If I travel in the morning and arrive home mid-afternoon, and if I lie down on the couch in the living room with a book and use either the air conditioner or two strategically arranged fleece blankets, depending on the season, to keep my body at just the right temperature, I can pretty much guarantee that I will be sound asleep by the time my mom gets home from the grocery store with the instant oatmeal and the flavored carbonated water that she is stocking just for me. I don’t usually come to until all the groceries are unloaded and she’s already putting them away.
If I travel for longer than forty minutes in the family mini-van, if I listen only to the white noise of the highway beneath the wheels, and I let the cold-blooded creature inside my mammalian body succumb to the hyper-controlled environment, I can pretty much guarantee that, as determinedly as I resist, I will fall asleep in such a position that I wake up with a drool splotch in a highly unlikely spot, such as mid-calf on the back of my jeans. I will be unresponsive for half an hour at a time, then I will stun other passengers by bursting straight into a conversation through most of which I slept.
For the three years I attended Mount Holyoke College, I could pretty much guarantee that I would start my period within six hours of moving into my dorm room at the beginning of each semester. As far as I know, my cycle never coincided with the other women with whom I lived in such close proximity.
If I express distaste for a new pop song the first time I hear it, if I comment on weak metaphors and lazy rhyming, if I sulk in protest when I hear it, I can pretty much guarantee that within two weeks, I will know all the words to that song and have a favorite line and press ‘forward’ on my iPod with the secret hope of shuffling to it. I keep an untitled playlist that I think of as “Songs I Love to Hate,” and in the same moment as I denounce a song, I make a mental note to download it.
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