Just in case you had nothing else to do on a Sunday

I am stuck inside. I have more than one reason for being here, and granted, with a little applied problem solving I would probably realize how easy my situation would be to resolve, but then I wouldn’t have a blog.

Reason number one for being stuck inside on a beautiful sunny day in California:

I have 5 phone numbers in my entire phone. Of the five contacts, three of them are named Mike. This backs up my long held hypothesis that Mike is the most popular name for people who love naked women and the industries they might find them in. When I was eighteen and working as a house dancer I used to forget names constantly. I still do that, but technology aids me now. Anyhoo, back then, I would ask someone’s name and then forget it before my brain could even register it. I did this because the music was too loud and it was hard to hear over it, and because it was dark, and for some reason I don’t process things well in the dark, and also because I was 18 and the world revolved around me so I wasn’t interested in outside details. But no one caught on. No one caught on because if I was put on the spot I would guess that the stranger at hand was named Mike, and I would mostly be right. My second guess would be Richard, or Robert. I usually got it in three guesses. A study on why this is the case would be fascinating. Maybe we just have no imagination with our baby boy names in Sacramento.

But let’s talk about why there are five numbers in my phone. There are five numbers in my phone because I am retarded. I cannot multitask, and neither can you. Not effectively anyway. Don’t fool yourself. I read the studies. But that doesn’t keep me from doing it. So I had three windows open on my desktop, and I was doing research on chat boards, and I had two windows open on my laptop, and I was toggling between email accounts, and then I decided I needed to sync my phone to both my laptop and desktop, and I needed to make everything streamlined on iCloud, and I plugged it in to one or the other and clicked the mouse on something but the mouse was connected to the desktop and not the laptop and things imploded and I realized I had restored my phone to factory settings. This happened of course just two days after I got a new phone, because I smashed my last one to shit when I decided to try to drunk text and instead let the phone slip between my fingers right into an elegant and nearly unreal faceplant into the asphalt I was stumbling across. I had not synced that phone effectively either. I spent the past two days tracking down all of the numbers I just lost again. So I am rebuilding again, and so far only the Mikes of the world are thinking to text me. To bring it full circle, I am inside because I can’t call anyone to make plans.

Reason number two I’m stuck inside:

 I’m supposed to be in Bulgaria. I will be flying out there on the 26^th to shoot one very awesome Indie movie. I will be there for three months with a quick trip home for thanksgiving. I have scheduled my life around this, naturally. The first part of my life that required scheduling for a long-term absence was my horse. I couldn’t just leave him sitting in a stall while I flitted around Europe, so I spent Thursday getting him settled in a sweet pasture situation near Santa Barbara. I rode him through some tomato fields. We stopped at a fruit stand. I played at the beach. All in all a good day. And that’s how I would normally spend a sunny day off. Outside. Conquering the world with my horse. Who I just shipped too far away to see regularly. The other thing about the Bulgaria shoot is that I was supposed to fly out on the 10^th, before things got moved around, and without enough time to book up the days in between the original departure date and the new one. Blah.

Reason number three I am stuck inside:

I am trying to not get any more freckles. I started swimming every day about a month ago, right after a week running around the desert in the white hot sun at Burningman, and now I look like orphan Annie. Shit’s gotta change. So I got some fun lotion that lightens freckles and was told not to go out in the sun while I’m using it. It’s ok though. The pool is heated. I swim at night, stealth style. But it’s still not ideal. Pre-Africa-trip it might have been more bearable because I was sleeping late and staying up half the night, but adjusting to a 9 hour time difference on the bottom of the globe and then coming back somehow reset me to something resembling healthier. 7am is painfully far from dusk.

So aside from the fact that it just sucks to be inside when the sun is out, I have made an extended list of other reasons it sucks to try to pass time at home, based on data gathered in the past 48 hours:

1.  I am not a cook. I have strange whims that are best handled by licensed and experienced professionals. Restaurants. I take standard dishes off the menu and amend them with my own ideas of what should be added or deleted and 15 minutes later it’s brought out on a shiny plate and it’s piping hot. This is a good system. I went off the system though. I went off the system the day I stopped at the fruit stand, my last day with my horse, in an agricultural basin where the fruit is fresh off the trees. The stands are erected on the very piece of property the fruit is picked from. There is no better. And I remembered how I used to feed one of my mares peaches, and then how I used to eat them with her, and I got nostalgic and bought bags full of perfectly ripe, almost overripe peaches. Then my horse didn’t eat them, which ruined the happy nostalgia and left me with a bunch of fruit about to spoil. So I ate peaches for a day and a half…..  And then I holed up in my house with canned food that I probably bought years ago. It has probably survived two moves. That is how often I eat at home. And I didn’t want to go to the grocery store because then I would just end up with more canned food that would become an unlikely relic of the past, so I decided to work through what I have. I had some noodles and spaghetti sauce. The spaghetti sauce sounded really good. But then the noodles didn’t sound so good. But I needed something to put the spaghetti sauce on. So I warmed up some canned vegetables and poured sauce over it. Then I realized that was probably not the best idea. I got some groceries. But I still can’t cook to save my life.
2.  I have spent too much time on the Internet. This is especially sad for me because I have not lost myself in a gaming site, or reading a favorite blog, or following one link after the next down a rabbit hole. No. Instead I have realized that I have no Internet life. Yes, I update twitter. Tumblr. Formspring. I answer emails. I use Wikipedia from my phone when I want to pretend to have a vast amount of knowledge on a subject I know nothing about. I know not to trust it. But outside of that, I have no sites. I don’t post on chatboards. I don’t have online friends that I recognize in places we frequent together by their cartoon avatars. I don’t have sites I even know to frequent. I don’t care about gossip. I don’t have a favorite news site. I don’t care much for youtube or itunes. I don’t have any papers to do research on for school. I lost my MySpace password right before I lost my facebook password. I am on the outskirts of online life.

Things I’ve paid: parking tickets, car registration, property taxes, 2010’s income taxes, my tax guy, horse board for three months, my sister’s tuition for the spring, and an IRA contribution. I did this because of the aforementioned Bulgaria trip. I needed to tie everything up ahead of time. I am not complaining about the money though. The money was gonna be spent on these things anyway. I am complaining that there is literally nothing left to do that would make me feel productive.

Things I did to make me feel productive that will only result in me having to follow through with things I don’t actually want to do:

• dentist apt.
• eye apt.
• acting lessons

Things I did after I did the other things to be productive:

• tried being a hypochondriac: I took all of my blood test results from last year’s check up and ran the results against searches on the internet. The diagnosis? I am normal and Kaiser is not lying to me. Even my cholesterol is awesome. Which I know for a fact because I divided my total score by my HDL. Because I am bored. I am a bad hypochondriac. I feel fine now.
• Went through my stocks. It was not fun. Except for one redeeming stock that made up for the sucky stocks. The problem? Even with this information, which I was only able to gather because it did not require any high level of analysis to achieve, I still don’t know what to do with them. So I left them alone. But I wasted three hours in the process.
• Laundry. I have washed everything that will fit into my washing machine. Then I sorted through my make up and cleaned the brushes.

But then I had an idea. I realized I could share this experience with you lovely people. Because you know what else I’ve been meaning to do? Blog. And I’m sure you’ve been meaning to waste time reading it.