random stuff friday

Tracey at Beyond the Pale is talking about bacon. (Now, maybe I'm dense, and "bacon" is code for something else, but I'm going to be literal here). It's been too long since I had bacon. Nice crispy bacon. Cooked in a pan, the real way, not in the microwave. I dislike microwaved bacon. What you really need to do is cook it in an old, not-non-stick, cast-iron pan that is well-seasoned. And you need to cook it until it's JUST this side of burnt. That's good bacon.

I judge breakfast restaurants on how well they cook bacon. If they bring it to the table all limp and sad, they go down in my estimation. Bacon needs to be crispy! You need to render most of the fat out of it as it cooks!

Unfortunately, where I live now, the only restaurants that really serve breakfast are the fast food places and you can't get good bacon at a fast food place. Or at least I never have. What you need is a real old-fashioned diner or coffeeshop (not coffeeHOUSE) type place, where they have a real grill and the eggs and the bacon and the hashbrowns and the leftover onion smell from the day before all commingle and make all the food good. (And yeah, I know - if you keep kosher or whatever the Muslim dietary laws are called, then you can't eat there. Or if you have some kind of real or imagined intolerance of one of those things, you can't. Sorry. Too bad. In my ideal world there would be nice old diners with big greasy grills where they cook good scrambled eggs that taste a bit of bacon fat and grilled onion, and hash browns that are crispy, and bacon that's brown and hot and crackles when you chew it).

Dang. Now I'm hungry. And I'm stuck here all day because my car's in the shop, and my lunch is my usual sad little production of yogurt and fruit and crackers because I'm never hungry at 6 am and so that looks like a reasonable lunch then.

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This weekend we go back on Standard Time. I am happy about that. The governmental types who voted to extend DST by like a month next year can suck it. I hate DST. Because, you see, I like to be in to work at 7 am. This is the time when no one else is around, no one bothers me, I can get geared up for the day without listening to other people's yammering.

But. Daylight Savings Time means that for a goodly chunk of the year, I'm driving to work in the dark (I suppose it's partly WHERE in the time zone I live; I'm close to the western edge of my time zone). And driving to work in the dark - I know lots of people do it, but I just find it depressing. (My commute is like five minutes too. I wonder what people who leave the house at 4:30 am or somesuch feel).

I don't mind driving home in the dark; that feels right, that is appropriate. But a person shouldn't have to go to work in the dark, I think.

Some days this semester I've driven to work in the dark and then driven home in the dark. And spent part of the day in a totally windowless room. The sun could go out and I wouldn't know.

And there's the whole waste of the changeover. Now, granted, I like 'fall back.' I like getting an extra hour of sleep (or, since I'm an early-bird type, an extra hour Sunday morning before church). I don't like resetting all the many clocks, though.

I wonder if anyone's done a study on lost productivity related to time changes? Because, even if it took only five minutes to reset clocks - and I would guess in most homes, with microwave clocks and clocks on vcrs and all that, it's longer - that wastes a lot of time for a lot of people. And then there's the matter of (especially with Spring Forward) people being tired and groggy and not being hungry at designated mealtimes and being hungry at non-mealtimes.

Actually, I'm afraid that if they did that study and found it screwed up productivity, rather than abolishing Daylight Savings Time they'd just make it permanent, so in December I'd be driving to work in the dead cold middle of the night dark (and also driving home in the cold twilight). And that would make me angry. And you wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

I'd like to see them do away with DST. I mean, it's not fooling anybody (or maybe it is and people are stupider than I like to think): it doesn't mean daylight is any longer. You're just screwing with the clocks so the feckless types of people who getoff work at 4 and have no responsibilities for the rest of the evening so they can go and play Ultimate Frisbee or Grateful Dead Dance on their front lawns or something. To me, an extra hour of light just means an extra hour of feeling guilty that I don't have time to mow my lawn on that day.

And I've heard that dairy farmers complain: the cows still need to be milked at the 'same time' in a real-time sense, and so in March or whenever we "spring forward" from now on, they'll have to go out an hour earlier than they did the day before to take care of the cows. (And the justification for DST was given as "it will help the farmers!")

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Gah, I think it's time for me to begin considering a new car. The one I have is only 7 years old but it's been in the shop a lot this year. First, the transmission failed. Then, it got an oil leak.

I don't know what kind of car to get. I kind of like having a minivan even though it's like this big joke - the nice thing about a minivan is you can just bung all your equipment in the back and you don't have to worry about it getting rained on or stolen out of the truck bed or stuff like that. And I've hauled home various pieces of vintage furniture I've bought over the years.

But I KNOW if I breathe a word of "new car" in my department, I will get all kinds of pressure re: hybrids or super tiny fuel efficient cars.

My concern with hybrids is that the local mechanics won't know how to deal with them, and I don't want to drive/have towed my car to the Big City every time it needs work.

And as for the tiny car thing: I'm more comfortable being up high. Yes, I know that if I get hit by a truck I will be just as dead, but I think being more confident and comfortable when I am driving means I drive better, and therefore am less likely to get creamed by a truck.

And honestly? I'm so busy that on a given week I don't drive more than 20 miles or so - to work and back, to the grocery, to church. It's not like I'm out tooling around and cruising and stuff. And driving a car 20 miles a week that gets 20 mpg is no different than driving a car 40 miles a week that gets 40 mpg.

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I dunno. Right now I'm tired and cranky and sad and I don't know why. I'd like to chalk it up to the poison ivy I still have (that is still driving me crazy thank you) and not that I'm depressed or hormonal or have something really and truly wrong with me like I'm burning out at my job. But I don't know. This week it's been hard to muster the necessary enthusiasm. (And trust me, it doesn't help to have people wandering out of class partway through. And I don't care about the Parade Of Excuses: I have to work, I have to take my kid to the doctor, we have an away game...)

But - if I quit teaching, what would I do? It's not like I have this huge giant skill set. I can't program. I'm not that nuts about doing research, although I think some days being a lab-tech who comes in at 8 and goes home at 5 and never works weekends and never takes work home looks kind of attractive. I'd love to be a writer or an artist or something, but I also like having a regular paycheck (and I'm secretly afraid I'd be a no-talent hack).

This is something that goes through my head most midterms though. The idea of "I'm spinning my wheels, I suck at this, the students are frustrating, I should quit and go do something else." And then, when the next semester starts, I'm usually fired up again, and it lasts until the next midterm.

Years ago, I had a little cartoon on my office wall. It showed a man walking around a circle painted on the ground. Half of the circle was labeled "passionate engagement" and the other half was labeled "existential despair." And I think that kind of captures how my life goes sometimes - I just need to walk around to the "right" half of the circle again. But being in the "wrong" half kind of sucks.