In Threes
Unfortunately, not the only mouse in my house.
You know how “they say” things come in threes? I’m not sure I ever really believed it was true, but the past day or so has convinced me otherwise.
It started at my ice skating lesson on Wednesday night, when I leaned over to pull the guards off my skate blades and felt my lower back pinch uncomfortably. It hurt, but I decided I just needed to get moving to work it out and so I took my class as planned. Unfortunately, by the time I finished, I could hardly sit down to get my skates off. The drive home was excruciating – I was seriously in the worst pain of my life. (And I say this as someone who has had sciatica off and on over the years. Unicorns and cupcakes compared to this.)
So, with my back killing me, just imagine how my mood was improved when I got into my apartment and discovered my heat was broken. For the third time this winter.
I took a giant handful of ibuprofen and headed to bed, grateful for my electric mattress pad, which both kept my warm and heated my back. It did not, alas, heal my back overnight, and – since I could barely walk – I opted to stay home from work.
As it turned out, however, I was not the only one at home. I was in bed reading when I thought I saw something move and looked up to find a mouse looking at me from atop the throw pillow I’d tossed on the floor the night before. I screamed – first in horror, then in pain – as I attempted to get out of bed and… I don’t know. Kill the mouse? Capture it? It ran off and vanished under the cedar chest before I had to figure out what, exactly, to do.
As I climbed gingerly back into bed, I started to laugh in that hysterical way you do when it’s all just too much. When you’d rather be crying. Because seriously? My back was jacked up, my apartment was cold, and there was a goddamn mouse in my bedroom. Enough already!
Fast-forward to today… Two visits from the landlord later, the furnace is working, the mouse-access holes are plugged, and the bedroom is full of tiny poison pellets. Sadly, there was nothing he could do for my back, which is slightly improved (like I can sit up enough to watch tv, which I couldn’t yesterday) but still absurdly painful.
So that’s my three. Not only am I converted to the truth of this old adage, but I’m also more than happy things don’t come in fours.
Time to Start Lying About My Age
Yesterday just before I left work, my friend Alison sent me a link to the Google Ads Preferences page – where our Googlian overlords reveal the demographic information they use to serve us customized ads. I don’t know if this was previously hidden, or if the release of Google’s new privacy policy just got people looking at it, but its wacky inaccuracies were taking the Internet by storm. (The Washington Post has details on their, uh, blogPOST blog.)
It took a moment of perusing my own see why. The interests listed were fairly accurate: cooking and recipes, specifically soups, stews, and Asian; team sports, notably hockey; and assorted interests around technology and social media. Yup, sounds like me. Primary geographic area: Washington, DC – also true. And then I got to the basic demographics, where they took me for a 25-34 male. Wrong, and really wrong.
Currently, this stuff is tracked by web browsers – that’s the change that’s got people up in arms. Google’s new plan is to merge browsing data into our account information to make the results more accurate, and therefore be able to serve more creepily-specific ads.
But because everything is still handled at the browser level I have a somewhat different profile at home. Still have cooking and recipes among my interests, but for meat, seafood, and Middle Eastern cuisine. I also like hockey, but apparently not technology/social media, so at home I’m a 25-34 year old female.
I have two thoughts on this.
First: holy gender-norming, Google! Technology AND hockey? Must just be a dude who likes to cook, but when tech’s not in play, clearly hockey is the outlier interest and cooking means I’m a chick. Oof.
Second: Though Google gave me mixed marks on my girlieness, I did land squarely in the age group that’s between six and 15 years younger than I actually am. Combined with the fact that offline me is often similarly mistaken, I think it’s clear that I’m meant to be lying about my age.
So all that stuff I said last spring about turning 40? Disregard. It was a typo. I meant 30 – the numbers are just so close together.
