Monthly Archives: June 2023

white noise

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I am the type of person who can’t sleep without some kind of white noise. I mean, half the time I can’t sleep anyway because my brain is a dick, but still. With the white noise, sleep may happen. Without the white noise, sleep will definitely NOT happen.

The source of the white noise isn’t super important. A fan blowing, the A/C unit running, even a white noise track playing over headphones will usually work if I’m travelling.

In our bedroom, we have one of those round twist-top white noise machines like what you often see used for noise cancellation in doctor’s offices. We’ve had it for many years. It has two speeds (white and…whiter, I guess?) and you can twist the top to change the size of the openings the air comes out of, thus changing the tone slightly (regular white, off-white, ecru…ok, the joke wasn’t great to begin with and I’ve now officially ruined it). I am so in the habit of turning the white noise machine on at bedtime that I still turn it on even when we run the A/C at night. I literally cannot hear the white noise machine over the A/C, but turning it on is muscle memory at this point.

Taking that into account, you can then imagine that when I woke up yesterday morning after the A/C shut off and there was no white noise machine going, I noticed immediately. I figured I must have just been out of it when I went to bed the night before and somehow forgot to turn on the white noise even though, like I said, it’s muscle memory at this point. Last night when I went to bed, I was very deliberate in my turning on of the white noise machine and my acknowledgement that it was, in fact, ON. I turned it on before the A/C, even. I KNOW that sucker was on when I got into bed.

So, why was it not running again this morning when I woke up? Did my husband shut it off, maybe?

Me: “Hey, did you shut the white noise machine off in the night last night?”

Him: “Nope. I noticed it wasn’t on this morning, too. I figured you just didn’t turn it on last night.”

Me: “No, I definitely turned it on. I made extra sure I did, because it was off when I woke up yesterday morning too, and I figured I must have just forgotten it the night before.”

Him: “Hunh. Weird.”

And for him that was the end of it, because he is not insane. My brain, on the other hand, immediately took the How Did The White Noise Machine Shut Off By Itself torch and RAN with it. My first three thoughts were exactly as follows:

1. Maybe someone has crept ultra-silently into our bedroom the last two nights and shut the white noise machine off while we sleep. Nevermind that I have the world’s most attentive watch-dog, who can hear mice farting in walls three houses away, who can smell traces of the last podokesaurus who stomped through proto-New-England 145 million years ago, and whose most favorite thing ON THIS VAST GREEN EARTH is to bark, specifically at strangers.

2. Maybe a mouse was on the desk that the white noise machine sits on, and maybe they walked by and brushed against the power switch, thus shutting the machine off. We’ve never had mice inside this house. Also, see above references to dog who hears / smells everything ever and would raise the unholiest of rackets immediately if a rodent was present. He wouldn’t chase and kill the rodent because he’s not useful a savage, mind you. But he’d sure as shit let us know it was there in no uncertain terms.

3. Maybe one of the rather large wolf spiders recently spotted in our basement (OH GODS WHY) came up the stairs (ACK), got into our room (PANIC-FLAIL), and hit the button with one of its extra long, extra hairy, EXTRA FUCKING CREEPY AND WRONG spider legs. I am convinced that at this point, my brain was just taking the piss, just trying to see if it could send me into an actual nervous breakdown, because I am super, SUPER anti-spider. I mean, in the house, anyway. Outside? Fine. Spider on with your bad self. Build all the webs, eat all the bugs. And honestly, small spiders in the house aren’t generally a problem either as long as they don’t do dumb shit like TOUCH ME. Big spiders in the house, though? No. Big spiders in the house make me want to move out…preferably without packing a damned thing, because fuck only knows where those hairy bastards are hiding at this point and OMG WHY AM I STILL THINKING ABOUT THIS, UGH.

Basically, my brain now won’t stop coming up with increasingly disturbing and/or convoluted ways in which the white noise machine may have gotten shut off in the night. At one point I was even wondering if maybe I had started sleep-walking and had shut it off then. Our bedroom is kind of cramped though, and I am large and klutzy, so I feel like even if I WAS sleepwalking, I wouldn’t have made it as far as the white noise machine without tripping over something and waking myself up, or bashing into something and doing myself noticable harm. But as far as I know I’ve never sleep-walked, so maybe that’s not how that works.

So, I guess there’s only one thing for it: we have to set up a night-vision camera pointed at the white noise machine and see what’s going on. Except I can’t do that either because I’ve watched one too many episodes of Ghost Hunters (read: I’ve watched exactly one episode. Not even a whole episode. I watched like ten minutes of it once, eight years ago), and I know that all the poltergeists show up as weird flashes and blobs on night vision in the middle of the night while you’re asleep. IT’S SCIENCE, BRENDA. You can’t argue with science.

And I’ll tell you what: finding out that there are poltergeists flitting around my bedroom all damned night isn’t going to help my sleep issues AT ALL.

“Hello, PETA? Yes, this is Keppo. Again, yes. Could you please send Sarah McLachlan to come pick me up? My human has finally lost it for real. Also, they haven’t fed me in weeks. MONTHS, even. Maybe years. I’m a dog, time works differently for me. But seriously, could you…hello? HELLO? Man, maybe the poltergeists got into the phone, too.”

undeveloped

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I found an undeveloped roll of film the other day. It was in a bag of random stuff that has gone through at least three house moves with me. I’m pretty sure I haven’t used my non-digital camera in close to 20 years, so this sucker has been around a while.

Exhibit A: ancient technology unearthed from the depths of a bag of junk.

There’s a place in town that still processes film and prints pictures, so I’m going to drop this off to be developed soon. I fully realize that it’s so old and has been stored so disrespectfully (for real: it has been banging around kitchen junk drawers for many years), that it likely won’t even turn out. But I’m curious enough about what’s on it to want to spend the money anyway, just on the off chance.

I used to take tons of pictures, often with the aim of wanting to be artsy, but I wasn’t very good at it. So, more than likely, this is a whole roll of pictures of branches or a cornfield or something similar. There is one other possibility: I took a trip to Kentucky to spend time with a boy circa 2000-ish (don’t quote me on that date, I’d have to get the scrap book out to confirm). I shot two rolls of film while I was there, but only one ever got developed. This may very well be that second roll of film. That was a weird trip and quite frankly, a weird time in my life in general (although, when is life NOT weird, honestly), and I have mixed feelings about the possibility of having that little time capsule available to examine. The boy doesn’t matter—he’s long gone and there were no deep feels there anyway. But I’m equal parts nervous and intrigued at the prospect of perhaps getting to see a glimpse of myself, or at the very least, of my perspective, from so long ago. Aging is such a mindfuck in that, the older you get, the more sure you become of yourself in some regards, but the more you (or a lot of us, anyway), tend to understand that the only constant is change. We are somehow always the same person we’ve always been in a general sense, but there will have been tens or even hundreds of versions of us from year to year, day to day, sometimes even minute to minute. And that’s fine—that’s completely natural. But it can feel very odd, especially if you’re an overly sensitive, always-in-your head person like me.

Anyway. If the pictures come out, I’ll post some of them. If nothing else, they should be good for a laugh at my complete lack of photography skills.