the ocean

We adopted Dolly a little bit less than six months ago. It has been a ride. Initially, she did not seem to want to sleep at all, but rather to scamper about our bedroom at night and bark the most chilling and impossible to ignore bark anyone has ever heard. Her first few nights, we ended up taking turns sleeping with her on the daybed in Ian's office so at least one of us could have a shot at sleeping through the night. That was followed by taking turns sleeping with her on a camping mattress on the bedroom floor. So when people are shocked when I tell them she gets one of us up at four in the morning each day, what they fail to understand is that this is a major improvement. At least we are both sleeping in our actual bed in our bedroom!

As an attorney, I am constantly doing exciting and glamorous things that are exactly like what you see lawyers doing on television. I'm basically that lady ADA from SVU. Not the tall blonde one, the shorter, squarer one. I'm constantly in court and my cases only last for 52 minutes once commercials are removed.

No, the truth is that ever since I left the exciting world of people who murder their elderly business partners with hammers, my work more closely resembles The Office than The Practice, to say nothing of Love Island. I sit at a desk and type. I meet with people. I go to the break room and hope that there are still some Sun Chips left. (There are not.)

Last week I broke things up with some travel. Saw some New Jersey and Michigan conference rooms for a change. Ate a meal by myself at a Buffalo Wild Wings and decided just to go with an appetizer sampler as my entree. Ate a meal by myself at an airport Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville and was assaulted by live steel drum music for forty-five minutes. Dominated the heck out of boarding group two.

Then this past week I was a panelist at a conference. It was kind of wild because pretty much no one in the audience did the same kind of work as me, so I realized I could pretty much just say anything and no one would be the wiser. I did not, of course. With great power comes great responsibility. 

Just as I'm complaining about my lack of things to write about, I have work travel that provides plenty of fodder for discussion.

Monday I flew to Newark for some work meetings. As fate would have it, I was seated next to an elderly Russian couple who spent the entire trip loudly discussing in two different languages how confusing nearly every aspect of the flight was to them. 

When I arrived, the man was hunched over in his seat with his eyeballs approximately one inch from the in-seat display, messing with the parental controls settings for no earthly reason. Then, his wife coached him on the process of selecting a movie to watch, which resulted in him accidentally starting an episode of the NBC sitcom I forgot existed, "St. Denis Medical," with what appeared to be Dutch subtitles. Understandably terrified by this development and apparently unaware that one can exit out of erroneously selected programming, the gentleman asked his wife to switch seats, but she was already too invested in The Barbie Movie to agree to that.

Shortly thereafter, and it's really important you understand I am not making this up, the woman became convinced that we had already taken off and landed, when in truth we'd just been doing the incredibly long taxi for which O'Hare is so well known. She convinced her husband to ask the flight attendant why we had landed so quickly, leading to one of the most meaningful stunned silences I've ever encountered. Fortunately, my new friends were actually delighted to learn that five-minute round trips are not actually in the United Airlines playbook.

Then there was the in-flight service. They asked the snack lady for a drink and the drink lady for a snack. Then the wife asked if they had any chocolate alcoholic drinks, apparently mistaking the plane for a bespoke speakeasy in Brooklyn. After discovering that alcohol was not complimentary, she settled on bloody mary mix with no vodka, which she then complained tasted like tomato juice. 

Once we landed, they entertained a ten minute phone call with their pet hotel on speakerphone whilst we waited to deplane. During which they asked to speak to their dog. Which I feel, but still, do not understand the need for the entire row to be involved. Particularly during the hold music, which was a janky electronic version of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. Finally that music history training has paid off.

Needless to say, I am now best friends with these people and they're coming over tonight. Travel really does expose us to new horizons.

I am struggling more and more to come up with things to write about here, and I'm not sure why. I mean, yes, my life is relatively uninteresting, but hasn't it always been? It's not like I used to be a backup dancer for Madonna or Hillary Clinton's lesbian life partner (or both) or anything. I'm still in the same straightforward and largely not for disclosure profession I've been in for twenty plus years, and I'm still married to the same dude I've been with for more than a decade. I guess I do spend less time "out on the town," as no one says, than I used to, but it's not like I remembered most of that to write about it, anyway. I'm certainly not watching less television or doing fewer stupid things than I did back in the day.

Case in point: I was in my friend's wedding last weekend and, after two days of being friendly with strangers and taking photos for hours with only a Walgreen's sandwich for sustenance, I decided to practice some intoxication. And I ended up giving the Uber driver a combination of my current address and the address I lived at three years ago, realizing I hadn't brought my keys and could not remember the code for the back door that I enter literally every day of my life, and having to wake Ian up to let me in in the dead of night. 

Oh yeah, so maybe that's the shit I should write about. Except I just did. And it's not like I had anything funny to say about it, other than the fact that it happened. 

Should I start recapping old episodes of "Caroline in the City" or something? Only issue is that I would then have to actually watch old episodes of "Caroline in the City."

Actually having a reason for being is such a high bar for a blog...