reading is fundamental

I consider myself an intelligent individual. I got very good grades in school. I'm enjoying a successful career in my chosen field. I don't embarrass myself when playing along with Jeopardy. In fact, I surprise myself with some of the things I get right when I watch that show. I blurted out something about photosynthesis once and nearly died of shock at both the speed and accuracy of my response.

Sometimes I even run whole categories! Granted, they're usually about TV and movies but sometimes Daily Doubles are hidden in there and one good wager can really create a comfortable lead for the rest of the game. It don't matter if the subject is The War of 1812 or The War of the Roses (starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, directed by their Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile co-star, Danny Devito), a right answer is a right answer. Or rather, question, in this scenario.

Of course, I usually fuck it all up in Final Jeopardy because the category is often about canals, treaties, ancient Rome and crap like that. Seriously, once I earned my six required Intro to Western Civ credits in college, my mind developed a scorching case of the after-Taco-Bell trots and expelled most of that info right quick. I'm not proud of it but it's just the way it is.

But even though I can't speak at length about the Battle of the Bulge or the rise and fall of various empires, I'm still quite smart in other disciplines. However, in recent months, I've noticed a decline in both common sense and memory retention. Ask me a question about something that happened more than five minutes ago and you will smell the wood burning as I try to piece together a coherent response. My natural expression has gone from blasé and indifferent to pained and puzzled.

I fear this doesn't bode well for me in old age. I will be that old lady wearing my underwear outside my clothes asking everyone if they've seen my cat. And the thing is, I won't even have a cat because, even in the late stages of senility, I know I still won't like them! But other people won't know that and they'll all be on a wild goose chase looking for a tabby that doesn't even exist! And then they'll get all pissed off and jaded and it will totally sour them on being Good Samaritans ever again. That's really sad and I don't want to be responsible!

Maybe I'll come up with my own version of a DNR. Like, I don't want the plug pulled when I'm really sick and on the verge of dying. No, no. Instead, I want to be bumped off when I start getting flighty and acting totally out of character, even if the rest of me is in good health. Friends, the day I willingly eat butterscotch or ribbon candy is the day I need to die. Got that? Say, does a blog entry count as a valid living will?

An emerging trend in my mental decay is poor reading comprehension. Now I've never been good about reading instructions. I give things a whirl first and then back up as needed to repair the damage (if applicable). Haste doesn't always make waste, you know. A good portion of the time, I get things right off the bat. And when I don't, I usually just need to loosen a few screws with an Allen wrench to get me back on track.

Not this week.

It began innocently enough. I received an email from a friend inviting me to join some sort of online network. It had a nice wee note that said, "This will be a good way for us to stay in touch!" I thought the message was a bit out of character for my friend but I appreciated the sentiment and began the process of signing up.

I blew through the Terms of Service like I always do. It's a compulsion of mine to click "Next," "OK" and "Submit" without reading anything. For all I know, my vital organs are being auctioned off on the black market as we speak because I didn't deselect a check box somewhere. Well, if so, the joke's on them because I have a heart murmur, asthma, astigmatism and I'm pretty sure my liver's been irreparably damaged, particularly in recent months.

But as I was saying, I raced through the sign-up process barely even skimming the accompanying text. And then I got to a page that had a Gmail logo on it. Oooh, I have Gmail! I assumed I could complete the registration process with my existing Gmail account. I thought I embarked on a wonderful shortcut.

Yeah, not so much.

Because I failed to read the fine print, I unknowingly imported all of my Gmail contacts into this service and it proceeded to send out "This will be a good way for us to stay in touch!" invites to everyone in my address book.* That's over 200 addresses!! For those of you who don't use Gmail, it automatically stashes addresses in your contacts even if you've exchanged just one email with someone. In other words, I inadvertently spammed friends, family, my web hosting company, The Bank of New York, eBay, Target customer service and even worse... a couple of girls I'm blowing off. Can you imagine their reactions when reading, "This will be a good way for us to stay in touch!" after months of not hearing from moi?! Dumb, dumb, dumb.
* My apologies to those of you who received one of these emails.

So several days passed pretty much free of fucktard behavior on my part. I thought I was on a roll but true to form, the streak ended as quickly as it began. While I was out and about yesterday, I saw an ad for a new online community with local directories, classifieds, personals and various other tools. It randomly popped into my head this morning so I visited the site and began the registration process.

I submitted my email address, gender, age and zip code. Normal. And then I worked my way down the page and hit a wee snag. What's this? When was the last time I went to synagogue? Wow, that's a specific house of worship. Imagine the befuddled look on my face and the smell of the burning wood as I tried to make sense of it. I then assumed the site was trying to be inclusive in its wording so synagogue was interchangeable with mosque, church, temple, what have you. Just the same, I selected "Never" from the dropdown.

I scrolled down a little further. Do I keep kosher? Huh? No. Well... I guess I do but it's not by design. I mean, I don't ever eat meat and dairy together but that's because I don't ever eat meat period. With anything. It's safe to say that the cheese almost always stands alone on my plate. Unless there's some pasta or some sort of soy-based product to go with it. What a strange question.

It wasn't until I got to the Religious Affiliation: Secular / Reform / Conservative/ Modern orthodox / Orthodox / Hassidic / Reconstructionist / Unaffiliated dropdown menu that I realized that perhaps this site wasn't geared towards an Irish-Catholic girl like myself.

My face turned red. I blushed even in the privacy and solitude of my office. Sweet Jesus, how did I miss that? In my defense, there wasn't a big ol' Star of David staring right at me and nothing was in Hebrew nor was there klezmer music blaring from my speakers. I didn't get confirmation that my shikse ass was in the wrong place until I found the About Us page. How embarrassing! Even worse, I saw no direct means of deleting my account so I had to email them and explain my stupid mistake. I started out with, "Hi, I hope you see the funny side of this..."

I am such a schmuck.