Insomnia Fails

You might not believe it, but the two posts about all the supplements and medications I consumed to treat my insomnia don't even begin to cover the myriad ways I tried to improve my sleep. Drugs are the quick and easy solution, and I, even in my addled and sleep-deprived state, knew that quick-and-easy usually also means too-good-to-be-true. So in addition to ingesting things, I also tried doing things!

I wasn't originally going to include this laundry list in my insomnia series, but 1) it's going to help illustrate a point I want to make in a future post, and 2) it's going to help illustrate a point that I want to make now, which is: if your sleep has deteriorated to the point that you're actually referring to yourself as an insomniac, minor lifestyle changes and sleep-focused activities aren't going to change a blasted thing. 

Here's a video on the subject, which does a good job of explaining why in a nutshell, but which I'm not going to cover right now. I still have a fragmented narrative about myself to get through, after all! But if you are an insomniac, I encourage you to watch the video above, and not do the things below, because they will only waste your time.

Ready, kids? Don't try these at home!

Lifestyle modifications

• Sleep hygiene —  Mention to any medical professional that you have insomnia, and they will magically whisk out a printout containing sage advice on how to improve your sleep (I got one from the doctor I saw for my chronic back pain!). These practices are known as sleep hygiene, and they do not help with insomnia. I have heard sleep hygiene compared to dental hygiene—it's great for everyone to practice regularly, but if you already have a cavity, tooth brushing is not going to fix it. Same with insomnia—adopting better sleeping habits is just not enough to break the cycle.
  
• Changing what you eat — For a while there, I suspected that my sleep problems were linked to my diet. Maybe I was eating too much sugar. Maybe I was eating too much protein near bedtime. Maybe I was eating too near bedtime, period. Maybe I wasn't eating enough near bedtime. I made a token effort to change some of those factors, but altering your diet is hard! Especially if it's only for an experiment and there's no guarantee that it will have any effect. Most of my dietary modifications lasted one day or less, and none of them had measurable impacts on my sleep.

Things you listen to

• Guided meditations — Back when we were just young'ns, my brother had this "Go to sleep quickly" self-hypnosis tape, and one of my grade-school camp counselors welcomed us on the first night with a guided meditation that I loved, so the idea of letting other people's voices coach me to sleep was probably my first experience with sleep interventions. Of course, we all laughed at the silly sleep hypnosis recording, and I never actually fell asleep during any guided meditation even when I didn't have insomnia, so I'm not sure why I had such faith in this strategy. I gave up on guided meditations completely when I started getting the twitchiness. Every pause in the speech meant I'd be startled when it started again, which did not promote relaxation by any means.
  
• Audiobooks — Back when I was doing an awful lot of air travel, I learned, quite by accident, that I actually can fall asleep while listening to an audiobook, even on an airplane! So when I stopped being able to sleep at home, my first thought was to at least fill the time with an audiobook so that my mind would have something to do, and maybe even fall asleep! Sometimes that happened, but I always woke back up again...because there was still a voice talking in my ear! Not an effective way to ensure restful sleep. And plus, I never knew what was happening in the story because I was always sleeping through parts of it!
  
• Affirmations — Go on YouTube and search for "sleep affirmations," and you'll find them. Long videos of inspiring phrases like "I love my bed." I tried listening to a few, but I couldn't get over the fact that someone else was saying them instead of me. (You love your bed? Great. Congratulations.) And I certainly didn't have the patience to do a follow-along or read from a script.
  
• White noise — While I acknowledge that white noise is great at drowning out the sound of your roommate getting up to use the bathroom every night at 3 am, I took my dedication to white noise to an excessive level. I have a white noise app on the iPad, and for a while, I was experimenting with different mixes every day, trying to figure out if there was a certain frequency or combination of sounds that would help me sleep better than others. There wasn't. But I did have my weirdest dream while sleeping to brown noise, so maybe try that if you're looking for a mental rush?
  
• Chillout music — One thing I heard/read over and over again when I first started having trouble with my sleep was that I should pamper myself with a pleasant environment in the hour or two before bedtime. Quiet, relaxing music was always one of the suggestions. While I'm sure this can't be harmful, I'm not the type to just have music on in the background, so I found that it was somewhat stressful to select a streaming channel every day, make sure it wasn't loud enough to disturb my roommates, and then actually listen to it, because I was in and out of so many different rooms, doing so many different things, that I was missing out on the music more often than I was actually hearing it. Not worth the effort!
  
• Binaural beats — Binaural beats are this weird, woo-woo concept that involves tones of specific frequency, auditory illusions, and their purported effect on your brain wave patterns. You can look up how they work if you want, but it's probably not worth your time. Essentially, using them is supposed to coax your brain waves into a certain frequency, e.g the frequency that they produce during deep sleep. Supposedly that helps you fall into sleep faster. I listened to binaural beats for a half-hour to hour before bed, religiously, for about 2 weeks. During that time, I did not experience any change in my sleep patterns, and I certainly didn't feel any different while or after listening.
  

Things you do before bed

• Hot baths — One suggestion that came up often for a relaxing evening ritual was to take a hot bath. There was a lot of compelling evidence in favor of this practice. Supposedly the heat helps your body cool down rapidly once you get out of it, which can cause sleepiness. I wanted to incorporate this in my life, but have you seen the interior of my bathtub? It's not the kind of place you want to be putting your bare skin if you're hoping to relax. Besides, I couldn't conscience using that much hot water every day just to maybe cool my body by a degree or two. Do you know how much water it takes to fill a bathtub? A lot more than a shower! I compromised once by taking a hot shower at night, but then my hair was wet when I went to bed, and, ugh! Some habits are just not worth getting into!
• Yoga — Yoga is one of my favorite forms of movement, so when I started reading about insomnia, I was pleased to find out that yoga was frequently recommended as a way to relax and help promote sleep. Maybe I shouldn't have been pleased, because I should have realized that if I was already doing so much yoga and it wasn't helping, then yoga can't be a panacea. But nonetheless, I tried, spending the last hour before many a bedtime doing various nighttime yoga routines in the hopes that they'd help me sleep. Surprise! They didn't.
• Qigong — One of the people in my insomnia forum just couldn't stop gushing about this evening qigong routine she'd found on Youtube and how it had changed her life and finally helped her get to sleep! So I tried it. I liked it the first time, because it was a little more active than most of the bedtime yoga, and therefore better able to help me channel any nervous energy I might be feeling. But ultimately, I got annoyed at how repetitive it was, and didn't really feel like it did anything for me.
• Acupressure — There are approximately one million acupressure points associated with sleep, anxiety, and insomnia. Press on any known acupressure point (or just pick a random spot on your body) for 5-30 seconds, and it will help you sleep at least as well as any other acupressure point! Trust me, I've tried them all. Yes, I'm being sarcastic, and no, acupressure did not seem to relieve either my anxiety or my insomnia. But it did give me a sore thumb!

Things you do while trying to sleep

• Breathing techniques — The internet is in love with breathing as a sleep aid: "I tried this one breathing technique and fell asleep in 2 minutes!" and I click on them, every time, like a sucker. There's box breathing, and 4-7-8 breathing, and 4-6 breathing, and the main difference between them is how long you inhale vs. how long you exhale, and the main similarity between them is that they don't help me fall asleep. In fact, when I was experiencing anxiety and insomnia together, I found that deep breathing often did the exact opposite of what it was intended to do: it made me panic!
• Progressive muscle relaxation — I learned about progressive muscle relaxation decades ago. It's a simple technique in which you tense up your muscle groups one at a time and then let them go, which causes them to be much more relaxed than before you started. A variation on this, which I recall was developed by the military to help soldiers sleep in adverse conditions, is to focus on each part of your body starting with your head, and consciously let it go limp. I have used both techniques successfully in the past, but they are not much good if the trouble sleeping is more in your mind than in your body. I've gotten myself as floppy as a wet noodle, but I was still so stressed out about still being awake, that there was absolutely no chance of sleeping!
  
• Directed thought —  One of my oldest problems with falling asleep is that my mind just tends to wander to ever more interesting topics, keeping me awake for longer than I should. So over the years I learned to keep my mind on track and fall asleep by playing the Alphabet Game, which I described in an earlier post. When that stopped working for me, I came up with other ways to distract my brain: sometimes I'd plan outfits for the next day; sometimes I'd try to list things I was grateful for; other times, I'd just try to retell the events of my day. Sometimes I'd fall asleep while thus occupied, but more often than not, my brain would go into that blank state where I could no longer think but I could not sleep either.
  
• Counting down — This is a specific form of directed thought that deserves special mention, because it is commonly suggested as a way to help you sleep—despite being basically identical to the generally-accepted-as-useless counting of sheep. It's pretty simple: count down from 100. I found myself hitting zero with this strategy more times than I could count (hehe), so I upped it to 1000. I think I only succeeded in falling asleep twice. Usually it was so boring, that my mind would slip away from me and get back to its regularly scheduled ruminating or utter emptiness.
  

Environmental modifications

• Lavender — Spray your pillow with lavender! they say. It'll help you sleep! they say. Well, I can tell, you, I sprayed my pillow with lavender, and all I got was a streak of essential oil on my wall that I cannot remove from the paint job to this day. It did smell nice, I'll give it that.
  
• Blue-light-blocking glasses — I'm sure you've heard by now that the blue light emitted from all our electronic devices is wreaking havoc on our circadian rhythms. Blue-light-blocking glasses are all the rage, and naturally I had to try and reduce my exposure to blue light once I became an insomniac. I had some orange-tinted sunglasses already that I co-opted for the purpose. They did not have a discernible impact on my ability to sleep, but they are one of the few things on this list that I'm still using. Can't hurt, right?
  
• Banning stuffed animals — I'm saving this one for last, because it's definitely the most paranoid thing I've done in a bid for better sleep! Yes, I confess, I sleep with stuffed animals. Hey, when you're lonely and you want to cuddle, there's no shame in taking what you can get! But after my breakup, I made the mistake of taking solace in this plush elephant that had been gifted to me by my recent ex. Every night I tried to sleep with the elephant, I slept abysmally. Uh, maybe it was because I was sleeping abysmally every night regardless, but somehow I got the notion that the elephant was contributing to my insomnia. I refused to sleep with the elephant after that, and soon eschewed all my plush toys entirely. I don't think the elephant had one shred of influence in whether I slept or not, but I still let it direct my sleeping habits to a rather large extent!
  

My forbidden friend. Look closely and you'll see the streak
of lavender oil trailing down the wall next to her left ear!

 

Now I want to make it clear that there's nothing inherently wrong with doing any of the things on this long, long list! By all means, put away your childish things if you're ready for it. Do all the yoga your heart desires, and go buy yourself a spa if you're really into hot baths! But just be aware that if you're doing these things for the express purpose of eliminating your insomnia, it's probably not going to help much, and it may even backfire.

I had to learn this the hard way, but I'll give it you for free: Sleep cannot be forced. Whenever you put conscious effort into trying to achieve it, it won't happen. Sleep is like your friend's skittish cat—you know the one! The more attention you pay to it, the farther it runs away. But turn your back and stop caring, and it'll be in your lap before you know it!

So I had to stop trying all these useless things to improve my sleep, and learn to just let it take its natural course. We're almost at the part of the story where I had that realization. Stay tuned for the turning point!

Super (and not-super) Market Shopping

Can you believe it's been almost a year since I last posted a list of things I like or dislike? This usual staple in my blog has been sorely neglected, and I have no excuse...but I shall be silent no longer! Today I'll present a veritable grocery list of my personal preferences. In fact, since so many of them are grocery-related, I might as well make a theme of it, and conduct you on a virtual tour of the best and worst of the grocery universe.

Walking into the store, let's head directly to my one of my favorite aisles: the condiments. While I've sung the praises of mayonnaise before, I've never given due credit to my absolute favorite condiment: dill pickles. You could probably tell I was heading in this direction, since I've rhapsodized about dill by itself and about the joy of receiving a pickle with my sandwich. But sandwiches with pickles wouldn't be possible without pickles in the first place, so let it be known: Pickles are great!

Some things that are not so great, though, are a wide swathe of other things found at the grocery store:

For starters, food that sticks to your teeth. You know how some people like to go to the beach and come back with saltwater taffy for their friends and associates? Those people better not be my friends or associates! I can't stand the texture of taffy. Also Starburst. Also, of all things, macaroni and cheese in certain circumstances. Though I'm a retired macaroni-reviewer and can be expected to have strong opinions about the stuff, I never thought macaroni and cheese could be downright bad, until I had some a few weeks ago that I literally could not finish. The reason? The cheese was so gooey, it stayed on my teeth even after I had chewed and swallowed. That's when I knew: Super-sticky foods are the worst!

Other bad foods: anything spicy. Truly, this preference is a serious handicap to me, as it prevents my enjoyment of a lot of meals when I go out, and even bars me from entire cuisines. Sometimes it has a detrimental effect on my social life. Everything would be a lot easier if I weren't so bothered by spicy food, but I can't help it; I'm sensitive! (I know this is true, because when I'm eating with others, sometimes I'll ask someone, "Is it spicy?" And they'll say, "Not at all." And I'll proceed to burn off my taste buds and drink half a glass of water to relieve the pain, because the heat I perceive as unbearable is undetectable to others!) I have the mouth of a kid who never grew up....

But if you take me over to the kid's food aisle, I'll probably run away screaming, because kids' foods are notoriously full of...artificial fruit flavors! Yuck! Most artificial flavors are disappointingly...well...artificial-tasting, but the top three on the gross list are as follows: apple in third, then grape, then banana with the grand prize. I can barely stomach real bananas; fake banana flavor is enough to induce vomiting (some of this sentiment may be due to the fact that the last thing I ate before getting a whopping case of the stomach flu when I was about nine, was banana-flavored Now & Laters. But most of the sentiment is, I'm pretty sure, just because banana flavoring is intrinsically nasty).

So we've scanned the shelves and identified all the foods that we don't want to buy, Now, the question is how to decide on what we do want to buy! Fortunately, in recent years, many grocery stores have made that easy by providing per-unit costs on their price labels. What a wonderful advancement in shopping technology! Now I don't have to do math in my head; I can easily discern which of several brands gives me the most bang for my buck, just by reading the tag on the shelf.

One last innovation in shopping, and the last thing that I really like on this list, is the single-line checkout. Many grocery stores have implemented this system in the past few years, and it takes most of the stress out of waiting in the checkout line. Remember when queuing up at the grocery was a crapshoot? You'd choose what looked like the shortest line only to find that the person in front of you had 60 coupons and was waiting for a manager to do a price check? Now (at least in the best-designed stores) that's impossible. Everyone just gets in one line, and when it's your turn, the first available checkout is yours, all yours! See, there is hope for the universe.

A list of pure goodness

Since my last list of pure grumpiness went public, I've planned to share its upbeat counterpart almost immediately. But somehow months have passed with no progress! We get it—I'm lazy—but that all ends now! And do you want to know why? It's all because I saw a picture of someone standing in front of a stream.

Once I saw that picture, I was instantly transported to a mental place that is some impossible combination of Iceland and New Zealand, where I had the fortune to get more or less up close and personal with the two glaciers I have encountered in my life. In this mental, impossible place, I realized in a flash of insight something I never knew before: I love glaciers! And now nothing can keep me from sharing that love with the world posthaste!

Glaciers

So, the secret is out—I love glaciers. This may sound strange coming from someone who has packed most of her dislikes lists with vitriol towards anything related to cold weather, but after having visited two glaciers, I am convinced that they are one of the planet's best features! 

Here I am about to meet Skaftafell glacier in Iceland

 Something about that vast outpouring of ice just warms my heart! Is it the way its edge is so strictly defined, like a massive, slow-motion amoeba of snow? Is it the fact that the landscape in front of a glacier is always uniformly barren and paved with a bed of millions of smoothly worn rocks, like a scene from a sci-fi movie? Is it the way the water that escapes from a glacier always has an opaque icy blue color, the way water looks in cartoons but never in real life? Are there more reasons? Probably. But my point is, if you have not had the chance to visit a glacier, I highly recommend you do so soon, because it is a magical experience that will probably never be had by future generations. And now back to our regularly scheduled climatic gloom and doom.

Or not! This is a happy list, so forget I said that!

Caffeine

I was a late convert to the fandom of America's most legal drug, but I have certainly come to appreciate caffeine in my middle years. It is true that I can still wake up in the morning just fine* without a cup of joe, and in fact, I still do not drink coffee. I no longer even struggle with staying awake in the afternoons. But I've learned that an occasional hit of caffeine is a delightful way to put a little more pep in my step and a positive outlook in my mind. One of my favorite weekend treats is a midday can of caffeinated soda, and if I have one at work, I am amazed at how productive and outgoing I can be! Of course, if I dare to consume this wonder drink past about 2 pm, I'm usually in for an entire night of restless sleep, so caffeine is probably always going to be a special treat for me and not a regular part of my diet.

Getting rid of old clothes

I don't know what happened between December and January, but all of a sudden the entire world seems to be obsessed with she-who-must-not-be-named (because I feel she's gotten more than enough publicity already, and I frankly can't take it any more!) and her method for tidying up. This whole frenzy for decluttering is kind of mystifying to me, because I declutter so continuously that I never feel like I have to read books and watch shows about it and pat myself on the back over my latest giant purge. But I can kind of understand the hype, because I know firsthand the rewarding feeling of getting rid of the stuff you don't really need. I love acquiring new things just as much as the next person, but what's more exciting than getting a new pair of shoes? Finding an old pair of shoes you won't feel sad to jettison, and subsequently ridding yourself of that dead weight! It helps that I sell most of my old stuff, so in addition to clearing up space in my living area and my life, I'm also earning a ... should I say it? tidy income!

Containers with perfectly parallel sides

While we're on the topic of home organization, I find there is much gratification in storing your stuff in containers of just the right shape. The right shape being, of course, one that has perfectly parallel vertical sides. You know, there are a lot of kinds of plastic storage tubs out there. Many of them have rounded edges and most of them have a narrower base than top. But the best kind of container is one that stays the same width all the way up. The kind of container you could load a collection of uniform cubes into and have them fit neatly end to end, top to bottom. The kind of container in which, if you had just the right size of cookies, you could assemble a perfect stack of them without a centimeter of wiggle room. 

Look at this beautiful empty gelato jar, which just happens to have perfectly parallel sides in a cylinder just the right diameter to hold a stack of my still-beloved Safeway candy cookies! Wow, I love this jar! If you happen to find a tub of the Talenti gelato at Costco (the normal-size Talenti jar is too small, and our Costco doesn't seem to sell it, and even if they did, sea salt caramel isn't really my flavor), save me the container!

Talking to myself

I will never forget** the day in first grade when I was holding my own personal Bob Ross show in art class, narrating every step out loud as I worked on my construction-paper masterpiece. A classmate turned to me and critically asked, "Why are you always talking to yourself?" Well, up until that point, I hadn't realized it was a problem, but I was duly humiliated into much more cautious self-regulation of my self-conversation. But I never stopped doing it completely! When I'm alone in the house, I take great joy in talking to myself. As a matter of fact, talking out loud helps me stay on-task, keeps my meandering mind from forgetting what I was about to do, and generally protects me from sometimes oppressive silence. Some people say talking to yourself means you're crazy... but quite to the contrary, I think it keeps me sane—even when I do, on occasion, start answering.

Footnotes

*OK, "just fine" is a bit of an overstatement. Most mornings when I wake up for work, it takes a superhuman effort to drag myself out of bed, and I usually feel sluggish and sometimes even dizzy for up to an hour after I am up and about. But I still don't depend on coffee!

**"Never forget" is probably a bit of an overstatement, too. Was I actually working with construction paper that day? Were those really my classmate's exact words? Probably not. I don't remember the details very well...but the embarrassment stays fresh in my mind forever!

Things I Dislike: The Sensory Processing Issue

As I was compiling my current list of things I like and dislike, I noticed they were pretty heavy on the things that involve the five senses—mostly things that irritate my five senses. I guess that makes sense (lol) — your senses are your primary way of interacting with the world, so if there are things in the world that are bothersome, you're going to experience them through your senses! So today, I bring you a special edition of Things that Annoy Me: the Sensory Processing Issue!

• Touch - Paper Straws

  You've probably noticed that there's recently been a lot of backlash against plastic drinking straws. People are pulling them out of turtles' noses, coffee shops are ceasing their use, and cities are banning them en masse. Even where plastic straws are still legal (like where I live), I've noticed that restaurants are becoming more conscientious about their straw consumption—now servers are asking if I want a straw when they take my drink order. I'm pretty excited about this development, because obviously it's a step forward for the health of our planet! What I'm not excited about are the paper straws that some places are using as an alternative. There is something about putting a tube of paper in my mouth that just makes me cringe! It's like the oral version of fingernails on a chalkboard. I can't deal with the texture—the way the paper becomes soggy and clings to my lips, the way it collapses just slightly too much when I touch it, the way it rasps if it encounters my teeth. Ugh! Do I want a straw with my drink? Not really. But especially not if it's paper!

• Smell - Smell of fabric softener

  Fabric softener is one of the many things that Millennials are supposedly responsible for killing off, and I count myself proudly among their ranks. I'm not exactly anxious to add more products (and thus more cost and more effort) to my laundry routine, but I also simply can't abide the smell! I can't count the number of times I've acquired some used clothing and had to immediately bury it in my laundry pile because of its weird aroma—not the disgusting stench of B.O. or mildew or whatever you'd expect from secondhand clothes, but rather the overpowering smell of flowers and synthetic chemicals! Blugh! Sometimes I have to wash my thrift store finds twice before their scent is reduced to the point I can wear them.

• Sight - Fluorescent colors

  One of the things that makes me me is my penchant for everything colorful. In almost all situations, I eschew neutral hues in favor of the bright and brilliant. Sometimes this makes color coordinating my various possessions a challenge, but for the most part, the more colors I see, the happier I'll be. The exception is highly saturated fluorescent colors. There's something not just off-putting about neons, but downright distressing! I have bought clothes online that looked pastel on screen, only to find them veritably DayGlo in real life...and I hated them so much that I actually found myself getting angry every time I tried to put them on. Needless to say, I purged those items from my wardrobe pretty quickly. Fluorescent colors have their place—mainly under a blacklight—but for everyday purposes, I prefer that my eyes not be assaulted by such intense hues.

• Taste - Uhhh...

  Taste is probably the most difficult of the five senses to use as a basis for hating something, because it is in fact too simple. There are only four tastes: salty, sweet, sour, and bitter (OK, and umami—you explain that one; I still can't figure it out!), yet when we say we describe the taste of something, we're really describing a complicated melding of taste, smell, and touch. If I wanted to take the easy way out, I could probably just say, "I hate the taste of bitter things," but since everybody basically does, there's not much story value in that. Let's talk instead about how a good taste can go bad—namely, when sweetness is used unsuccessfully to make something repulsive more palatable. Cough syrup is the classic example.  All the sugar in the world can't hide that fact that what you're consuming is a nasty non-food that basically tricks your body into doing things it wouldn't otherwise do. Cough syrup is gross. So I can't understand why drug companies take perfectly good tastes (sweet) and flavors (fruit) and ruin them both by combining them with medicine. It will never work. There's no getting around it! Stop the madness!

• Sound - basically all movie sound effects

  I do not watch a lot of movies or TV, but thanks to living with someone who does, I certainly hear a lot of them. Sometimes, my boyfriend will be watching something in his room, and the sounds of violence will start drifting out into mine. At first, I don't even notice, but then it just keeps going on and on—one minute, two, five. So many explosions! So much screaming! I don't know how he can tolerate watching it, because just hearing the noise is enough to make my cortisol levels rise! Actually, I have this theory that watching movie violence is less stressful than just hearing it, because when you can see the action, you can also see the good things that might be happening to mitigate the violence (e.g. superheroes arriving to save the day), but when you're listening, all you hear are the sounds of horror. So if you're watching a violent or otherwise disturbing movie and you have other humans in the house, help them keep their sanity by putting on some headphones!

Dogs are the mother of invention

I used to say I get my best ideas while walking to the bathroom (this is at work, where the nearest bathroom takes the better part of a minute to reach). Nowadays, I seem to get my best ideas while taking my dog to the bathroom (that is, the dog bathroom, a.k.a the great outdoors). There isn't a walk that goes by where I'm not suddenly pointing my finger to the heavens and exclaiming, "Wouldn't it be great if there was..." usually followed by some fantastical invention that would make dog ownership easier.

Here are some tools for dog owners that, if someone just had the technology and I just had the money, would make my dogs more like my best friends and less like my worst frenemies.

The automatic fur remover

This is the first dog-related invention I ever dreamed up. Between covering up my couches to keep the dog fur off in case of guests, to buying coats to match those of my dogs, to being unable to fall asleep at night thanks to the wisps of dog fur dangling off the blanket into my face, to washing and folding my clothes inside out to prevent them from picking up fur during the laundering process, dog fur is a constant source of struggle in my life. While I beg my boyfriend to brush his dogs at least once a week, he never actually does, so it would sure be nice if we had something that would do it for us...or at least, remove the shed hair from everything it lands on. We have an automatic dog-fur remover for the floor (it's our robotic vacuum cleaner!), but wouldn't it be great if there was something I could just set on top of the bed and let do its thing? Maybe a little box that I could just drop a shirt into and have all the dog hairs meticulously sucked off?

The automatic leash detangler

The catch-22 of dog walking is, if you don't put your dog on a leash, he'll run away, but if you do put your dog on a leash, he'll get it tangled. Around everything, but most annoyingly, under his legs approximately every five steps, which will cause him to slow down and attempt to walk sideways, or just plain fall over. Wouldn't it be great if there was just some kind of tool that would keep the leash out from under the dog's legs at all times?

The dog force field

Better yet, wouldn't it be great if there was some kind of force field you could turn on to keep your dog in your vicinity, so you didn't need a leash at all? Not only would this solve the leash-around-the-legs issue, but it would also prevent other mishaps such as the dreaded walking the leash around the table in a spiral until dog is trapped one inch from the table leg but can't figure out how to unwind again,  and the infamous two dogs meeting each other and walking under and around each other's leashes, forcing the owners to do a little dance and/or pseudo-handshake to get them separated again. My boyfriend tells me there is some sort of shock collar you can get to keep your dog nearby, but I think a force field sounds much more humane and way cooler.

A typical dining-out leash situation

The indoor dog toilet

One of the grossest things about having dogs is having to pick up their poop with your hands. Even cat owners get a scoop to go with their poop, so why do dog owners have to go around fondling it like coprophiliacs? In fact, why do pet owners have to clean up poop at all? I can't believe, after so many millennia of living hand-in-paw with companion animals, and so many centuries of indoor plumbing, we still haven't invented a surface that would appeal to a dog yet still enable us to flush its waste away with the flick of a finger. This would undoubtedly be the greatest dog invention of all...but if someone made it a reality and I never had to walk my dog again, how would I get any more of these marvelous ideas?

These are a few of my favorite things

[Editor's note: I wrote this post on December 7 and thought I posted it on the same. However, it has come to my attention 2 weeks later that I did nothing of the sort. I apologize to all my readers who were left hanging, but mostly I apologize to myself, because I am ashamed that I could have been so stupid!!]

For whatever reason, a completely seasonally unrelated song from The Sound of Music has become linked with Christmas in our culture. Every year around this time, I begin hearing "My Favorite Things" playing on all the holiday radio stations. (On a very tangentially related side note, I seem to have lost my personal collection of Christmas music, and it's weighing heavily on my heart—how can it be the season to be jolly when I don't have my Jingle Cats meowing the soundtrack to my life!?) But, back to "My Favorite Things." What is it about this song that screams Christmas? Is it the brief mention of brown paper packages, to tie in with a season of gifting? Is it all the talk of silver white winters and sleigh bells and warm woolen mittens, evoking the weather of the holiday season if not the holiday itself? Whatever it is, the song creates a timely motif for one of my signature "things I like" blog posts!

Ahead, here are a few of...

My favorite things!

• Putting dishes in the dishwasher

  You might not think that a mundane domestic chore would rank very highly on a list of things I love, but there's something immensely gratifying about clearing away the clutter of eating and whisking it into a hidden chamber, to later emerge sparkling clean with little to no additional effort. It also might be the fact that, since I am part of a two-person household that doesn't do a lot of cooking, it takes quite a while for the dishwasher to become full (sometimes up to a week!). While we're waiting for that magical wash-day to come, the dishwasher itself is meanwhile getting quite unsightly with the accumulated spills of several days' worth of food and drink. So every dish that I add to the rack means I'm one dish closer to having all the dishes be clean again! I must add, of course, that unloading the dishwasher is one of my least favorite chores, thanks to the loud clattering that is impossible to avoid, and the fact that it involves wet things—a peeve of mine that may have to wait for another post to be fully explained.

• Microwave cooking

  I may as well call this post "Ode to kitchen appliances," since my microwave is now getting in on the action. Where would I be without a microwave? Probably a lot skinnier, certainly much less content with my lot in life. As I'm very fond of saying, I do not cook, but when I do, it is mostly to pop a prepared dish in the toaster oven or leftovers in the microwave. The microwave is an ingenious invention that uses both less energy and less space than traditional cooking methods like ovens and stoves, but cooks your food in a fraction of the time! Sometimes you pay for these environmental savings in the form of soggier food, but often, a microwave-cooked dish is just as good as one cooked over a flame.

• Mayonnaise and cheese

  While we're on the topic of cooking, let's talk about a couple of my favorite ingredients. Cheese is my lifeblood. Since I became a vegetarian, it has become probably my largest source of protein (save for the protein bars I eat almost every day for breakfast). There is some debate out there about whether cheese really is or is not just as addicting as cocaine, but I can say, as a proud cheese addict, that a day without cheese puts me in a pretty bad mood. Another food I love, that doesn't get the credit it deserves, is mayonnaise. Mayonnaise is usually an afterthought, relegated to condiment-status and considered optional, but really, I can't think of very many dishes that aren't made more delicious by the addition of mayonnaise. At least, not the ones that already contain cheese!

• Words

  It probably goes without saying, but a person who loves words can't help but say it—I love words! How many hours a week do I fritter away on writing? I blog for an audience of four (or so) and receive no rewards for my hard work, other than the satisfaction of using words! I could go on forever with examples of how language has enriched my life, but instead, I'll perversely keep my words to a minimum on this topic!

• Themed everything!

  I am having trouble finding a way to introduce this topic except by saying that everything that's fun in life is more fun if it has a theme. While in Japan, one of my top destinations was a themed restaurant (that was the Kawaii Monster Cafe, in case you would like to pay it a visit). When I host parties, I always give them a theme (usually revolving around animals and encouraging the wearing of costumes). When I create an outfit, I'm frequently proudest if it has a thematic overload! I don't spend a lot of effort decorating my home, but I make an exception for major holidays, when I go all-out (at least, as all-out as one can go on a stringent budget) to meet the theme of the season. Heck, even this blog post has a "My Favorite Things" theme!

"Dog bites" and "bee stings" (i.e. things that make me feel sad)

• Me

  What kind of fool writes a blog post and then forgets to post it for half the month!? The same kind of person who now realizes that in all the recent conversations where I thought I was making a subtle reference back to this post, I was really not because no one could have possibly read it. That makes my witty comments feel a lot less witty now.

• The futility of trying to change others

  People are annoying. People do things that annoy me and things that I think would show basic human decency to not do. Two weeks ago when I wrote this post, I put here a very long-winded rant about one particular thing that sometimes people do that I find incredibly rude. But with age comes wisdom, and in the two weeks I have aged since writing the rant, I've realized that the people who engage in such behavior are unlikely to read this post; and even if they do, they are unlikely to recognize themselves in my story; and even if they do, they are unlikely to be inspired to change their behavior. So basically, all I would accomplish by complaining is to look like a whiner and possibly alienate more people. So, alas, I replace my original accusatory tirade with a much sadder, much more resigned lament that some things will never change. For example, next week, I'll probably go right back to griping about people.

• Snow

  You might have noticed that I pretty consistently complain about some aspect of winter or another—by now it's basically a tradition! This time I'm going to dump on the stuff that always gets dumped on us this time of year. I know mine is an unpopular opinion, as almost everyone seems to have some kind of romantic infatuation with precipitation that comes in flake form, but I, for one, have lost all interest in the dandruff of the sky. It's cold. It might not be wet when it lands on your nose and eyelashes, but it will be when it stays there long enough—just wait! White Christmas? Nah, I'll take one that's 80 degrees and sunny. Some people like snow because it's pretty (OK, it is, slightly). Some people like snow because it gives them days off (Yes, that is a perk). But for me, snow is mostly just a very visible reminder of how miserably cold I'm going to be, should I choose to go outside.

• Buffets

  I don't have any inherent objection to a buffet meal—in fact, being able to select exactly what you want from a wide array of choices is basically a picky eater's dream! What I object to is getting charged a large fee for a volume of food that I have no hope of eating. Not only am I a picky eater, but I'm also a small (but frequent!) eater. A meal for me is typically only an appetizer for most of the people I associate with. At restaurants, I have come to expect that I'll pay a lot for my meal, but be able to make at least one more meal out of the leftovers. Not so at a buffet! At a buffet, I pay marginally less than I would for a full-size dinner, but I only get one meal, and I'm still limited by my appetite to only a few bites of food, and I can't take home my leftovers! Whenever someone I know suggests we eat at a buffet-style place for lunch, I groan inside, knowing that I will be overstuffed at the restaurant and still hungry a few hours later!

• Visible "no-show" socks

  

  I scoured the internet for pictures of this phenomenon, but apparently no one
  wants to advertise their wardrobe malfunctions, so I created an example just for you!

  It's a little thing, hardly significant in the vast world of fashion, but it still counts! It's socks showing around the edges of one's shoes when they should be hidden! I try not to judge people for their fashion choices, but when I see someone with just part of their socks peeking out, it makes me cringe inside.  It is my opinion that if you are going to wear shoes that are clearly not meant for socks, then either 1) don't wear socks, or 2) wear full-sized socks and wear them loud and proud. Don't wear those supposedly "no-show" socks that always do show! It's akin to letting your underwear hang out the top of your pants! Gross! The end!

Loves and Loathes of my life

It is time to rhapsodize. Naturally, it is also time to complain, but we'll get to that in a minute. First, I'd like to tell you about some of the loves of my life.

Loves of my life

1. Bubbles

As in air bubbles rising up through a liquid. While floating soap bubbles are fun to create and chase around like a toddler (yes, I'm 33, and yes, I still sometimes chase bubbles), I am particularly amazed by how bubbles look when you're underwater and you see them rising up around you. They don't look at all like those perfect round bubbles I'm always doodling—rather, they flatten out like mushroom caps and wiggle their way awkwardly to the surface.They remind me of cute little jellyfish. When I first conceived this list, I thought that was all I was going to have to say about bubbles, but then I noticed these in the bottom of my Diet Coke on an airplane.

Aren't they just the most lovely little spheres?


2. Lists

   While we're on the topic of this list, let's talk about how much I love lists in general. I have a whole category for them in my blog. I have 199 notes in Evernote (at this very moment), many of which are lists. I love articles in list format (they call them "listicles" now, though I'm not sure I'm ready to adopt that term into my vocabulary), I love keeping lists to keep me organized, and even the way a short, concise bulleted list looks. Whoever thought up the idea of a list surely deserves a spot in the top ten greatest inventors of all time!

3. Color gradients

   There was a time when color gradients were a very popular thing to do in design (it happened to be while I was in design school!)—so popular that our classmate who was already a professional designer warned us all against using them (that and drop shadows) unless we had a very good reason for doing so. For a few years, that scared me off of using gradients, but I love them! Who am I to go against my true nature? There's something inherently soothing about the smooth progression from one color to another that I can't explain, but only enjoy. To celebrate, here's a picture of one of the first digital gradients I ever employed in my art!
   

4. The heater in my office

   It's summer now, but winter will be here soon enough, and rather than find something about it to complain about (as I usually do in my "loves and loathes posts), I'm going to take the positive route and mention something that's nice about it: my personal heater in my office. Despite the wide variance in comfortable human temperature preferences, most office buildings nonetheless try to set a sitewide temperature that suits a majority of the inhabitants – which never includes me – but in our building (or at least many parts of it), each individual room has its own heating/air-conditioning unit. This means that I'm free to set my office temperature to 80 in the winter (it never quite reaches 80, but at least it tries) and turn off the air completely in the summer. Of the many things I really appreciate about my job, this is definitely up there near the top. One can be so much more productive when one's fingers are not frozen stiff!

Loathes of my life

1. Clattering dishes together

   I absolutely can't stand the sound that occurs when I am putting away dishes and I accidentally knock two of them together. Strangely, I used to work in a restaurant and the sound never bothered me, even though it was a pretty much constant racket. I am fairly good at ignoring loud noises, as long as they are occurring ambiently, but apparently, one type of noise I can't tune out is one that I make myself. It's enough to make me want to replace all my dishes with plastic!

2. Everything about sunscreen

   Sun avoidance is a regular part of my lifestyle these days, but it's somewhat disheartening that I have yet to find a sunscreen I don't despise. The skin experts annoyingly bombard me with reminders that "even if you're in the shade, you're still getting exposed to UV light," and "windows don't block out harmful rays," and "You should be wearing sunscreen every day—no exceptions!" These reminders are annoying because they put me between a rock and a hard place—between blatantly ignoring the advice that could save me from both visible aging and cancer, and having to wear a nasty goop on my skin all day every day! Ugh! Don't try to offer a suggestion for a sunscreen that's less disgusting than the others, because they're all disgusting! Texture not even withstanding (although I have lots of complaints in that department too), they all stink, and I mean that literally. The chemical sunscreens smell like chemicals, and the physical sunscreens smell like dust. No matter how much perfume has been added, there's no getting around the fact that the active ingredients make me feel like I've doused myself in my own personal nightmare. Why does living healthy have to be so unpleasant!?

3. Going to the bathroom at class-change time

   While it's great to have a personal heater, there are of course things I dislike about my job. One of them is the very people that make my employment possible: the students on campus! Again, because it is summer, at present I don't need to deal with this problem, but during the semester I am routinely inconvenienced. Like any normal human, I prefer to perform my bodily functions in private, but more often than I can explain, just as I am heading to the loo, I am rushed by a stream of students all leaving class at the same time, crowding into the bathroom and completely ruining my peace and solitude! I actually memorized the university's class schedule so that I could save my bathroom breaks for an off-time, but it seems like at least once every day, I slip up and have to face the herd. Sometimes when I get up to use the bathroom, I immediately turn around and go back to my office, to wait another 10 minutes until the hallway has cleared. Speaking of bathrooms...

4. People playing on their phones while leaving the bathroom without washing their hands

   No, really! This just happened yesterday! I was in the bathroom washing my hands, when a person left the stall and passed me (and all the sinks) to go have a look in the full-length mirror, poking away at her cell phone the whole time. Like, ew, which hand did you wipe with, because you're using both of them on your phone right now! I cannot say for sure that this particular person didn't return to the sinks after I left, but I do know that it was already too late for her phone. I can't believe that educated adults (hello, this was at a university!), living in a world with ebola, still aren't washing their hands after using the toilet. This could possibly be the absolute number-one item on my list of loathes...ever.

My 7-month checked-list

Today, I have owned my house for 7 months. When I bought it, it didn't seem like a fixer-upper, but it turned out to be (my boyfriend and I nicknamed it the Bubalou house, because it's so cute but so needy)! So after I began discovering all the problems, I set a personal goal of doing one house project a day. Sometimes it was cleaning up the mess the previous owners left behind; sometimes it was just the necessary day-to-day cleaning. Sometimes it was a big semi-construction project; sometimes it's just making yet another shopping trip to Home Depot. For the first 4 weeks, it was mainly just trying to get my dishwasher to work. But yes, for around 3 months, I basically worked on my house in some capacity every day.

The daily goals kind of fell by the wayside when I began constructing an epic Halloween costume, but there's still plenty more to do, and I'm continuing to plug away (if at a less strenuous pace).
Being a cheapskate and priding myself on my creativity, I refuse to enlist professional help for all but the most difficult jobs (no, the dishwasher saga didn't teach me anything, and yes, I did consent to calling a technician when the air conditioner broke, and yes, of course it did.) which means I've been McGuyvering a lot of DIY solutions to things that I probably shouldn't be!

• "Waterproofed" the bathroom window ledge, by which I mean I glued a piece of painted wood to it and coated the edges with silicone.

  

  No water's gonna gather on that window ledge, now that there's
  an angled piece of wood and lumps of silicone all over it!

• "Improved" the ventilation around the attic, which basically involved poking the huge sheets of insulation with a stick.
• "Insulated" the hole where an attic fan should be but isn't. This involved salvaging all the insulation from the two dishwashers that I discarded during my dishwasher project, folding them up and stuffing them into the space behind the fan grate.
• Grounded all the outlets Started an outlet-grounding project with high hopes and the aid of someone who knew slightly more about wiring than me, but after a series of snafus, settled for replacing just three of the 2-prong outlets with GFCI outlets.
• Braced poorly made and poorly installed window screens so they could actually serve as screens instead of leaving gaping holes for bugs to fly through
• Delegated the task of building a shed ramp (from salvaged nails and lumber found in backyard) to a visiting helper
• Reattached all parts of shed ramp with screws after they got loose
• Repaired the holey storm door screen with a needle and thread (later cutting new pieces of screen and gluing them on in a very attractive patchwork!)

  

  Wow, take a look at that artful screen fix!

• Made a new threshold for the storm door with glue and a discarded piece of a friend's closet (it fell off after a couple months)
• Hung three towel bars (all free, thanks to Freecycle and me taking the one I bought for my old house with me when I moved)
• Tightened loose door hinges all around the house and replaced missing screws
• Cleaned up the messy paint jobs all around the house
• Cleaned (by removing years' of dust and dead cockroaches) and repaired (by straightening out the very deformed metal dampers) two heat vents

Eventually, though, I had to concede that some projects do require the purchase of brand new materials. Armed with about 300 dollars in Home Depot gift cards, I was able to accomplish the following:

• Restarted the jammed sink disposal (it's easy once you have the right size hex key!)
• Sealed the shed ramp with new wood sealant when it began to get mushy after it rained
• Made one window screen from kit
• Re-screened one window screen (using new screen and a screening tool but salvaged spline)
• Opened a permanently sealed heat vent and added a (new) closeable grate
• Re-bolted the toilet to the floor (with a new bolt kit, 2 wax rings, and lots and lots and lots of help)

  

  Nothing like a perfectly sized cap over your closet bolt, eh?

My friend tells me I'll have to take down my blog if I ever want to sell my house, because there are so many incriminating things in it! The easier solution would be to just stop writing about how horrible my house is. But I won't!

I tell every embarrassing story, because I can! And I write down every list of accomplishments, not because I imagine anyone will be interested, but just because it makes me feel better about the huge quantity of work that I have yet to do. I've made such progress, surely one day this struggle will come to an end!

Right?

Right?

OK, I guess I'm gonna go worry about my plumbing now. Laters!

13 things men can darn well wear if they want to

I was a little bit outraged when I read this article, "13 things men should stop wearing." I'm almost certain (at least I'd like to hope) it was written as a backlash against patronizing articles (some even written by a man!) describing things women shouldn't wear, which have been making the rounds among my fashion/women's publications for as long as I've been reading them.

But really!? If the overwhelming consensus (as it seems to be, according to what I've read) is "Forget the rules! Women can wear whatever we want to wear and we need to stop letting society tell us we're ugly!", then how does turning the tables on men help the cause? Haven't we had enough with the negativity?

I have a different cause—absolute fashion freedom for everyone—and a blog post to go with it. Inspired by the original snarky article, here is a slightly different list...of things I think men should try wearing as soon as they can! Please read, enjoy, and pass it on to a man in your life (along with the shiniest shirt you can get your hands on)!

1. Deep V-Neck T-Shirts
Nothing wrong with that! If women are allowed to wear shirts that look like this, I don't see why men can't either.

2. Cute Graphic T-Shirts
If the only T-shirts it's socially acceptable for a man to wear are the ones that are emblazoned with macho imagery and sarcastic messages, that leaves very little room for self-expression. Let's expand the offerings so that men can wear pretty florals and kitty cats, and then there will be no need for them to settle for fake CBGB shirts.

3. Colorful Suits
Are you bored with black, brown, charcoal, and black? I am! I was looking through some catalog images from the 1970's, and was awed by the colors on the men's suits! We should have more of that!

4. Button-Down Vests...over nothing else
One of the sexist policies that really gets me going is the one that says women are allowed to show up to a nice establishment wearing short dresses and sleeveless tops, but men have to be fully covered in pants and sleeves. Not only does this perpetuate the belief that women are objects to be looked at; it's also needlessly restrictive to men. Men are the ones with the higher baseline body temperatures; they should totally be allowed to wear comfortable. breathable clothes, and show some skin at restaurants. Maybe the way to make this point is to wear dress vests as shirts. Maybe it's not, but I still think it's a fun idea.

5. Shiny Dress Shirts
 These were also derided by the original article. Once upon a time, I too, opposed shiny dress shirts for men. Mainly because they were associated with "those guys at the club who women warn each other about in the bathroom." Then I realized, if more upstanding gentlemen were to sport this style, it wouldn't have such a douchey reputation. There's nothing inherently wrong with shiny fabric; it's just the people that have always tended to wear it. Let's buck this trend! Sirs, go ahead and shine on the outside the same way you shine on the inside!

6. Vintage Shoes
Women's shoes are designed to last a year and then have to be replaced. Men's shoes are made to last for decades. If the square-toed dress shoes you bought when you graduated high school are still working for you today, don't be ashamed they're no longer trendy, be proud that you've saved countless cheap vinyl imitations from the landfill! But also, don't be afraid to wear pointed toes or even round ones if that floats your boat.

7. Baggy, High-Water Jeans...with cargo pockets!
There was a time when "mom jeans" for women were an extreme faux pas. And then, voila! All of a sudden mom jeans became the coolest thing in women's fashion. So men, if gender equality is real, then you are completely entitled to wear baggy jeans with high hemlines. Maybe you'll start a new trend! Or you can just go back to an old one and bring back cargo pants. If your pants mean you'll stop trying to cram your entire livelihood into my purse every time we go out, I'm 100% in favor.

8. Skinny Jeans
 The very opinionated writers of the original article seem to think you're not allowed to wear baggy jeans, and you're not allowed to wear skinny jeans. What's left? You might as well just walk around naked. Men, please don't walk around naked. I think skinny jeans are a very acceptable alternative.

9. White Jeans
Oh, and you're not allowed to wear white jeans either...says the snarkicle. But I say if that's the case, you might as well just give up on life and wear your bed sheets around town...or just never get out of bed at all. Honestly! With so many rules, no wonder men's fashion is boring! I don't have a problem with white jeans. Just make sure you can't see your boxers through the fabric. I hear this is a problem.

10. Jean Shorts
And why the heck not? ... The crickets are saying, "That's what I thought."

11. Purses
So cargo shorts aren't your style? I strongly suggest you give handbags a try. If you think purses are "too feminine," stuff the largest one you can find with things like samurai swords and electronic gadgets, and you can show off your strength by hefting your "manbag" around town. You'll be a purse convert before you know it!

12. Sandals that aren't flip flops
I can't remember any time when men were encouraged to wear any kind of sandal at all other than shower shoes. Go ahead and live a little! Let your feet air out, and flaunt those Berkenstocks!

13. Fitted Jerseys
 Sure, there are definitely better things you can wear than a sports jersey. More flattering. Less polyester. Less likely to get you beat up in the wrong city. Less...related to sports. My catty counterpart would have you believe that sports jerseys are unacceptable garb. But my realistic self recognizes that nothing can stand between a male and his wholehearted expression of his irrational love for his team. However, if you must wear a sports jersey, you can at least make an effort to look good in it. They make "girly" sports jerseys with a tailored fit for female fans, maybe it's time to start making similarly well fitting jerseys for male fans. Then you could flaunt your team spirit without sacrificing those good looks that I know are hiding just underneath!

It's Whine O'clock!

When I last posted about my likes and dislikes in June, all I had was a list of likes. This time I'll turn the tables and round things out with some more dislikes.

1. Biking into a cloud of gnats

This item is at the top of my list right now, because, 'tis the season for clouds of bugs...apparently. Every year when it starts to turn cool out, I suddenly find my commute home beset by inordinately large numbers of fruit flies. Where's the fruit? I don't know, but its absence doesn't seem to be stopping them any! I don't begrudge these creatures their right to congregate, but if they could do it somewhere out of the path of my lungs, I'd be much obliged.

2. Foldover waistbands

It seems simple enough...almost irrelevant...among the many things fashion gives us, but I have several pairs of pants with a foldover waist (yoga pants are an especially common culprit, but a foldover waist has also "graced" my bikini bottoms) and every time I wear them, all they bring me is grief. Just try to keep the folded part folded in the right spot! It will invariably unfold itself and bulk up your midsection, or merely start to bunch up in an annoyingly asymmetrical way. The aesthetic benefit of having a band of fabric wrapped around your butt is surely outweighed by the annoyance of having to adjust it every two minutes.

3. Slideshow websites

The web developer in me must needs gripe about something website-related, and this time, it's those sites in which all their information is presented in the form of a slideshow. If you ever click on sponsored posts on Facebook (I've fallen victim to this trick more times than I can count!), you know what I'm talking about. Unfortunately (actually, probably fortunately), I can't find a specific example right now, but I can describe it for you. You view the first slide, and it has something informative about the subject you came to read about. If you're lucky, it has a whole sentence, but sometimes, the answer inexplicably drags out...





...Click the "Next" Button...






...to the next slide!

As if having to click 2 or three times to complete every sentence isn't bad enough, now imagine that every portion of the sentence you want to read contains a large image (usually only vaguely related to the topic) and is supported by approximately 3,026 ads. The agonizing slowness with which these fragments of information load is enough to make anyone go crazy.

4. People buying limited-edition things for the sole purpose of reselling them at a profit

This is one of those unfortunate and pretty-much-inevitable downsides to a free market economy. Anyone who can afford to buy something at any price is allowed to...and equally allowed to sell it at any price, even if that price is hundreds of times the actual value. But just because you can do something, that doesn't mean you should! This is a classic case of the haves (those with the resources and position to acquire something extremely rare) profiting from the have nots (the ones who only have the means to buy something on the overinflated secondary market. Perhaps I'm naive (and perhaps I'm still bitter about the house-flippers who made getting a new home at an affordable price way more difficult than it should have been), but I believe in kindness and sharing and making an honest living.

5. Weighted doors

After that "weighty" subject, let's go on to something weighty in a different way—doors that shut themselves. I'm not a fan. This kind of door has afflicted me too many times, mostly resulting in me getting locked out of a place because I stepped out briefly without a key and found it had swung shut behind me. That's the worst-case scenario, but weighted doors also give meaning to the saying, "Don't let the door hit you on the way out!" When you're trying to pass an overzealous door with an armful of stuff and don't have the momentum or the foresight to swing it wide open before you pass through, the door hitting you on the way out is exactly what will happen.

6. Cleaning up other people's hair

Whether you live with roommates, significant others, or random strangers who pay to stay in your home for a few days, you can be sure of one thing: at some point, you will be forced to clean up their hair. People seem to love to shed their hair everywhere, but especially in the bathroom. They shave and leave the cuttings all over the sink. They shower and deposit what seems like the entire contents of their head in the drain. Cleaning up these messes is disgusting beyond measure, and frequently, not even necessary. For those of you who don't know it, I'm going to share a little trick: Brush your hair before you shower. That way all the loose hairs will end up in your brush, not snaking down into the drain for someone else to pick up. Oh, and also, when you shave, it's not acceptable to leave your cuttings where they fell. I don't understand why it's still necessary to explain this to people, but apparently I'm one of only a few people in the world who doesn't enjoy all their surfaces studded with hair.

7. Tipping

Last gripe, and again it's a financial one: I hate being obligated to tip all the people who perform a service. I spent several years of my life working for 2 dollars an hour as a tipped employee, so I understand that not tipping is an unacceptable behavior in our current system, but I am angry that tipping ever got ingrained in the system in the first place. The vast majority of people who work for tips are paid by their employers. They shouldn't also be paid by their customers who are also paying their employers. For any industry, forcing your employees to live off the kindness of strangers is a scoundrelly practice, and forcing your customers to have to choose what's an appropriate payment for your employees is scoundrelly as well. Life would be so much simpler (and there would be so much less ill will between restaurant servers and customers, just as an example) if the cash only flowed one way.

Glue Reviews / What Glues to Use

 
As a DIY-hard crafter, I have a pretty impressive collection of glues. My glue stash is so sizable that I have devoted an entire drawer in my plastic 3-drawer rolling cart to "Adhesives." This includes tape (of which I have the masking, the duct, the sport, and the packing varieties), and I've also thrown in a few other bottles of household fluids there because they don't fit into a better category—WD-40 (the exact opposite of an adhesive) and foam insulation. But the glues! I have become quite a connoisseur of glues over the years, and today, I thought I'd share what I've learned with those a little newer to the gluing game.

Hot glue

Probably the first glue I fell in love with (yes, we of the more geeky persuasion do fall in love with glues), hot glue first hit my radar at the young age of 7 or 8 thanks to my Girl Scout troop leaders. My fair share of finger burns later (I can't believe they trusted us with such a dangerous weapon in 3rd grade!), I was hooked. My mom purchased a hot glue gun for the family, and it has been in my arsenal ever since! Hot glue is useful when you want to glue two things together and have the glue set quickly. Because it is bulky and messy, however, it is not so great for gluing small pieces, or for use in places that will get a lot of scrutiny. It also fails to bond to the vast majority of materials, (including pretty much all non-porous ones), so any attachment you create with hot glue should be considered more or less temporary. I like to use hot glue for quick-and-dirty crafting—assembling Halloween costumes, for example. It's also great for when you need a big blobby lump of glue, to actually form an architectural element in your project.

Tacky Glue

Another crafter's standby, Aleene's Tacky Glue is tried and true for many applications. Like hot glue, it works well only on porous materials. Unlike hot glue, it takes a lot longer to set, but it can be applied with much greater precision. The "Tacky" in its name is its greatest strength—because it's a thicker glue, the items you are gluing are more likely to stay in position until the glue has set...and once it has, it forms a waterproof bond. I use Tacky glue mostly for projects involving fabric (it's not a fabric glue, but it works just as well).

Epoxy

Around the time I graduated from college, I learned, from a friend who built model airplanes, that epoxy was the glue of choice if you really wanted to glue two things together and have them stick. Especially if the two somethings were somethings like metal. At first, I was a little intimidated by epoxy, because you have to actually mix a hardener with the adhesive, but that actually makes epoxy an ideal glue to have around, because it will never dry up in the bottle! Epoxy's pros are that I've never found any two substances it couldn't bond, and it's tough and dries hard. Its cons are that it's a little inconvenient to use, in that you have to mix it in a separate container before you can use it, and if your mixture ratio is a little off, you will get glue that never hardens. I use epoxy for repairing metal jewelry, and as a replacement filler for molded plastic (it's currently holding the wheel of my office chair into its broken socket, and I've also used it as a replacement for the heel tip on oddly shaped shoe heels).

Gorilla Glue

When I worked at the grocery store, my colleagues swore by Gorilla Glue, which I had never heard of up until that point. When I finally did give it a try, I was underwhelmed, although it does have its uses. Gorilla glue's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness—as it cures, it foams up, expanding into any cracks it's been placed into. This is great when you need to fill gaps, but it's terrible for precision applications. My friend's mom once used it to repair a broken china figurine of mine—it came back with brownish foam protruding from all the cracks. I also find Gorilla glue to be less strong than some glues—do not use it in places that will be subject to a lot of torque. What is it good for? Large-area applications. I am currently using it around the house to hold pieces of wood to various other surfaces.

Spray Adhesive

You've seen spray adhesive come up numerous times in my other blog—I've used it to hold up my socks as well as to make various paper and fabric crafts. In all those projects, I was using an old can of spray adhesive that I'd had since graduate school, where we were advised to use the substance to affix our design samples to mat board for presentation. So I can thank my master's degree for my knowledge of the strengths of spray adhesive: it is excellent for attaching one large flat, flexible surface to another one. Spray adhesive forms a thin, even coat that is unlikely to bleed unless you really overdo it. Objects with spray adhesive on them can usually be repositioned a couple of times before the glue loses its tack. But a big downside of this glue is that it is messy! It's hard to keep the aerosolized glue from settling onto everything in the vicinity (my design school actually had a gluing room, which was sticky from floor to ceiling due to all the overspray!), so when my last can of spray adhesive ran out, I haven't been in a hurry to replace it. I think I'm going to settle for rubber cement in the future.

Rubber Cement

My first encounter with rubber cement was when my mom created her influential dining table Halloween costume. She used rubber cement to affix plastic utensils to her tablecloth, and I was amazed, because up until that time, my experience of glue was limited to Elmer's School Glue, which as we all know, does next to nothing. Rubber cement is pretty awesome because it retains a degree of stickiness even after it dries. It dries faster than white glue, and because it comes with a brush, it can be applied in a thinner layer. I prefer rubber cement for all my paper-attaching needs, and I'm experimenting with using it to hold my clothes up (temporary verdict: it doesn't work as well as spray adhesive, but it is easier to remove from your skin.)

E6000

I can thank Pinterest for introducing me to this second-newest addition to my Glue Gallery. All the crafters who post tutorials involving attaching rhinestones to anything always recommend using E6000 glue for the purpose. If you don't know much about rhinestones, generally they have a very smooth shiny back which can be quite hard to stick to anything. So, intrigued, I bought a tube of the stuff. It says right on the label that it's industrial-strength, which sounds pretty good to me. I haven't had a lot of opportunity to use E6000 for very many applications, but so far I've reattached a couple of shoe soles with it, and they haven't come apart yet.

5-Second-Fix

Normally, I'd be the last person to purchase something emblazoned with an "As Seen on TV" label, but recently I made an order that needed a few more items to qualify for free shipping, and the 5-Second-Fix was a pretty low price, so I threw a tube of the stuff into my virtual cart. So far, I can't say I regret my purchase. It seems to work the same way as dental fillers do (it might even be the same substance my orthodontist used to attach my braces!)—the glue remains liquid until you blast it with the attached UV light, and then it takes only 5 seconds to cure. For the limited amount of time I've had to try it, I have to say this glue is pretty awesome. Like hot glue, it dries fast, but unlike hot glue, it only dries when you're ready to dry it. Like epoxy, it bonds to a wide variety of materials and seems to form a strong, clear bond, but unlike epoxy, you don't have to pre-mix it and can use an infinitesimally small amount right out of the tube. My first and only use of this glue was to repair and reconstruct a couple of pairs of earrings, for which it worked like a charm—until the pair I repaired fell on the floor a week later and broke in the same spot... but I'll give the glue the benefit of a doubt—I might have just not applied it adequately. There are apparently lots of similar products on the market, so when it comes time to replace my 5SF, I might just look for a cheap generic.

Other options

I have other glues in my collection as well, but they are for really limited uses, but here's a quick rundown:

• Elmer's glue stick (good for almost nothing except temporary bonds of flat porous materials like paper and fabric)
• School glue (being water-soluble even when dry, it's only good for temporarily bonding things that you later want to wash out. I got it to use as a substitute for wax-resist in fabric dyeing, but haven't actually tried that yet)
• Temporary Fabric glue (When sewing, you can use it for basting instead of pins, which fall out, or a basting stitch, which my sewing machine doesn't have. Fabric glue is a little tackier than traditional white glue, so it attaches things more quickly and securely)