Tag: life

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One of the things I like about Slate, an on line magazine, is its advice columnists. They have a variety of subjects like finance, misbehaving children, people being assholes and sex questions. I enjoy reading and seeing whether I agree with columnist about the problem being discussed. Every so once in awhile there will be a non problem that I think why would anyone even bother writing about this extremely lame “problem.”

A reader addressed one of these non-problems to Slate’s sexual advice columnists recently and I have to admit being baffled by the reader’s concern and the columnist’s advice. The reader’s boyfriend, while asleep, vigorously touches his dick to the point of semi-erection. He never takes it to climax, he doesn’t make any demands on her, he remains asleep during the whole time and doesn’t seem to be negatively affected by the time he sleeps in this semi-aroused state. So what exactly is the problem here?

The woman is concerned that this might be a form of sexsomnia — a condition, I have to admit, I never even heard of until reading Slate’s sex column. For those of you, like me, who are new to sexsomnia, I have provided a link but I will try to summarize as best I can. A person with this condition acts out sexually during sleep – this could include attempting to have sex with a partner sharing the bed. The person who suffers from this condition is actually asleep and not faking it in order to get sex. They are genuinely asleep.

The advice columnist thought it could be a form of sexsomnia and suggested the woman have her boyfriend take a sleep study done to ascertain if this is indeed true. All I can say is WTF. Really. A sleep study to find out if he touches himself to semi-erection while sleeping? Why would anyone consent to a sleep study when he is bothering no one? The woman isn’t being harassed for sex and he isn’t complaining about the lack of sleep. How would anyone’s life benefit from a sleep study here? Yes you do have sexsomnia but it is so mild we don’t suggest you do anything about it? Or no, you don’t have sexsomnia, you dick is just getting hard because you touched it for a few seconds. It’s all perfectly normal so don’t worry about.

I would suggest the woman just go back to sleep when she finds her boyfriend in this state and to stop worrying about nothing.

On the other hand, it does keep my mind off of Donald Trump for a few minutes. So, there is that.

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One of the advantages of living in San Diego is that you hardly ever have to use air conditioning or the heater. This is pretty much the environment I have been living in for the past 30 years. I write this as a way of explaining why I had such trouble when my fire alarm went off in my new smart apartment. Bob was cooking and apparently a minuscule amount of smoke got into the fire alarm setting it off. I could neither see nor smell any smoke but who am I to argue with a screaming fire alarm.

Bob turned on the stove fans. Alarm continued to blare. I opened the patio doors. Alarm still continued to blare. Bob told me to turn on the fan in the apartment. This seemed like a simple task and I gladly expected the challenge. In the good old days, you would just move the dial to fan, the fan would go on and the smoke would disappear.

The smart thermostats, however, are different. There is no moveable switch that can turn the fan on. The smart thermostat is a touch screen with icons. None of the icons look remotely like a fan. So I did would anybody would do in this situation, I begin to randomly hit the icons in the hope that one of those icons controlled the fan. Mind you, the alarm is screaming in my smart apartment. Scaring me, Bob, the cats and all of neighbors on the third floor.

The icons do bring up menus. Unfortunately the menu items are crammed onto a screen about the size of a baseball. I am unable to read them with or without glasses. So I was back to the tried and true method of randomly picking menu items in the hopes one of them turns on the fan. Finally after a few minutes something occurs and the fan goes on and the indecipherable amount of smoke clears the room.

Greatly relieved but also a little concerned that I can’t easily turn on the fan which also leaves Bob worried about cooking again. If the alarm is going to go off every time the oven is turned on we needed to learn how it worked. It was time for me to learn more about the thermostat. I thought since the alarm had been silenced I could calmly look at the thermostat and figure it all out. Wrong. There was still the same unrecognizable icons, the same small print, and I again found myself randomly picking an icon in slim hopes that it will be the one to tell me how to turn off the fan.

Bob suggested finding a Youtube video explaining how to use this thermostat. This annoys me because instead of being easy to use, which is how the apartment bills it, I have to watch a video on how to use this most excellent tool. I fight the urge and continue to randomly pick icons. This has become slightly more important in that I have managed to turn on the fan but now I can’t turn off the fan. After going through numerous menus and not seeing, and I mean not seeing in every sense of the word, I surrender. I go to Youtube.

This is a revelation. I thought there would be one or two videos of how to use the system. But there were numerous 5 to 10 minute videos about a variety of topics — how to set a temperature range to automatically turn on the air conditioner, how to set a temperature range to turn on the heater, how to set the temperature range for mornings and evenings, and so on and so forth. None however specifically were for how to turn the fan on and off.

I did find one that had the word fan and managed to get enough information to turn off the fan. Success. We were on the road to fully use all the great tools our smart apartment had to offer.

The problem with my lesson is that by the next day when Bob asked me how to turn the fan on and off. I couldn’t explain how it was done because it required going to the right menu options and, for the life of me, I have no memory of how I did it. Indeed, I had to watch the Youtube video again to explain how I turned off the fan. The fan I had turned off just last night. That is how easy it is to use the smart thermostat.

I guess what I am saying is that the apartment might be smart but the users are definitely stuck in the remedial class on how to work it.

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For most of this summer, I struggled with a spider on our side porch. It all started one day when I noticed the string that turns on our porch light was out of reach for some reason. I pulled it down so I could reach it better. A few days later I noticed that it was again out of reach and I wondered what was happening to the string. This was when I noticed that the string had been incorporated into a spider’s web.

At first I thought I am not going to let some spider beat me. I pulled the string out of her web but the spider kept spinning the string back into web. Every morning I would take it down and the next morning the string would be back in a spider web. This went on for a week or so before I decided I would let the spider have her way. It was only a little stretch for me and I imagined it was a bit more work for her to spin her web and pull the string into it. I was being silly to fight with her about. So I surrendered.

Every so once in awhile I would need the porch light on so I would pull the string as gently as I could so I wouldn’t yank it out of the web. Occasionally, despite my best efforts to be gentle, I accidentally would pull the string out of the web. But the spider would repair it the next day and the string was where she wanted it.

Until the other day. The string dangled freely outside her web which was no longer translucent but grey and old. Day after day, I would check to see if she had reattached the string into her web and each day I was disappointed to see it hanging there.

She hadn’t returned to her web. I told myself stories. She didn’t need the string any longer or she moved to a new location but I knew she was probably dead. Spiders don’t live much longer than a year or so and it had been at least six months since I observed her work with the porch light string. She had probably come to the natural end of her life. It has bummed me out nonetheless.

I was of Katherine Mansfield short story “The Fly” where a man who lost his son in World War I struggles with a fly caught in his inkwell. Each time the fly gets out, the man puts more ink on it and roots for the fly to struggle free from his dilemma. He keeps doing it until the fly eventually surrenders to its fate and dies — upsetting the man.

I am at a certain age when people have begun to die around me at a frightening pace. Three people who I know in just six months. Others are getting sick and taking a long time to recover. Some, I surmise, just aren’t going to get better. Then there is the daily reminder of my own diminishing abilities — not hearing everything, pains in the knee, getting winded when climbing stairs, trouble seeing while driving at night and most of this is not going to get better. Only worse. Yet we, for the most part, carry on.

In the meantime I am waiting for my spider or one of her children to return.

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As I get older, I try to keep tabs on my mental state. So far, I think I am all right but every so once in awhile I think I might be a little crazy and I am just too crazy to realize it which leads me to present confession. I think my plants are watching me.

Now I rationally realize this is impossible but I still have this nagging feeling every time I give one plant water and not the others that I am pissing off the waterless plants. Watering the plants is not one of my normal chores. Bob does it. I water for ecological reasons or so I tell myself. If, while washing dishes, I notice water still in the glass, instead of tossing it in the sink, I give it to one of the house plants. There usually isn’t a lot of water. Just enough to give one of the guys a little dash.

Only one of the five plants is going to get water so I try to be fair. I put the plants in a rotation, so all is well as long as I remember my rotation. But I don’t. If we go out to eat several nights in a row, or I have too much to drink, or I just plain forget or some combination of the three, I worry that if I went out of rotation.

Now a normal person wouldn’t worry about this, right? But it really bothers me. I don’t want piss of the plants. It has gotten to the point that if I can’t remember the rotation that I give all of them a little water. The problem I have is that I am doing because the plants are behaving like assholes and not because I love them. It kind of pisses me off that I am letting a bunch of plants push me around.