Friday Shuffle - Panic Button Edition

My oldest brother is a smart man. Well educated. He has a master's degree from Duke University and has a PhD from USC. He teaches children with learning disabilities. So can someone tell me why he can't seem to get that California and Germany are in different time zones? Vastly different time zones? That there is a nine hour time difference between them?

I was deeply asleep and in the midst of a dream involving my sister, buying a car and a soccer game when the phone rang. Two of them actually - the extension that sits in the hallway by the front door and shrieks as loud as a tea kettle and the one in the living room which ain't no slouch either when it comes to waking one from a dead sleep. My legs were wound up in the duvet so by the time I untangled them and had dashed into the living room, the fourth ring was starting up and then abruptly stopped before I could snatch up the receiver.

It's been my general experience that anyone who calls at 3:30am isn't calling to chat. They're calling because they're in trouble or because they have bad news to report. Being awakened by the phone ringing had stirred me up quite well but when adding in that it was the middle of the night and that whoever it was hung up before I could reach it had me on the verge of a shit hemorrhage panic.

Our cordless phone has a feature that shows the number of who is calling so I checked to see if it stored the number of my phantom caller. Unfortunately I can't remember which direction you press the scroll button to start at the last call so I couldn't tell if the caller was our friend, Kirsten, or my brother, Bill. The likelihood of it being Kirsten seemed pretty remote - even if someone had died I couldn't imagine Kirsten calling before morning. Now it would be possible, I suppose, for my brother to call with bad news but it seemed more likely that he would call my sister first and then she would be the bearer of bad tidings.

By now I was wide awake and my nerves were jangling from the fright so I called my sister. You may wonder why I didn't just call my brother back and the reason for that seemed very logical to me at the time. I was pretty sure that the number recorded on my phone was Bill's but I wasn't completely sure. Bill moved from Los Angeles to Berkeley a few months ago but the phone number had an 818 area code - an area code in the LA area. It could have been the phone number for his cell phone that didn't get changed but then again maybe it was someone else who lives in LA who has my phone number but was calling from 818. I don't know anyone else in the LA area who lives in 818 but at the time my though processes were a bit hampered. I also wanted to speak with my sister because if Bill had bad new for me, I would rather hear it from her than from him and I know for a fact that if there was tragic news, he would have called her before calling me. In our family, extended family included, if there's bad news to be told, the first person you tell is my sister.

So I called my sister and when she answered there was an enormous amount of static on the line so I only had time to say "It's me. This line is bad. Hang up and I'll call you back". Of course I wasn't thinking of the effect my calling at that time of night would have on her. I rang her back immediately and her first question after answering was "What is it? What's happened?". I'm sure she was expected terrible, tragic news and was likely a bit surprised when I answered "Is Bill's cell phone number 818-blah-blahblah?". She told me she would have to look it up in her cell phone to check (and by the way, I could have looked it up on my cell phone had I even a glimmer of a logical thought in my head) and while she looked she said "What is going on anyway? Why are you calling in the middle of the night? You've scared the hell out of me!". I went on to explain about the phone ringing and me not catching it in time and me seeing what was perhaps Bill's cell phone number on my phone and me wanting any sort of bad news from her and not him and by the was nothing was wrong, was there? Sister replied that everything was fine as far as she knew and she couldn't imagine Bill calling me with bad news before calling her and yes, that number is Bill's cell phone number and you know Bill. He probably got the notion to call you and didn't even think about there being a nine hour time difference until the phone rang and then he hurried up and hung up not thinking that a call like that in the middle of the night was bound to scare the shit out of you.

Now that both of us were nervous wrecks we said goodnight to each other and I told her I'd call her over the weekend and at a normal hour. I reassured B that everything was fine and crawled back into bed, completely wound up and completely unable to fall asleep. In order to get my mind off my fright and off of wanting to brain my brother for scaring me and, in turn, scaring my sister, I grabbed Fletcher the iPod and listened to a couple podcasts from HowStuffWorks.com. I'm a little sleep deprived but am more knowledgeable about vikings and comas than I was before I went to bed.

Time to shuffle.

1. Rain - The Beatles
2. Seminole Wind - James Taylor
3. Hey Now - Tenfold Loadstar
4. No Myth - Michael Penn
5. Far Behind - Candlebox
6. Chinese Dogs - Dirty Pretty Things
7. Je Cherche Un Homme - Eartha Kitt
8. Tonight - Shooting Star
9. In The Heartland - Michael Stanley Band
10. Passionate Kisses - Mary-Chapin Carpenter