High School Psych Day

It's odd to me that some people don't believe in hypnotism since it's fairly common and can be readily observed. I've seen it a few times. Once at a high school post-homecoming party and once in my high school psych class. I was very tired the time that the hypnotist came into our psych class, and I did not volunteer to get hypnotized. I'd prefer not to be the plaything of some weirdo who temporarily brainwashes me by putting me into a bizarre trance. He picked five people and had them sit down in front of the class, and he asked them to imagine they were floating on a raft going down a river. I was so tired and zoned out, that I began to imagine along with them. I caught myself right as I was going under water and realized that I was on the verge of becoming hypnotized. I wonder if hypnotists have some kind of ethical boundary that would have prevented him from making me dance around or bark like a dog had I become hypnotized. Or maybe I did become hypnotized and never knew it. Maybe I never even snapped out of it. I hope I don't wake up in high school psych class in a few minutes.

On the Hour, Every Hour

I never had a car when I was younger. Nowadays that sounds cool, like I was eco hip years ahead of the curve. But the truth is that I wanted a car very badly and would have happily driven a Ford Pinto that ran on veal cutlets if that's what had been available to me. The rare times that I was allowed to drive, I would get my mom's Pontiac 6000 LE. One of my 15-year-old friends lost a watch in that car during a night of me driving back and forth from the 24-hour Perkins, and we should have been able to find it since the alarm went off once every hour. We didn't and as long as my mom owned that car the watch would beep from somewhere in the depths of the backseat on the hour. It might sound like something that would be annoying, but you got used to it. Plus, it's not like you're supposed to be sleeping when you're driving, so it was kind of nice to have a little alert every hour. Every year the beep would get a little quieter as the battery faded. If I'd been able to find the watch, I would have put in a new battery and tucked it back away before we traded in that car.

Missed Connections

Our photography teacher ordered us to procure some Kodax Triax film over the weekend for the black-and-white shooting portion of the class. A friend suggested I try Walgreens, so I opened the phonebook and found the one closest my house. I punched in the number and the guy picked up on the third ring. "Do you have Kodak Triax Film?" I asked. "Uh, I think you have the wrong number," he said. I did indeed. I should have known something was up when he didn't answer the phone, "Walgreens." I was surrounded by people when I made the call, but the shock of asking a stranger for Kodak film so unnerved me that I couldn't play it off like I called the right people and they'd simply run out. I've been a lot more sympathetic to people who accidentally call me since this experience.

The High Schooler Sightings

I went to a bar with my sister the last time I made the trip back to my hometown. It was over a holiday weekend, so the place was packed with people I'd gone to high school with. It was awkward. It's not that I don't like them, it's just that I never really knew them, and spending 11 years not talking to each other hasn't changed that. Sure, I'm 'friends' with a few of them on Facebook, but only because it seems so petty to deny anyone a Friend Request, even if you never actually knew them. Walking through a bar and seeing these people is similar to seeing them in high school, only it's as if we've all been exposed to some chemical agent that makes your face swell. Actually, we probably have. I think it's called "alcohol."

Sleep Deprivation Revelations

A lack of sleep causes people to become more emotional. Or rather, it causes them to have less control of their emotions, so they'll swing into anger or sadness before they can reign in their feelings. I took two red eye flights under the same circumstances one year apart. I skied all day, had a few beers, ate a huge meal of Mexican food, and then sat on a plane not sleeping for five hours. The only thing that changed for me was what I had to do when I arrived home. The first year I laid on my bed and stared at the clock for four minutes before getting up to shower and go to work. Lack of sleep also helps strip things away. That was the day that I wrote an e-mail to a friend trying to explain the general feeling of what I do, rather than what I actually do. I said it's like sitting in front of a wall of electrical outlets and looking at a couple dozen extension cords. The goal is to plug and unplug all of the cords into the wall in a certain order. This process will take about 2 hours; the rest of the day is spent surfing the internet. It might not sound so bad on a normal day, but after not sleeping for 48 hours it will make you want to kill yourself. The morning after this red eye flight, thankfully did not contain any such revelations.

Worse than the Electric Chair

A particular ski resort in Utah used to have a double chairlift that took about 17 minutes to amble up the hillside. The trip length varied based on how often the lift had to shut down so the lifties could clear fallen skiers out of the unloading area. Sometimes you'd sit two chairs back from unloading, waiting in the gusty wind for a few minutes while someone collected their skis and poles from the crash zone. Then sometimes you'd bob up and down at a sudden stop halfway up the hill, waiting a few minutes until they kicked the chairlift's lawnmower engine back on. It got to the point that some skiers expected the liftie to shut down the chair whenever they downloaded at the top, but one liftie had had enough. I remember standing at the top and watching a guy bail while getting off the lift. He wasn't in any danger at all; just lying at the bottom of the off loading ramp trying to collect his poles, but he kept yelling over his shoulder, "Shut down the lift! Shut it down!" The liftie was standing there yelling back, "Just pick up your stuff! Get outta there." It's times like that when I feel most in tune with the ethos of utilitarianism. That guy lying on the ground might be having an awful time, but at least the rest of us aren't waiting on the chairlift.

Theft of Services

There are a lot of ways to get away with illegally discounting your lift tickets. One option is pretending you forgot your season pass and getting a free 1-day ticket from the pass office. They make you put it on your pants right in front of them so you can't sell it, so you put it on and then trade your pants with your friend who needed the ticket. I've had one friend get caught using this method. A diligent liftie noticed that the same name was on the season pass and the day ticket, and he called them out. They made a break for it, skiing into the parking lot and driving away. Liftie powers evaporate as soon as you make it to the parking lot. The cheapest we ever were with lift tickets was high school. On Wednesday night, the local resort would sell half-price tickets if you brought some canned food to donate to the food shelter. We'd buy two tickets for four people, cut the tickets in half, and then stick them to old lift tickets we left on our pants. It was quarter-price night for us.

Pyramid Sales Pitch

There are few things more hopeless than driving the width of Nebraska by oneself. The only remarkable encounter over the course of a six-hour drive are monstrous bugs that are ocassionally so thick you need to stop and get out the ice scrapper. It was during one of these breaks to clear the windshield of my Buick that I was first assailed. The man approached me and mentioned something about how the internet confounded him, but he was willing to bet that a youngster like me probably knew all about it. I admitted with a shrug that, yes, I did in fact know a thing or two about the internet. That was when he dropped the news that he belonged to a pyramid scheme in which he made millions, and the only work he did anymore was to enrich the lives of young, obviously ambitious men like myself. I soaked it up for awhile and then managed to plow through the rest of the drive without careening off the interstate. I forgot about it until a few years later when I was on a first date and somehow the conversation veered into these pyramid schemes. I told that girl about my encounter on the Nebraska highway with a pretty disparaging tone towards the schemes. Turns out that her dad got in on it early and now he only works a day week. I told her I'd possibly already met him.

Reckless Driving and Train Tracks

My friend considered it an honor to be the one to pick up our buddy from the airport after his couple months surfing through Australia and hiking in New Zealand. In his excitement and haste, my friend Shawn took a wrong turn on the way to the airport. A heavy fog had blanketed Minneapolis, and the tracks recently laid for the new light rail confused him. Instead of taking a left onto the roadway, he took a left onto the tracks. The frame of his car rested on the new tracks while all four tires hung suspended in the air. Instead of calling a wrecker or notifying the police, he got out of his car and ran the rest of the way to the airport. He was there to greet our friend and help him carry his surfboard back to the car, but when they arrived they were greeted by a few policemen standing around the site. Shawn is the kind of guy who can give a carload of friends a pirate-themed tour of any town--even one he's never been to. He's convinced people that he's Jimmy Buffet's nephew, and one time he managed to put up a tent using only one broken pole. I believe it was these skills that helped him convince the police to help him pull his car off the tracks and send him home with nothing more than a ticket for reckless driving.

The Last Minute of J-School

An assignment in one of our journalism school writing classes was to profile a bar or coffee shop. I chose a bar as I was over 21, and it was the first education-specific excuse to drink handed down to me during college. Our profile was due in class on Thursday morning, and Wednesday afternoon a violent blizzard descended on the city. The bar profile I wrote began with an anecdote about me riding a bike to the bar nearest my house in the middle of a huge snow storm. When I arrived at the bar, there was only one guest and three employees. Two of those employees were in charge of running was normally a raucous karaoke night and what could have been a wonderful profile of a local bar called The Goal Line. Instead my classmates heard a story about me playing pool against one other guy and us taking turns singing terrible songs. He tried to instill some wisdom in me after I told him about my bar profile piece that was due the next morning, but my only takeaway was that we were the only two people in the whole town who loved karaoke and dive bars so much that we headed out on a Wednesday night with the snow cranking.

Ladies Man Education

We found out that our middle school teacher had to take a few days off to deal with some kind of digestive, intestinal problem. This was shortly after my friend had put a handful of dirt from the potted plant into his coffee grounds. The dirt probably wouldn't have hurt him, but I'm worried that the little chunks of white fertilizer had some kind of negative effect. The poor guy used to hit on our school's only attractive, single teacher during bus duty. Watching his moves was a spectacular education in how not to attract females. I even briefly considered having a talk with him about not wearing sleeveless undershirts cut from such vibrant colors when he wore white button-ups. After I turned 21, I ran into him once or twice at the bar while he was out looking for ladies. I heard he eventually met someone nice and got married, but I wonder who finally had the courage to talk to him about those undershirts.

On My Reasons for Hating Poetry

I hated poetry for years without any really good reason. The whole genre seemed so needlessly complex. If you want to say something, just say it plainly instead of telling me in a rhyming allegory about building fences. I can trace it all back to my second grade advanced writing class. We had to write a poem. Mine was only a few lines. Two of them were, "Roy lost a toy/He found it with a ploy." My mom helped me find a word that rhymed with 'toy,' and I just found out what 'ploy' means a couple years ago. The most impressive poem in advanced writing was a girl's that went (and I hope I'm not infringing on any copyrights here paraphrasing it): "Proud saguaro/dusty saguaro/lonely saguaro/...proud saguaro." I just found out what a 'saguaro' is last year; it's a cactus. I would argue from a critical standpoint that using 'cactus' instead of 'saguaro' would have made the poem more accessible to our non-advanced writing friends while not detracting from the meaning of the poem.

Projectile Building Class

Our 6th grade class went through a brief and ill-advised period of shooting one another with homemade projectiles whenever our teacher's back was turned. A popular pen-barrel and rubber band crossbow made in the style of Mad Max could embed sharpened paper clips a half-inch into text book covers. Most of the class favored less abstruse methods; the most popular being safety pins stuck through an eraser at several angles. You tossed this loaded potato to your victim, and if they tried to catch it or simply didn't get out of the way, it'd end up stuck in their hand or through their clothing. I walked into the bathroom one day to find my friend Dan furiously washing his hands. The bottom of the sink was covered in blood, and he had a red Magic Marker sitting on the countertop. He was freaking out because his hands sustained heavy casualties, and he was worried that our teacher Mr. Hazelquist would find out and punish him. He was using the marker to color his hands red so that he could pretend that a pen had exploded on them. After he explained his marker plan to me, one of the stalls in the boy's room opened and Mr. Hazelquist walked out buttoning his pants. He washed his hands and said, "Hey boys," on his way out the door. We stared at each other for a moment before filing out of the boy's room and back to class. I'm pretty sure our teacher didn't want to deal with the hassle of disciplining kids. The projectile building and shooting phase ended as abruptly as it began. Some kid made a pea shooter that could blast cork board tacks out of a pen barrel, but he accidentally inhaled one while getting a really big breath to shoot a classmate.

Beer Sneaking

Sneaking beer into movies is a great way to stick it to the man. You avoid insanely over-priced soda and get to drink beer during first-run films. It's wise to wait until after the movie starts to break it out so that the ushers don't catch you drinking it on their final walk-through before the movie begins. Then the trick is to opening it at the right time. This is easy if it's an action movie because you can pop it open during an on-screen explosion and the loud sound will cover the noise. It gets a little harder if you're watching something like The Notebook or Terms of Endearment, and it's impossible to make it through those those kinds of movies without a couple beers. My favorite place to watch movies is at a theater with lax beer enforcement in Madison, Wisconsin. Anytime you get up to go to the bathroom you know you'll kick over a couple empties that have been left on the floor. Since the ground is slanted towards the screen, everyone in the theater hears them rolling all the way forward and crashing into the screen.

The Candy Shop

A man on the west side of town transformed the living room of his residential home into a candy store. He put a soda machine and a bench out front, which was odd since he would go outside and yell at any kids who sat there for longer than 10 minutes. In his residential zone near the middle school, he replaced his solid front door with a glass door and installed shelving behind a counter in the foyer. Kids would line up in front of his house after school let out. I never thought of it back then, but his neighbors must have wanted him dead. Maybe they were the people who turned him in. There was a story in the paper one day about a police sting. The man had gone shopping every day of his life at the big grocery store in town, and they'd suspected him of shoplifting for years. They checked his bag and looked through store video, and they finally figured out that his shopping bag had a false bottom that he'd fill with candy and sneak out underneath his daily produce. Not exactly groundbreaking as far as conspiracies go, but it was a big deal in our town. Plus the guy managed to go about ten years without every working a real job, and that's a pretty impressive accomplishment.

Discovering a Car

My roommate Graham was telling me about an invention he was working on with some colleagues. They'd bought him a drill press, and he casually mentioned that it was "down in the workshop." I'd lived in this house for several months, so naturally I asked, "We have a workshop?" He walked me down into the basement and into a darkened room. He swung his arms in the dark until making contact with a single hanging bulb, and then he pulled the chain next to it. The light showed a small tidy room with some shelves, a workbench, and a lot of tools. I poked around a bit, then turned to head back upstairs. On the way I passed a door that looked like it hadn't been opened in ages, but in the spirit of finding out about the workshop, I gave the door a shove. It opened into a garage underneath our house that I didn't know we had access to, and in it was one of my other roommate's broken down Ford Mustangs. I imagine its the same feeling people get when they find out that some caves on their property contain ancient drawings.

Frenemies

I worked briefly at a newspaper in college, and we'd occasionally have guest speakers. One asked us how much of our own paper we read each day, and we admitted, 'Not too much.' "Of course you don't," he said. "You're out chasing down stories. The only ones you read are your own to see how badly they got messed up in copy editing and your enemies' stories to see if they're doing better work than you." Even these days, it's nice when one of your enemies blows it, and the advent of social networking makes it much easier to keep score of these mistakes. You can take a look at what high school frenemies have swelled to the size of small cars or been through three marriages in as many years. The flipside is that it's even more disappointing when the really attractive people from high school have gone on to great success.

Proximity Infatuation

I sat with a group of my peers at the purple table all year. It was a conventional table, except that we had a piece of purple construction paper in the middle of it. Perhaps designating the tables this way was my kindergarten teacher's plan to identify colorblind children. I'm currently Facebook friends with two of the people I sat with at the purple table. Sadly, I've lost touch with the other three. Of those, there's only one I remember: Stephanie Purple Table. It's not that I forgot her last name, but rather that I never knew it. We chose to identify her as Stephanie Purple Table among friends so that we wouldn't confuse her with the other Stephanie in our class. Stephanie was my first brush with proximity infatuation, though we never dated. If I ever run into her, I'm sure I'll enter her into my cell phone as Stephanie Purple Table.

TV Ratings

There's a TV rating organization that sends out surveys stuffed with a few dollar bills and a self-addressed-stamped-return envelope. They hope that you'll keep a journal of all the TV you watch over the next couple weeks and then send it to them. They don't ask you to return the money if you're uninterested in their project, they simply leave it out there to try and guilt you into doing their bidding. It seems logical to me that the only people who would return this filled-out survey would either be people who have a sense of moral duty to do something once they've accepted the meager payment or people who live with a lot of guilt. Either way, I'd bet that the TV ratings returned from this type of survey method are drastically flawed. People with a lot of guilt filing out these surveys are likely to blame for all the TV shows I hate that are still on the air. We'll see how they like living with that.

Suit Shopping Heaven

I buy a new suit on average of once every 30 years. So far, I've only bought one. I rarely need to wear them as very few of my friends are getting married or dying. I was in Florida awhile ago and stopped in a strip mall's used bookstore for some beach reading material. Next door was a thrift shop, so I popped in for a minute. Thrift shops are a great place to buy anything you need but hate to spend money on. I like them but try to avoid thrift shopping on vacation since if I buy too much I'll be forced to check a bag, which really defeats the purpose. This thrift shop was stacked with nice men's suits, and I asked the clerk why. He said that a lot of Florida's immense elderly population makes arrangements to donate all their clothes to thrift shops upon their death. My problem is that most of these old guys are pretty small, but if you're under 6 feet tall, Florida thrift shops are the best place in the world to shop for new suits.

Keys Lost in the Mail

My Salt Lake friends knew their house guests would arrive in town during working hours. Since they couldn't get out of work to welcome their guests, they sent them a set of house keys in the mail. It was their guests' first time in Utah, so they included a detailed map from the airport to their house. They dropped the package in the mail 10 days before their friends would leave the east for Salt Lake. It should have taken four or five days to get there, so after five they began to get a little concerned. The suspense heightened after each daily phone call asking, "Did the package arrive yet?" In 10 days it still hadn't arrived, and the postal service had no idea of its whereabouts. At this point they're faced with a choice: Spend the money and resources to replace all the locks, or hope that the map and keys to their home didn't fall into the wrong hands. I think that the vast, vast majority of human who get mail would not break into someone's home even if they were given a treasure map, key, and time that the family would not be home. And my friends' family agreed with me. They never replaced the locks, and no one's broken in. They also haven't had the mail returned, so it's still out in the ether somewhere. So if you ever get that mail with the key and map, now you know the house is there and the key still works.

Neti Pots

I got hooked on the neti pot a few years ago. It's a small tea pot that you fill with salt water then jam up one nostril and tilt your head to pour the water through your sinuses. Water running through your skull is an odd feeling to get used to, but it helps immensely if you bike through polluted environments or suffer from allergies. I've been on the neti pot a few years now, but something odd has begun happening lately. Sometimes, a half-hour or so after I use it, I'll tilt my head forward and a bunch of water will pour out of my nose. I'm afraid that I've been using the neti pot so long that I've splunked a new cavity deep in my skull that is now accepting water. After I use it, I'll tilt my head to every angle I can in an effort to get rid of all the water, but then 20 minutes later I'll still get some salt water pouring out of my face. I realize this doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, but that I'm willing to accept random salt water pouring from my face in exchange for the goodness of the neti pot ought to mean something.

Too Cool for School

I went to school sick on the day my 8th grade science teacher was running experiments in the hallway. He setup a course for a radio-controlled car and handed out stopwatches to everyone in the class. We lined the halls at the ready. I took a seat against the locker since the floor felt more stable with my back against the wall. It's kind of like the story that if you're lying in bed and it feels like the bed is spinning, then you're supposed to put one foot on the ground. Not sure if that works. Our class was timing the R/C car's run down the hall, but our teacher couldn't keep the car straight and we had to keep starting over. This experiment was, by all accounts, one of the cooler ones. It had us out of the classroom and holding stopwatches. The bar for cool experiments was set pretty low. At some point my frustration with my teacher's R/C driving ability bubbled over, and I mumbled something along the lines of 'come on man, let's get this over with' under my breath. He overheard, and as a self-appointed cool teacher in our school, had me try to drive the car instead of disciplining me in front of the class. I did terrible, and I'm pretty sure our whole class handed in incomplete work since we hadn't collected enough data. Thinking back, I never really took school too seriously, so the most baffling thing to me about the whole thing is that I was there on day I was even a tiny bit sick.

Todd's Productivity Standard

We used to send TPS reports at the end of every week. It was a list of all the work we'd done. There was a bit of grumbling when the idea of being held accountable for our work was pitched, but we gave in since they paid us to be there. The name "TPS Report" was borrowed from the movie Office Space. It's never clear what the acronym TPS means in that movie, but in our department it stood for "Todd's Productivity Standard." Todd was a guy who worked in our department. He wasn't lazy, but he also wasn't breaking down cubicle walls to get his work done. We therefore established the amount of work Todd did in an average week as our Productivity Standard, and we'd all have to at least do as much work as him.

On Drinking Egg Nog

I think we only drink Egg Nog around the holidays because it would kill us if we drank it all year. My parents sent me a bottle the other day. I'm enjoying it immensely, but it's thicker than half-and-half and definitely has more calories. It's like a butter-flavored milkshake that's spiked with booze. I'm torn between hording and sharing. On one hand it's unsafe for any human to drink a liter of heavy cream, but on the other it only arrives once a year. The name Egg Nog is only half accurate. It tastes nothing like eggs, but if I had to invent a word to describe its texture, I could never come up with something more suitable than Nog.

Death by Machine

I go to batting cages about once every two years. I don't have much natural skill at baseball, but there's something healthy about smashing things with a bat once in awhile. Though I rarely make the trip, twice in my life I've seen these pitching machines malfunction. Instead of pitching only 10 or 15 balls for $.50, the machine gets stuck in pitch mode. It won't let up. You lose count, swinging as hard as you can pitch after pitch until a teen employee saunters over and turns off the malfunctioning machine. The first time it happened to my dad during a trip to Door County, and he stood in there batting for so long that he had a hard time with the car door. It happened to me several years later in Minneapolis, and I stayed in hitting as hard as I could even though my friends were yelling at me that it was their turn. This is what it will look like if computers ever need to wage war on mankind. They won't design some terminator killing robot or farm us as human batteries. They'll let us kill ourselves with free stuff.

Coffee Corrections

Starbucks doesn't correct me anymore when I order a 'medium' coffee. They used to always reply "Grande?" to my, "Medium." Someone must have had a word with the collective Starbucks baristas. The shift happened around the time the economy fell apart, and I speculate that ordering in non-English sizing became less of a priority for the coffee corporation. I know a lot of coffee purists who would never set foot in a Starbucks, but I'm a fan of the consistency and reasonably clean public restrooms. Plus I use their bathrooms all the time without buying anything, and no one's ever yelled at me. Not yelling at me goes a long way. I've spent enough in that chain to cover restroom rights for me and whatever children and grandchildren I ever have.

Lying Teachers

When I think back on second grade, I'm pretty sure that my teacher was in the early stages of dementia. She retired the year after we left her for third grade, and I think the school's administration knew she was on the way out and figured that she couldn't do much damage to one more year of second graders. Mondays in her classroom were largely spent sitting quietly and listening to her talk about about her weekend. I remember one that must have been particularly traumatic for her, based on the extent to which she expounded her innocence. She'd cut through a corner gas station to skip a red light at an intersection, and a cop saw her and pulled her over. She told us that she thought she'd seen a friend in the gas station and pulled in to say, 'Hi,' but realized a moment after pulling in that it wasn't her friend so, she left the gas station parking lot on the other side. The cop let her off with a warning, but I question her story. She so emphatically told us about her 'friend' over and over that I think she was just looking for vindication from a group of innocent second graders, trying as hard as she could to believe that she hadn't broken a law and then lied to a cop. Also, she sometimes wore her Roos on the wrong feet.

Corrective Surgery

My young nephew's ears stick out a lot. They're like the handles on a cup they give away for winning a horse race. I went to high school with a kid who had a similar look, and I saw him out at a bar when I was home over the holidays. His ears looked a lot different, and I thought that I'd exaggerated how much they stuck out in my imagination. I mentioned it to a friend, and she said the kid had gotten plastic surgery to have his ears corrected during the summer between high school and college. I hadn't seen him in ages, so I still remembered him with his signature ears. I wonder if that guy regrets that decision now. I can't imagine my nephew will ever get surgery to have his ears pulled closer to his head. He can thank President Barack Obama for making it cool to have ears that stick out. It's kind of like how all men stopped wearing hats with their business suits after President Kennedy went through his inauguration bareheaded.

Teenage Trending

When I was a teenager, I assumed that if I ever had kids I would follow whatever teenage trends were cool. I thought I'd tight roll my acid-wash jeans and crank Dire Straights in my Jeep Wrangler. Now I recognize that most things teenagers do are pretty lame. Teenagers have it rough. It's an awkward age, and no one really likes them, even themselves. But now there's a trend among teens that I think I could get into. They wear shorts, short-sleeve shirts, and flip-flops all winter. They can't be bothered to wear warm clothes when it's cold out. If I had teenage kids, I'd pop the collar on my Polo shirt and wade through snowdrifts in my sandals. We'd just have to hope our Jeep Wrangler never slid off the road and and got stuck in a snowbank.

Shoe Panic

I'll occasionally be riding my bike into the city or sitting on the train, and I'll suffer the tiniest fraction of a second of panic that I forgot to put on shoes. This happens most often after I've had a couple beers at home before heading out to meet some friends that night. It's such a quick feeling that there's no logic involved in it; it's logic-less, it's a simple feeling rather than a thought. Immediately after that tiny fraction of a split second, my thoughts turn to a new notion that  lasts slightly longer but is still only a split second. This is the thought that I accidentally put on mismatched shoes. This feeling used to occur much more regularly when I would have to wake up at ungodly hours in the morning. To date, whenever I've looked down to settle my mind, I've found matching shoes on my feet.