Category: Columns

It wasn’t even sunrise when I felt nature’s call. Clad in my usual sleepwear — yesterday’s T-shirt, unfussy undies — I stumbled half-dreaming from my twin bed toward the loo and stopped cold as I shuffled past my roommate’s bed in the opposite corner of the narrow room.

Was that a hairy arm hanging out of the bed? Was that a man’s sleeping body entwined with that of my sacked-out roommate, only inches from my barely garbed, bathroom-bound bladder?

He hadn’t been there when I went to sleep. What had happened in here? Scratch that. I didn’t want to know. Could I possibly go back to sleep a mere feet from this rather attractive stranger? And if I left the room in my skivvies, how long before they’d clear out and I could return?

Tufts University drew nationwide shrugs and sniggers last month when it issued an edict to students: “You may not engage in sexual activity while your roommate is present in the room.”

It’s funny. It is. But finding somewhere to bump bodies in college really is an exacting task. I remember breaking into empty dorm rooms and, once, climbing onto a campus rooftop. Not safe. Not smart. Not especially sanitary.

They say guilt is a great motivator, but I’m unconvinced. If it were true — if disgrace and penitence could spur a gal to stand up and set things right — then I wouldn’t be lying here, curled around my atrophying wallet in a shade-grown, grass-fed, phosphate-free paralysis.

I’m lame with eco-shame.

Do I read too much? Do I pay too much attention? Am I the only one confused and incapacitated by knowing the fiendish ways that every product on the market will impact our health, environment, and the progress of global human rights? Pesticides, PVCs, bioengineering. I’m afraid to consume anything for fear I might ingest E. coli, support sweatshops, or single-handedly deplete a rain forest.

I’m not one of those “let someone else figure out global warming; I loves me some Styrofoam” people, I swear I’m not. I’m conscientious-ish. I buy organic milk, free-range eggs, fair-trade coffee. I pack my kids’ lunches in re-purposed hummus tubs instead of landfill-bound, petroleum-based sandwich baggies. I confess I still don’t know what “sustainable” means, but I compost kitchen scraps for garden mulch. I even lease solar panels for my roof.

I spend my life hunting for exercise in disguise — activities that will hasten my heart rate and tone my tail feathers without me much noticing. Too aggro for yoga, too wussy for … well, anything that hurts, I need to be tricked into fitness. I need it to just sort of happen while I’m living my otherwise delightful and not especially active life.

Which is why my friend Margaret suggested we spend a nice evening chasing one another around in the dark, trying to kill each other dead.

Margaret is not a scary person. She’s an erudite English professor and cookie-baking mommy who happens to have a jones for laser combat. For months, she has been begging me to join her at Motionz laser tag in Santa Maria for their weekly Lasercise night (wha … ?) and when I run out of excuses, I gather my up-for-anything gal pals Kate and Kalai and bite the bullet. Or rather nibble the bright red beam.

On the drive up, we giggle and snort as Margaret briefs us Spandex-clad suburbanites on Lasercise procedure. Clad in high-tech, sensor-laden vests and wielding bad-ass light-launching weaponry, we will do calisthenics then play back-to-back laser-tag games in Motionz’s two-story indoor war zone. The object is simple: Shoot people, and don’t get shot.

Shakespeare never had to put up with this crap. I sit down at my computer this morning with a hot cup of fresh coffee and grand plans. I mean grand. I need to post my latest column, answer questions from confounded students, confirm an interview for tomorrow, check who’s coming to one son’s birthday party, find out who’s coming to the other son’s band practice, and complete research for a story that’s due today.

These are all tasks I accomplish online, so when I discover that my Internet is down — defunct, dead — I panic.

I call Cox for an explanation, and a recording tells me they’re having technical problems in my neighborhood. This is not news to me; this is what I called to tell them. The voice does not explain what they plan to do about it.

I click my “get mail” button just in case the connection has resumed while I was busy pounding on the phone (who uses the blasted phone anymore?), trying to find someone to shriek at.

Nothing happens. I click it again — “get mail,” “get mail,” “get mail” — hoping it will miraculously, spontaneously decide to obey. I am impotent. I am a eunuch. I am flipping the freak out.