yes i am a germophobe

and i try very to avoid getting other people's nasty viruses on me. i wash my hands a lot, and i run when i see a pack of school children, they are walking biological weaponry in my book.

So whenever i use a public restroom, well, i try to wash my hands without getting them dirty in the process. my big complaint about public restrooms: the most obvious way of getting germs on your hands is on the door handle. so all public restrooms should have doors with no latches that swing out, that way, even if you touched the knob on the way in, you don't have to touch it on the way out with freshly washed hands, you can just push it with an elbow etc.

just a suggestion . . .

low technology

like many people I have a little portable stereo. It's nice to have, I use it mostly at the gym, makes running on a treadmill seem less dull than it is.

Here is my problem: I have a wide range of a lack of taste, and my music sources are from CD's all over-- classical, oldies, bossa nova, whatever. And every one of these songs had a different engineer determining the audio level of the song. This means the agnus dei from a recording of the faure requiem needs to be turned up all the way, but unfortunately, the next song in the queue of the player (a sansa 250 which I can't control all that well in terms of order of songs) is the motwon shoop shoop song, and blasts my eardrums into dust unless i remember to quickly grab it and turn it way down.

In this digital age, would it be so hard to look at all those 1's and zeros of each song's files and allow me to set a preferred volume level on my player that would be applied to all songs no matter what the original engineer did to muck it up?

morning bigots

all of my life I have been a night person. There have been days where I have never been awake when the sun was up. I like working at night-- it's quiet, there's nothing to distract you, nothing on TV to draw you away from working, and I get my primary creative energy bursts after 9 pm.

Now being a night person, I am aware that there are people who are not. After 10 or 11 pm, even though I am often full of energy, I know there are day people who have gone to bed and I make a sincere effort to not disturb them. I walk tippy toe and I don't slam doors. It takes a tenth of an ounce of effort to do this.

So yes, I do sleep later than most, but it's not because I am lazy, it's because I was UP LATE WORKING. So why I can't I get the same courtesy from the day people? Why is their circadian rhythm deserving of courtesy and mine are not? Every morning they wake me up.
They are up, so in their limited rem-fascista world view, everyone else must be up too. They bang doors and rattle dishes.

It must be nice to be so oblivious to other people. maybe that's why they sleep so well.