NP: Nine Inch Nails, The Fragile

What? You don't listen to Nine Inch Nails on Valentine's Day?

I digress, and I haven't even started yet. I'll go on and on about how everyone is predictable to anyone who will listen, and I'm certainly not any different. What I've noticed lately is how simple it is to disrupt my normal patterns of behavior, simply by changing a small element.

This has happened three times recently. Yesterday, I got to the gym and got dressed before I realized I didn't actually have gym shoes with me. On Saturday, I had taken them out of my gym bag because I started off in my gym clothes and was going to shower and change into regular clothes after working out. When I got home, I didn't put them back, so when I executed my normal weekday routine of throwing shorts, a shirt and socks in the bag, they were still missing.

Saturday night was a little more dangerous. I gave a friend a ride home after the Goose Island show. We were in the middle of a conversation, so I flipped off my headlights while we wrapped it up, mostly because there was another car idling in front of me. Typically, when I'm idling in my car, I don't turn on my headlights before I start moving again. So the mile or so back to my apartment was sorta in stealth mode. That one could have been ugly.

Finally, I had a doctor's appointment a couple of weeks ago, so I had to get up earlier than usual. This meant getting out of bed when my first alarm goes off, when I normally shut that one off and wait for the second. In anticipation of that, I didn't set the second alarm -- they're both part of the same alarm clock, so it's not like I need several clocks to get out of bed in the morning. The next day I was late for work because -- you guessed it -- I shut off the first alarm and waited for the second, which still wasn't set from the previous morning.

This is either a good example of behavioral patterns, or evidence of a very early onset of senility.