party lines

Ok, it has officially been too long since I've posted. I could not get in for the near life of me tonight. Of course, I had already spent thirty minutes of the ten I'd promised myself I would write tonight, reading the real-writers-of-my-writers-group's recent posts before I realized I was blocked from the blog by my own absence. I nearly had to resort to asking Norma Jean for more help getting me reconnected. I'm pretty sure she already thinks I'm a writing slacker and a computer idiot--so I try to avoid requesting further Blogging for Dummies assistance whenever possible.

I'm running in a 10k race tomorrow in Forest Park. If I can force myself out of bed at 5 to eat and register in time that is. I'm going to try because I haven't been taking the running thing seriously enough. It's like i can't commit to anything and it's driving me insane. I would like to say I read write and run, but so far, I only watch tv regularly. And mostly reality/survivor/amazing race type shows unfortunately. I even got sucked into American Idol this season. And I cared. I was actually bummed when Chris got voted out.

The other day i got a voicemail on my cell phone. It was an accidental dial by one of my clients...where she hadn't meant to call me but must have inadvertantly hit redial. And for the life of me I could not hang it up after I realized that she'd accidently dialed my number while out to dinner with a friend. Just like reality tv. I just could not turn it off or hang it up no matter how guilty and voyeuristic it made me feel. I even got really pissed off when I got another call ten minutes into listening to her private conversation. It was like I actually stopped and debated...click over, thus having to start listening to this message again from the beginning? or skip the new, live, call coming in on the other line so I don't have to listen to the first ten minutes again...weird. Why is it that other people's completely uneventful dinner conversation feels like some sort of scandalous event to me--merely for the fact that they didn't know they were being listened to? And how is it that my husband could have simply hung up after a few seconds when he realized the call was accidental. he said "i would have just hung up" and I was shocked. How could someone just hang up? What about all those words you would miss? I remember an episode of Little House on the Prairie where Mrs. Olson got a telephone operator job (or maybe ran the phones through their store) and she just couldn't stop listening in on all the phone calls. I'm Harriet Olson. I also remember being little and discovering the joys of listening to a neighbor's conversation on our "party line." One of my client's calls the group consensus the "party line," as in "what's our party line on inviting spouses to the corporate holiday party this year?" It took me a minute to figure out she meant what are we all going to say to our husbands. Maybe this is why I need to listen in.