at all (I have it on good authority that they provide better stock tires than Acura does on the TSX - that good authority comes from siblings who both got TSX’s and almost immediately replaced the tires because they were shit). I can throw the car into “fake” manual mode so I can actively drive in a lower gear when there’s a downgrade or crazy turn. But I was still taking it slow - and I have quite a bit of a lead foot otherwise, so that’s saying something.

Sigh. I’m going to enjoy some of the trail mix I made yesterday but forgot to bring to work as snack food. It’s a combination of mini chocolate chips, pecans and Craisins. It would be healthier if the chips were dark chocolate and the nuts were walnuts, but whatever. Next time. This is super tasty.

Yesterday was action-packed indeed. I got a haircut, went shopping and had lunch with my friend Sara, then got tea at a diner with my friend Theresa and went shoe-shopping. We actually found some great shoes on sale for 65-75% off their original cost. I ended up buying two pairs and paying $37. I felt all savvy. It almost makes up for having purchased a $170 pair of shoes a few months ago. Here they are:

The black ones will be getting a lot of mileage indeed; the red ones won’t get as much, but they’re still cool as hell and I wear a lot of black, so they can be my little “pop” of color.

Now for the adventure. I got home from shoe-shopping and left again 15 minutes later to pick up my friend Vin and drive 80 miles south on the Garden State Parkway to check out the only Sonic Drive-In in the state of New Jersey.

For many months now, Northern New Jersey has been “infected” with Sonic TV commercials. Whenever it comes up in conversation, people get pretty vocal about it - “Why the hell do they show those commercials here? It’s a tease… we don’t even have a Sonic within 2 hours of us!” There are active message boards of people just whining about it.

Well, technically, we do have one within 2 hours of us - it’s an hour and a half away. It is sort of in the middle of nowhere, though. We passed by a power plant that looked a bit freaky since the lights in the parking lot and on the various buildings were a strange orange color and the fog in the air was glowing orange above the trees. Creepy. I expected the car to stall, radio stations to change, and Mulder and Scully to knock on my door.

NOTE: just checked it out online. I remember the sign outside the facility said “Amergen.” Well, folks, that building was the Oyster Creek Generating Station in Ocean County, NJ - a nuclear power plant. So, if this was a TV show, that glowing might’ve been indicative of something more sinister and weird than just orange-colored light bulbs in the parking lot. It’s owned by the same company that runs the Three Mile Island Facility. That’s just some trivia - I am actually pretty comfortable with nuclear energy as a source of clean power.

Anyway - Sonic. It was an interesting cultural experience. Vin’s first comment was, “Wow, it actually IS a drive-in.” The commercials don’t play up that part, so we weren’t quite prepared for our first-time Sonic experience — parking in the drive-in space, placing the order at your personal menu board, paying via credit card at the board and waiting for the server to bring a tray or box of food out to the car. Some of the servers were actually sporting roller skates. And, hey, that’s fun.

We sampled burgers, fries, popcorn chicken, their limeade and a root beer float. My brother requested that I bring back some food, so I brought a cooler and an insulated lunch bag for his corn dog, chili dog, and Sonic Blasts. Then we made the long drive back, in a sudden torrential downpour, which got me home about midnight.

Adventure!

Dude. That’s totally a bad and sort of weird pun/play on words for a post title. Oh, well. The snow outside is all sparkly and inspiring introspection, my work-week is done, and while I’m feeling a little drained, it’s OK. There’s knitting and reading to do, Netflix en route, and a few possible weekend plans. It’s not bad.

The post title just popped into my head because I was listening to this song in the car, and remembered that the last time something reduced me to tears (other than my own internal crap) it was this song. I watched “Dancer in the Dark” over the weekend - somewhat universally acknowledged to be a horribly depressing movie, and a decent one - and that got me a little choked up, but not teary. There was no lingering sadness.

There might be something wrong with me.

So here’s the song - “Cycling Trivialities” by José González, complete with lyrics, though you have to hear it to get the full effect:

Too blind to know your best
Hurrying through the forks without regrets
Different now, every step feels like a mile
All the lights seem to flash and pass you by

So how’s it gonna be
When it all comes down you’re cycling trivialities

Don’t know which way to turn
Every trifle becoming big concerns
All this time you were chasing dreams,
without knowing what you wanted them to mean

So how’s it gonna be
When it all comes down you’re cycling trivialities
So how’s it gonna be
When it all comes down you’re cycling trivialities

Who cares in a hundred years from now
All the small steps, all your shitty clouds
Who cares in a hundred years from now
Who’ll remember all the players
Who’ll remember all the clowns

So how’s it gonna be
When it all comes down you’re cycling trivialities

So what does this really mean
When it all comes down you’re cycling trivialities
Cycling trivialities
Cycling trivialities

I’ve been rock-climbing (indoors, at a rock gym) every week since mid-September. That’s going on five months now, and it’s been a huge part of my physical fitness “makeover.” In terms of keeping me interested and challenged, it’s great, and it is hard work. However, I’ve progressed moderately well for someone who goes only once a week, is missing three bones in her left wrist and wasn’t ever Miss Athletic to begin with.

So today was a pretty OK climbing day. I didn’t conquer anything super difficult, but I tried some climbs that were a bit more technical and different from what I’ve done thus far (thusly was I informed by my friend who invited me to join this crazy world’o'climbing). I kept trying, rather doggedly, thinking that there had to be something I was overlooking or missing that was making them more difficult.

Nope. They were just difficult for me. My hands got tired. And that’s OK. End result?
I have some markings. Something to show for my efforts. Perhaps even a sort of tribal initiation sign.

I’ve got me some raw hands.

It’s hard to take a steady photo of your right hand when you’re right-handed. The left hand is not as adept at keeping a camera still. However, you can still see the shiny new blister on my pinky finger, the pink spots on my palms and fingers where callouses have been building for several moons (and soreness persists), and the bit of abraded skin on my index finger. There’s lots more excitement under that Band-Aid and on my other hand, but why give it all away?

Just don’t let anyone say I don’t give a 110% when I set out to conquer something!

Even if I don’t quite get there by the end of one attempt, there’s always next time.

Maybe it should be varieties, but varietals just sounded fun and brings to mind grapes and vineyards and fun.

There’s crap insomnia that results from stress, being emotionally overwrought, or from knowing that you have to be up way early the next morning. This is the kind that will make you feel sick and horrible the next day.

Then there’s not-so-crap insomnia that results from having a weird holiday sleep schedule and having problems getting re-acclimated to the work/sleep schedule. This is the kind that will make you feel mildly out of sorts the next day, but not so bad that you’ll crash.

Then there’s pseudo-insomnia - where you stayed up late, were tired at one point, but had a second wind (or, in my case, stepped out into the 17°F windy night and then drove) and are now wide awake physically and incapable of falling asleep because you’re doing something that requires little thought (i.e. watching TV, reading the newest crap best-seller, looking at pictures on lolsecretz) but is still a half-step beyond brain-death.

In my case, I have the third, and this “something” is updating my iPod with new music from CDs acquired before Christmas as well as iTunes purchases made since then. And writing this entry. There’s a reason it’s short. I’ve got 3 more CDs to get on here and some of them are mixes, so no CDDB help for me.

Hint: it’s #5.

Thank you, CNN.com, for giving me a reason to dislike society just a little bit more today.

Almost two years ago now (it may be closer to a year and a half, but I’m not keeping track), I deleted my accounts at all the social networking sites I belonged to. At that time, Facebook was still only open to college students and corporations (that changed all the way back in Sept. 2006). Friendster was beginning to die its slow painful death, and MySpace was teh hawtness (if I may use a two-year old -or more- slang phrase).

Yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered, one of their contributors talked about abandoning Facebook altogether and how she feels like a Luddite. You can listen to the piece here (it’s only 2 min. long). Granted, she’s 23, so the six-year gap between us probably makes enough of a difference that it’s a much bigger deal for her to be absent from Facebook than it is/was for me. She probably is considered a Luddite by some of her friends (though I daresay they might not be familiar with the word).

Most of my friends continue to plug away at Facebook (and there are a few MySpace hangers on) and communicating with friends that way: e.g. “I’ll just Facebook [name] and see if she is going to be around,” or “I left a message for [name] on Facebook asking him to pick that up for me.”

I don’t operate that way. It seems like a terribly inefficient way to communicate with friends. For quick things like that - send a text message. Your friends always have their cell phones with them. For longer things, send an email (or actually call, if it’s urgent). Leaving a message on Facebook requires your friend to be sitting at their computer/laptop somewhere, logged in (and chances are they’re probably on there all the time, so I have to allow for this difference between myself and 58 million other people) and deal with anything else that might’ve popped up: someone’s annoying post about how drunk they were this weekend or much they love their boyfriend, embedded YouTube video of the newest annoying viral phenomenon, perhaps some invitations to get together at a bar with only 40 or 50 of a person’s other closest friends - and “pokes” (We are how old? Oh, wait, this was created with a slightly younger set in mind).

There’s all this periphery and noise - the ads, the streams of irrelevant info being generated by people you feel compelled to befriend but really don’t need/want to know about beyond their pre-established role in your life… a veritable buffet of empty and useless distraction parading around under the guise of social networking.

“Social” = friendly (and who wants to be seen as unfriendly?) “Networking” = is supposed to provide both the technological element and some aspect of legitimacy? Every high school and college student hears about how important networking is to his/her future. Look! We’ve made it fun (or at least made the buzzwords)! “Social networking.”

While Facebook hasn’t become a complete and utter visual vomitorium like MySpace (which is one nice thing), the framework is the same. Users will want more and more control and the powers that be will slowly grant it - little things, but enough to make people feel like they have some control and prevent them from deserting the site which I feel would happen if they had too much/little control. See also: MySpace. It’s the country club effect, I suppose. Some restrictions give it a sense of exclusivity - “Well, if we can’t limit membership, then at least the standards of dress are being upheld!”

But look at the little fish flakes of freedom - removing the verb from your status update so you’re free to write WHATEVER YOU WANT! This actually made national news under the headline “Facebook users given grammatical freedom.”

I was just getting fed up with all of it (and apparently continue to be) and had a sort of “Burn it all down! Make it clean! PURGE!” moment. It’s just too much clutter - too much info I don’t need, too much involvement with people encroaching upon my personal time, too much time wasted (since it does become a major time suck - I see this in my younger target-age siblings… hours and hours) that could be spent pursuing something that makes you a better, happier, smarter, healthier person. Or sleeping. Sleep is a good use of time, too.

Full disclosure: I should mention I belong to one real social network - LinkedIn, which I sardonically refer to as “networking for networking’s sake”, repeating something a friend wrote when he sent me an invitation. But no one’s posting invitations to parties on that site… yet. I also belong to Last.fm, but do not participate in community features. I only wanted this fun music widget on the right.

I love the technology. What are you reading? Yeah. I stay abreast of social networking for work and general awareness, but I guess I’m just not the target audience for the medium of social networking. I don’t want more involvement with people. I’m a quiet person (believe it or not) who values time alone. I don’t want shallow connections with lots of people. I prefer deeper real connections with fewer people. I vastly prefer a small dinner party with three people and good conversation over a large gathering where the conversation is limited to surface discussions of TV shows, celebrity gossip and who is playing beer pong - and where everything else gets lost in the noise.

And having spent all this time sitting in front of the computer, I’m going to balance it out with an hour of running - which has been doing an OK job of making me a better, happier and healthier person.

I still need to check something.