Little Nearer

Well, Lit

2011-09-14T13:54:00.000-07:00

Things have been hectic. Also suspiciously well lit for mid-September. I'm ready for a seriously gloomy, tea-worthy fall season.

Parody of a Good Time

2011-09-02T15:03:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I read this book, which isn’t remarkable. It’s exactly the kind of book that I always pluck covertly from a display in the public library while I’m waiting to use the self check-out station. It is, for that matter, exactly the kind of book that’s always on display in the public library next to some much-repaired copy of Angels and Demons. So the fact that a person with my oversized appreciation for the prairie and my library loitering habits read this book over the weekend is really, really not of note. What is of note is how this book — and the circumstances in which I ended up reading it — proved how epically un-cool I am.

The fact that I’m un-cool (and I mean un-cool here as the strict antithesis of “way cool”) isn’t really of note either; I fancy myself vaguely self-aware. But over the weekend I climbed (descended?) to new and dampish heights of squareness. I actually knocked on a neighbor’s door and asked them to please quiet down, because, you know, it’s really rather late and of course I don’t mind but the floor in my apartment is shaking somewhat vigorously. And after this fall from post-collegiate grace, I ambled back upstairs and kept on reading my plodding nonfiction book about the prairie. And since I try, as previously noted, to be vaguely self-aware, this juxtaposition wasn’t lost on me.

The incident occurred on Saturday night around midnight. I was lounging around the apartment after an evening of Mongolian BBQ and Mad Men catch-up on my laptop, wearing an ensemble zoned strictly for in-home and post-Mongolian evenings. The folks below us in our new place were being a little noisy, but as it was the weekend and I was firmly distracted by period-appropriate frocks I hadn’t been paying much attention. Anyway, I tend to fall on the lenient side with regard to neighbor relations. For one thing, a mean note on my car puts me off my feed for days; the possibility of glares in the shared foyer gives me hives. For another, I used to be an absolutely terrible neighbor, so I prefer to give noisy folks the benefit of the doubt. It’s my way of doing penance for all of those Simon and Garfunkel dance parties back in college.

As I settled down to read before bed on this fateful Saturday, I distracted myself from the noise by pondering how uncivilized my old apartment-mates and I had been during the first years of college. We threw parties, the kind where the cops would come and everyone would freeze but no one would get the door because someone would be whispering, persistently, that the cops couldn’t do anything if you didn’t. Of course, this only made the cops angry when you finally answered. And I imagine that the neighbors were angry, too, though none of them ever approached us about it. In hindsight and with several additional years of apartment living under my belt, it’s a little embarrassing to remember that I was so obtuse. But we were mostly drunk, often on cheap beer, but also on our own noise. There’s a certain egotism attached to being able to fill a house with people and that kind of high self-regard can lead to detachment from reality, to say nothing of manners.

While I was lying there thinking about those early parties with a mixture of nostalgia and chagrin, someone down below started playing the bongos. I sat bolt upright; I may have been noisy and heavy-footed as a young adult and I certainly exposed my neighbors to an ungodly amount of The Flaming Lips at unseemly hours, but I’ve never played a bongo drum in the dark of the night. Bongos aren't standard good-times procedure — they’re a parody of a good time. But as vindicating as I found that realization, I was still acutely aware of a shift in roles as I assured a newly-awake Kevin that I would go down and ask them to holster the bongos.

I was also acutely aware of the fact that I needed to find a bookmark for my sad, nonfiction prairie book before I went to rain on the parade of some boisterous young people.

Questionable Judgment in Questionable Bathrooms

2011-08-27T14:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve always been the kind of person who makes illogical answers to what should be easy questions. If you were to ask me what I do for a living I might name, instead of giving a pat one-word title, an inconsequential aspect of my job (i.e., precision date-stamping). And if you were to ask me where I live, I would certainly describe the prominently attractive features of my abode before I got around to the cross-streets. Thus, if you were to ask me if I moved last week from the house that I spent so much time (and text) lauding, and from which I predicted I’d never move, I would probably start by explaining that my new place has a very dramatic bathroom with a claw-foot tub. And then I would probably change the subject to something really, horribly enthralling — like how I accidentally learned from Wikipedia that the entire final season of Roseanne was a dream sequence. (You can use this one for your own awkward conversation lulls; consider it a gift.)

My internal barometer of conflict-avoidance would probably also urge me to skip a description of how quickly after moving in we decided to move out and how I developed a careful, casual attitude for telling people that we’d put our house on the market. The fact that I learned, when pressed, to shrug and say “You know how the market is” is actually fairly hilarious. It may not seem like much, but for me — a person whose only economic education prior to the adventure of homeownership was a much-skipped high school course taught by man who wished he made enough as a summertime river guide to ditch the teaching gig — the plain logistics of the thing were hardly enough explanation.

Or maybe I’m just not used to being able to shield my impulses (because our decision to move was fueled by more regret than the convenient suicide-dive of dividends) with logistics. This time, strangely enough, the sentimental impulses were actually capital-R-Right on both sides of the transaction. When we wanted to buy the house it was undoubtedly the Right and Rational thing to do; the market had collapsed; we were gainfully employed; I was drunk on a caustic mix of homesteader blogs and the American Dream ala The First Four Years. Less than a year later, when we were regretful and woefully underwater, putting the place on the market was the upstanding choice. So we moved, gleefully and ever so responsibly, to a place with a claw-foot bathtub and a coffee shop down the block and a built-in bookcase above which my sad buffalo print looks classy without seeming to try too hard. But this time I don’t plan to be quite so vocal and fatalistic in my praise of the place. I’ve had a hard time eating my needlessly italicized words.

Bathtubs aside, it hasn’t been an idyllic couple of months. Moving is always hard, especially for spaztastic types like me, and its particularly trying when you’re a compulsive reader who packed all of the reading material prematurely because you were worried about finding room for all of the books in the packing crates. (To risk two The First Four Years jokes in one sitting, I spent the last week in our house bemoaning our hastily disconnected internet service and rationing a single magazine like some frontier person isolated for the winter. Like Lincoln. Only I was spending every waking, post-work moment on my cell phone trying to get our internet service up at the new place.) Lately I’ve been rushing and wrapping and avoiding explanations; I haven’t been answering my phone, which is hardly unusual, but I’ve also been letting my emails sit unattended. That's usually a bad sign.

I’ve also neglected my little blog-friend, only to return in a blaze of melodrama and regrets and promises of better judgment and kinder bathrooms. Now that’s a hella blogging cliché.

Flat Brain Stoppage

2011-08-11T16:24:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I was reading Terry Castle’s essay collection The Professor when I came across this little gem: “So what if Jo didn’t want to be a professor anymore? Fine: I did. I wanted to read Edith Wharton novels…”

The sentence goes on to describe all manner of middle-class academic clichés, but my brain stopped flatly at Edith Wharton. Prior to this little nugget I wasn’t exactly attending carefully to the memoir — I was rushing a bit, eager to get to this Virginia Woolf biography (which has turned out to be pretty plodding, not nearly as saucy as The Professor). Don’t get me wrong; I was gobbling up the writing, but I just wasn’t jiving with Castle personally. And then the Edith Wharton joke. I suddenly remembered how much I love Hudson River Bracketed (heavy-handed ending and all) and how I once relished the idea of academia for the very reasons Castle outlines: I sort of used to think that reading things like Edith Wharton novels was what professors did, like, professionally.

I’ve long since been stripped of this fallacy. Plenty of my friends went into teaching and the time devoted to lesson planning, plagiarism patrol, and, you know, teaching, seems to outweigh the quietly-thinking-and-reading parts of the job. (Not at all the impression a doe-eyed college freshman gets wandering into a professor’s office; all they see is a poster depicting all of the different flowers mentioned in Shakespeare.) But older and wiser as I may pretend to be, I’ll admit it: when I read that sentence in that Terry Castle essay, I had to take myself firmly in hand. Of course reading Edith Wharton novels (and perhaps chatting about them) isn’t really the job description of a professor.

I had this whole plan to write a long and (presumably) hilarious retelling of the exact moment that I canned the possibility of being a professor, but I've tried typing it up a couple of times and it just won't stick properly. Suffice to say it involves sitting in the back row of a lecture hall listening to a couple of back-rowers riff on the professor's pathetic enthusiasm for a certain lady novelist. This professor was a short, disarmingly earnest woman; she was a little on the chubby side, and sported a rather unsightly Emily Dickinson tattoo on her upper arm. I admired her terribly and she unwittingly did me a good turn by turning me — a shy, stuttering, Edith Wharton enthusiast — away from a disastrous career path of, you know, prolonged public speaking.

As I sat eavesdropping in the back row I realized something very important about professorship: it isn't all about reading novels. Some of it is actually about dealing, fairly and sympathetically, with the youngsters in the back row, the very ones who spend the lecture mumbling about your haircut being awfully Peter-Pan-ish. And since I have a feeling that I'll become a middle-aged lady of particularly Peter-Pan-ish haircuts, this observation stuck with me. Another career path canned because of the possibility of cutting remarks from gents in trucker hats.

Less Than Twelve

2011-08-08T18:59:00.000-07:00

As usual, I managed to take fewer than twelve photos on my vacation. And Tahoe is beautiful, too, so I can't do what I usually do and blame the landscape. And after I subtracted all of the pictures that made me wince and ask myself what exactly I'd been intending to do with my face, I had like seven left. None are of the birthday-lady and some of them aren't even very good. I'm a flaming, blogging wreck. [But at least I'm a wreck who got a picture of that weird bear-family-v.-eagle-family fight statue. All the clean air and bright sunshine up there makes people (brass artisans?) wacky.]

(Immediately after this picture was taken we had to leave the dock/bar. I was getting embarrassingly sea sick while trying to balance on my stool and drink my fancy beverage.)

Deserving It

2011-08-05T15:24:00.000-07:00

I’ve been gone for awhile, I know, and what’s worse is that it was premeditated: I’ve known for months that I was going to Tahoe for the days surrounding my mother’s 50th birthday. My mother, though carefully assuring everyone that she wanted to be surprised and relaxed and certainly not the hostess, has been planning the event for almost a year. The longevity of the plot was supplemented by plenty of emails with the cap-locked subject line “TAHOE,” all full of links to dinner cruises and spreadsheets showing the inflow of guests into the cabin she was renting. Most were signed, faithfully, “Or am I micro managing?” And somehow in the face of all this I managed to completely un-manage my blog. And I’m no small micromanager myself.

See, I meant this to be a nice and earnest blog and already I’ve slipped into a tone of gentle mockery. My mother is a wholly pleasant person, as mothers go, a real open-hearted chatterbox; it’s unfortunate that she birthed and raised four daughters of a more cynical bent. We’re adults, sure, and fairly affectionate ones, but we were also raised in the constant influence of sitcoms — laugh-track booms as her luggage is revealed, enough for a good, long stay — so we tend to josh my mother quite a bit. She joshes us too, in her way, mostly with wheedling emails about how many grandchildren her girlfriends have and text messages on glaring Sundays mornings that read, “ARE YOU ALIVE?”

We reply in kind and usually en masse, which may be what has me feeling so wobbly in this post. My sisters and I may not agree on much, but we agree on a few things about my mother, namely eating all of her food and doting on her in this confusing way. We harass her about her Navaho print couch and her daily FB check-in to Pete’s Coffee, how she named her convertible “Fancy” and how she claims she stayed skinny in the ‘80s by only drinking Dr. Pepper. She chides us to settle down and pop out some children, to call more, and not to get so riled when she accidentally includes us on one of her email forwards about guardian angels. We, in turn, remind her that she has a denim jacket covered in pins from the Hard Rock café.

This is all a ruse, of course, the kind of elaborate misdirection that chicas in their mid-twenties perform to distract from the fact that their laugh sounds exactly like their mother’s laugh, their calves are starting to look suspiciously like their mother’s calves and they keep crying during music videos for country songs like a certain you-know-who. It’s intended to fend off the specter of your own inevitable denim jacket.

There is some evidence, at least in my case, that these similarities shouldn’t be taken too seriously. I struggled alongside my three sisters to turn out a spread for my mom’s party — a spread that I must note was dictated by my mother before she politely averted her eyes and pretended not to know what we were up to — something that my mother does at every major family event. We heaved and sawed at giant red onions while my mother and her friends giggled and ironically sipped boxed wine from enormous goblets. (I think I should note that I don’t think I could fill a cabin as thoroughly as my mother did; a possible correlation between kind-heartedness and number of friends accumulated? Surely not.) Hours later, when the food was cleared and the store-bought cake presented with a little embarrassment, we too took to guzzling cocktails and playing cards. I felt exhausted and mildly accomplished.

But in the morning when my sisters and I were laid low by lite beers, griping about our stomachaches and how one of us accidentally slept in her sneakers, my mother was up, calmly cooking pancakes, clad in a matching set of pajamas. She was nice enough not to make fun of us, though we certainly deserve it.

Hobo Coffee

2011-07-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

Ever since I broke the vase on my coffee press and tried (and failed) to replace it, I've been making my coffee using this hobo system. I know it's not sustainable; I'll eventually run out of cheesecloth and have a hard time buying another roll for this ridiculous purpose. But it's works for now. And it'll keep working until I figure out the precise size of my broken vase (the one I ordered online using my apparently faulty sense of volume was the size of a thimble) or until I break down and replace the whole press.

When I do replace the Mason jar and cheesecloth method, I'm pretty sure it will be because of it's inherent silliness and my tendency to burn my fingers when smooshing the grounds into the cloth, not because of the quality of the brew. The coffee is surprisingly un-hobo-like in taste. Probably the influence of those Mason jars -- they really class up a slip-slod coffee process.

[Weirdly I don't remember when last week I took these pictures and the time on the clock is distressing me. I don't recall drinking coffee at 9:13 at night (I don't know what "night sweats" are but I'd probably get them if I drank coffee at that hour), and yet I start work at 7:30. This has to be a leisurely cup of weekend hobo brew.]

Pretty Damn Heartwarming

2011-07-20T14:14:00.000-07:00

Last week I accidentally reread The Incredible Journey, and since I bet you’re wondering, I’ll tell you: it’s still horribly heartwarming. Not quite as heartwarming as that movie based on the novel (the one with Michael J. Fox doing animal voices), but still pretty damn heartwarming. These animals are friends, you see, and they want to go home. Are there moments when you start to doubt that a cat would really kill a bird and present it to an elderly bulldog after the bulldog was poked by a porcupine? Certainly. But damn, it was a pleasant way to spend 145 pages.

I think it’s worth noting that I ended up rereading The Incredible Journey because a friend of mine reread it first. It all started when I met this particular friend for a beer at this hippie bar she frequents, and discovered her reading the book. (The differences between hippie bars and hipster bars are so subtle that I can’t go into here; suffice to say that this bar has a large tree in the courtyard and plenty of bearded old men eating omelets on the patio.) As I approached her I became instantly envious — the weather was warm but the patio was shady and I know of few better ways to spend an afternoon than reading in a place of shady refreshments. This applies particularly to books that you’ve read a few times and don’t need to concentrate on too carefully, since I like to combine rereading in public with a healthy dose of eavesdropping, attempting to look casually academic, and trying to decide which side of the hippie-hipster divide the establishment I’m patronizing falls on.

When I expressed this sentiment my friend nodded and slid the book across the table towards me, pausing only to reveal that it was a childhood copy filched from a school library. I stuck it immediately in my purse and felt really suave, like we were in a secret society and she’d handed me a sheaf of sensitive materials. (Will I pause to make a joke about The Incredible Journey being a flare for the overly-sensitive and thus my actually qualify as “sensitive material”? I won’t. I’m a busy lady on a roll.)

If there’s anything actually interesting about this story I believe it’s this: I feel like handing off a YA novel in a bar does mark you as a member of a particular secret society. It takes a particular point of view to appreciate chronic rereading, especially when you’re rereading something that you read when you were 13 years old. The goal of this isn’t to understand the book better, though you probably will accidentally (someday I’ll tell you how traumatized I was after reading Julie of the Wolves as an adult). It’s about enjoying the book again. Don’t get me wrong, my taste in literature isn’t stuck in the Babysitter’s Club era; I reread most things that I like. I just think the willingness to reread something with that little Newberry sticker on the cover is too often construed as laziness, which it is, but in a good way. I like sometimes to lazily absorb a novel while simultaneously absorbing beer and filtered sunshine.

If you need further convincing, consider this: compare the movies you liked as a young person with the books you liked and then consider which you’d like to revisit. The offer to rewatch Kill Bill makes me want to die a little bit inside. I’d reread The Giver any day of the week, though.

PS: I may be changing my RSS allegiance, so I'm trying out Bloglovin. Thus,

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Shim-Shimmering Around

2011-07-18T19:12:00.000-07:00

This last week has been strange and hectic and I'm a little too busy at the moment to describe it properly. I'm also a little too busy to pen my usual ode to dramatic over-contemplation -- too busy even to do what I usually do and pretend that blogging is productive act, like eating ice cream after you go running. Just understand that this week has been full of work and guys in Voldemort masks.

(Hello thematic juxtaposition! Meet my old friend, jarring photo transition.)

I'm just going to pretend that sums it up.

Sob-Spot

2011-07-13T16:01:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I’m going to go and do a horrible dork-thing. It’s also a horribly irresponsible thing, considering that I have to go to work in the morning. I’m going to see the second part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, or, as I’ve been assured it’s called by the organizers of the outing, HP7-2.

I feel like it's impossible for someone of my basic age group not to have some opinion on Harry Potter. After all, HP and I are vaguely the same age; the first book came out when I was 11 years old and for awhile (until the books got unbearably husky and took longer than a year to produce) we progressed together. I remember the mania when it first took off in the U.S. — all of the newscasters were saying between morning weather reports that old J.K. had finally taught American children to read. And while I don't necessarily agree with that sentiment, I'll credit her with reminding those of us stateside how much we love feeling bad for British orphans. It worked on me. I certainly cried during the obligatory Harry-has-no-family part of every book. And now I’m going to honor those carefully stifled orphan-wizard-tears by standing in line to see the last movie at midnight.

For this last really extreme tidbit I have to blame my younger sisters. For years my sisters Meghan and Kaitlyn (along with her best friend Stephi), have organized a tailgate party around the opening of the newest Harry Potter movie. (A few years younger than me, they’re the unabashed and indoctrinated enthusiasts.) Anyway, they do chairs and snacks, with coffee runs, pizza delivery and lots of gold and red scarves. I haven’t been in several years, but they were staunch in their insistence, claiming it was the end of a cultural epoch, the anti-Twilight thing to do, and something only a total square would miss because of something as humdrum as work. Since I’m a sucker for cultural epochs and a square besides, I capitulated.

I've got a lot of work to get done tonight, but I'm determined to sneak in a little reading and tailgate preparation. I’m sure I'll over pack and bring plenty of supplies for the long wait, most of which I’ll ignore in favor of eating snacks and watching the crowd. I’ve already set aside a water bottle, my camera, and a handkerchief for that sob-spot we all know is in there.

Bring it on, HP7-2.

Sometimes Spitting Mad

2011-07-10T10:45:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I was scrolling through the blue and white majesty of Facebook and saw this link, which goes to a blog discussing (with dandy illustrations) how perfectly regular, cheerful people can suffer from “Chronic Bitchface.” From what I gather having Chronic Bitchface means look glum when you’re happy and having to suffer condolences and unsolicited advice to cheer up. I totally get this, only in the opposite. I’ve got one of those horribly nice faces; it draws chipper, chatty people like a flame does a moth, even when I’m spitting mad.

Generally speaking I don’t mind that I give off an air of church-supper benevolence to strangers — deep down inside I’m mostly nice, I promise! — because it has a lot of inherent advantages. I have, for example, never had anyone request to have their seat assignment changed when placed next to me on an airplane, which is not to say that I haven’t suffered through many flights of deep conversation with the dame next to me, who, consistently, has a daughter about my age who is always going over her text messaging limits and what, by the way, kind of cell service do I use? Of course looking pleasantly naïve also draws the pan-handlers, scam artists, and people in coffee shop looking to bully someone away from their electrical outlet by pacing the place and pointedly glancing beneath the tabletops, but I’ve become somewhat accustom to those things.

The real secret advantage of seeming innocuous is that it tends to make people, practical strangers even, feel comfortable revealing secrets about themselves. This is great, because I’m nosey and love giving advice on topics I know nothing about, and occasionally horrible because your office/G-chat window can become a secular confessional and on days when you’re busy or not quite in the mood for consoling, your face is still radiating Paula-Deen levels of hospitality. (See, maybe I’m not nice.) I don’t mean my friends or sisters, but more the random coworkers and passersby who like to tell me their secrets, usually starting mid-thought and without giving proper background information for the main characters. I suppose the best way to staunch this flow of private information would be to pass some of it on, but on most days my voyeuristic tendencies outweigh my desire for peace, quiet and productivity. Plus my innards match the character of my face at least to the point that I don’t want to betray anyone’s confidence. There are days, however, when I’m scowling impatiently on the inside while maintaining that default look of bland sympathy.

Obviously seeming nice isn’t the worst social fate in the world. For all of its strange consequences I’d prefer it to looking intimidating or confrontational. I’d rather be bullied out of my outlet at Starbucks every day of the week by the pointed glancing and, finally, the shoulder-tap and iPod-out-of-battery sob story than have someone actually approach me and punch in the face over it. Yup, that’s how I see people scamming for outlets. They’re either face-punchers or bullies and probably both. I told you that I wasn’t all that nice.

Drunk on Whimsy; Longer Than The Return Policy

2011-07-06T14:06:00.000-07:00

I harbor a secret desire to someday be the kind of person who has, invariably, correct gear. Surely you know these kinds of people — the ones who show up to the tennis match that you’ve arranged partially for the hilarity of arranging a tennis match in beautiful tennis whites, a crisply turned out racquet slung over their shoulder and a towel falling just so from their belt. Hell, you probably are that person. You’re probably reading this on the laptop you pulled from your perfectly fitted laptop sleeve (which, in turn, is stowed in your tooled leather laptop bag). I salute you in the disheveled, envious way that truly ramshackle people salute. As someone who shows up to beach with nothing but a book and a pair of ballet flats that transform immediately into little sand-shovels, I admire people who possess and remember snorkels.

And this isn’t a strictly materialistic kudos, either; it’s an envy of preparedness. I went, for example, backpacking this weekend in the Sierras with some of my rougher and tougher pals — the sort who don’t preface any mention of backpacking with a crude joke about the lack of standardized facilities in ye olde forest. I should take a moment to note that I’m the conspicuous sissy amongst these pals. I’m not a great compadre to nature; I just have a bad habit of befriending folks with a great, whopping enthusiasm for it. Thus I spent the week before our departure making light of the trip to acquaintances who, upon hearing my plans for the 4th, got goggle-eyed and asked whether I knew what backpacking meant.

When confronted with an utter lack of faith in my ruggedness, I hastened to imply that I knew exactly what backpacking meant and that I didn’t see what was so serious about a little walking mixed in with your camping. But in reality I felt more than a little out-gunned, gear-wise. When we met to plan the trip over drinks, my friends busied themselves comparing collapsible cookware and convertible microfiber turtlenecks while I tried to remember what kind of sleeping bags we owned and what “degree rating” they had. I’m no stranger to the concept that hard-core outdoorsy types require hard-core gear — I’ve browsed the pocketknife section of REI before — but it was pretty intimidating to hear the lingo in action. Especially for someone who’s level of wilderness preparedness is more on the scale of filling up my old Jansport with a clean socks and some snacks.

The funny thing is that I actually own a backpacking backpack, purchased in the spirit of marvelous cliché when I planned on, ahem, backpacking Europe after studying abroad. The lesson here is that you should never enter REI drunk on whimsy and good-intentions, especially if you plan on being out of the country for a term longer than what's allowed in their return policy. In the end I ran out of money long before I was free to travel Europe and spent the time I’d allotted for such things loitering in free museums and living in a stuffy hostel full of boys who all maintained that they were musicians back home. I hauled that empty backpack everywhere with me, scrunched into the bottom of my overflowing suitcase, so I feel entitled to make backpacking jokes.

And who doesn’t love a backpacking joke? Certainly I do. And I made plenty of them over the weekend; I wheezed them as I hauled that backpack up a not-so-steep mountain path, wearing Keds instead of hiking boots and clutching my fluffy full-sized sleeping bag (degree rating: it was cheap on Amazon) as it came slowly and repeatedly unrolled.

Grossly Catchy Theme-Ballad

2011-06-29T14:39:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I sit down to peck out a blog post, I find myself dismissing all kinds of potential topics as fleeting obsessions, the kind of two-week preoccupations that I don’t want to commit to the eternal tangle of blinking wires and inactive LJ’s that is The Internet. I give myself the same lecture that old people give when they see a particularly nice tattoo on one of their grand-brethren: “Sure you like it now, but I remember when you used to like The Saddle Club. That’s one pony tattoo you’d be regretting.” Then there’s the fact that most of my fleeting obsessions are a little, ahem, un-classy. Affection for the so-bad-it’s-good-again is one of my fatal flaws as a person; I’m a mess of good-intentions and limiting inclinations. And so I’m a little surprised that even with all of my reservations I haven’t found time to discuss my ongoing Have Gun – Will Travel obsession.

I love westerns and streaming things from Netflix, so it’s not that amazing that I like Have Gun – Will Travel, a show about a gunman for hire that ran from 1957 to 1963 (thanks, Wikipedia!). What’s strange is that I generally hate moralizing in television, especially programs that function in a continuous loop of good-guy-beats-bad-guy. And boy, is Have Gun — Will Travel moralizing. It’s absolutely puke-worthy the way the main fellow, Paladin, goes around thwarting lynch mobs and freeing high-bosomed ladies from the clutches of scheming saloonkeepers. He’s an impossible hero, the epitome of the anti-Everyman, a cowboy who lives in a luxury hotel and quotes Shakespeare before executing a few round-house kicks and taking someone else’s wife to the opera. Plus, his mustache is really distracting. (Google it!)

Add this to the fact that once you’ve seen a few, each episode starts to feel really canned and formulaic (hilarious intro, unnecessary zoom-shot on “Have Gun – Will Travel” business card, assailants defeated, quips exchanged), and you’ve got what should be a really obnoxious TV show. And yet, there’s something practically soothing about it (and not just because Kevin falls asleep almost every time I put it on). Once you get over the absurdity of Paladin’s character, you start to relish it in the way you relish explosions in action movies; once four cars are on are fire, it’s interesting to see whether the director has the gumption to drive them off a bridge. A few days ago I watched an episode where Paladin rescued Oscar Wilde from kidnappers and then dismissed him as a hack. This of course was only a few episodes after he stopped a small-pox epidemic by believing in the science of immunization and making out with the local school teacher.

How can anyone resist that? Or resist the relentless egotism of the entire premise? (Richard Boone is the only actor credited in the iconic intro.) Or, finally, this grossly catchy theme-ballad?

Hands of a Bag Lady

2011-06-27T18:54:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago a friend of mine was reading (and summarizing for my benefit) an article about how salespeople in high-end retailers evaluate which customers to spend time wooing. Apparently this has a lot to do with the state of your hands and fingernails, which made a lot of sense to me. Certainly it explained why no personal shoppers approached me when I accidentally wandered into an exclusive high-rise shopping center while on vacation in Honolulu. At the time I thought it was because I was wearing my cover-up (vaguely pinafore-esque in appearance), but it must have been my hands. These suckers definitely don’t communicate a hearty commission to salespeople. If we’re talking economic indicators here, my hands are the hands of a crazy bag lady.

I bite my fingernails — I have since my little fingers sprouted nails and my little gums sprouted teeth. And I don’t bite them in a cute way, either, nipping at a delicate pinky finger in moments of coy contemplation. I chomp them down to the quick. I usually do this in private, most frequently while driving, and it’s all pretty unconscious. I figured it was, at best, an economic provision that kept me out of nail salons.

Still, I didn’t like the idea of people looking at my hands and making inferences, though I shouldn’t have been surprised by the concept. There’ve been many times when I’ve jerked my fingers out of my mouth when someone’s walked into my office; I didn’t want people to see me gnawing on my digits, but I also didn’t want to make the jump to condemning the act. After I heard about that article on consumer tells, however, I couldn’t shake the fancy that people were looking at my nubby nails and peely cuticles like a bunch of amateur Sherlock Holmes’. You know, like in those short stories when Sherlock Holmes is all, “The knees of that man’s trousers aren’t faded from the alter, so he certainly isn’t the Catholic don he’s impersonating. Also, that chick with the slightly oversized glasses has horrible nail beds and cannot be trusted.”

Like that. Exactly.

Anyway, the moral of this story is this little kick of social paranoia kept me from biting my nails for the last few weeks. It was shocking to look down at my hands and see little arches of white at the ends of my nails. The length of them caught me by surprise a few times, mostly while typing, but occasionally when I was busy tapping my fingers on a tabletop. I realized that tapping my lengthy fingernails gave my digit gymnastics a completely different sound and attitude. Suddenly my tapping was loud and demanding; a habit that once seemed fairly innocuous was now borderline bitchy. I have little desire to project unadulterated sass while waiting for staff meetings to start, so I gave up tapping my fingers, too, ditching conference room percussion along with the fear of getting colored nail polish stuck in my teeth. I couldn’t help but think, however, that the ability to tap bitchily on countertops probably has no small influence on the attentiveness of salespeople.

And I was doing so well — until last week when I sort of stopped doing so well. The excitement of actually having fingernails to speak of (and to effectively open cans and pinch pins with) wore off a little and I found myself thinking that my thumbnail was probably never going to be attractive and that growing it out was just a little bit silly. From my thumbnail it was easy to excuse a little casual chewing on the nail of my index finger — the better of point bluntly with — and then my ring finger. Soon the only impressive fingernail remaining was the one on my middle finger and since that seemed outlandish and silly; I undertook removing it with some relief.

But I’m not giving up after this embarrassingly little display of poor impulse control and a shocking lack of mindfulness. I’ve got time after all. Surely I’ll learn to stop biting my fingernails far before I have the extra cash to inflict my bag lady hands on the sensitive eyes of high-end salespeople. Or I could learn to wear gloves, which, depending on the deftness of the execution, might push me a little further into bag lady territory.

Visual Summary

2011-06-26T18:24:00.000-07:00

What follows is a visual summary of the last week, during which I celebrated my birthday, got amazingly stressed out (for reasons unrelated to aging), ate pie with a fork, drank whiskey from a can, forgot to take good pictures of the many good friends who took me out, got presents of the shiny variety, read an Evelyn Waugh biography and then some Evelyn Waugh, dined (and made obligatory sisterly poses) with my sisters, swilled lots of milky coffee, and missed my two-blog-posts-a-week quota.

Here's to starting another year in the same vaguely frantic mode as I've passed the last 24 of them.

I'd Like a Warning

2011-06-20T19:14:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is my 25th birthday, which, as I told a friend of mine last week, is one of the last important birthdays you have before people start giving you clever cards starring guys with 6-pack abs and slogans like “You’re old so I’m giving you this.” Oh, yes. I’ve browsed the greeting card section of Walgreens many times and left with only a sense of foreboding. Really, though, I don’t think too much about birthdays or put too much stock in them as milestones or have sitcom-style seizures about my rapidly diminishing youth. Now, I’m not well-adjusted enough to take the outright forgetting of my birthday in stride, but I pretend that I am by pooh-poohing it in public and never (ever) mentioning it at work. I never want to be the reason for cupcakes in the breakroom.

Anyway, my family came up to visit last weekend to go out for Mongolian BBQ and celebrate my birthday. It was pretty dandy. Though my older sister couldn’t make it, it’s still the closest I’ve gotten to having my entire family over since we moved here a year ago. And my mom, being my mom, brought piles of pie. (It was a struggle to convince her that going out to eat was acceptable; she wanted to prep all the food at her house — she is convinced, rightly so, that I never have the specific tools she needs — drive for an hour, and serve a dinner of her own creation.) It was also great because I didn’t have to drive anywhere. Most of my family lives within ten miles of my hometown, so the outliers (Nicole and I) are usually the ones declining cocktails and making the sleepy drive home.

So while we were all sitting out on the patio my father, being my father, started shooting off nosey questions. He wanted to know how I felt about turning 25, whether I was doing what I expected to doing at this age, and all manner of other things I prefer to be pre-warned before answering in public. He wanted to know if my current life reflected my dreams ten years ago (at 15) and I declined to answer on the grounds that I was an amazingly foolish 15 year old. I’m pretty sure my dreams at 15 didn’t extend beyond driving a car that wasn’t a Chevy Blazer, having a room I could call a “study,” and making out with Elijah Wood (LOTR-era). One out of three isn’t bad, I guess, especially when one goal is, while understandable, pretty damn irrational.

When my dad persisted in his line of questioning, I had to remember exactly what I was doing five years ago, on my 20th birthday. At the time I lived in an apartment (and state of mind) where throwing themed keggers was always a go-to in times of celebration. The party for my 20th was prairie themed in a semi-ironic nod to my obsessive love for the old west, though I don’t remember anyone dressing up. What I mainly remember was being touched by the turnout and completely disregarding the fact that college students will flock to any party, regardless of sentimentality. I remember a friend of my roomie’s boyfriend handing me a bottle of cheap champagne housed in a Fanta box and being disproportionately grateful. I’ve always been a sucker for gestures.

Anyway, once I centered in on exactly what I was doing five years ago, I had to admit that I wasn’t doing anything close to what I thought I’d be doing at 25. In part this is because I’ve done several things — gotten married, bought a house, worked at less-than-glamorous jobs — that I thought were distinctly unfashionable at 20. But the larger reason it that I had no idea what I would be doing at 25; I can confidently say that I waltzed out of college with no understanding of what I wanted to do, a perilously low bank account, and a burning urge to Get A Job. I’ve never been good at finite planning on the macro level. I’ve always been better at vague impulses and unimportant details.

This, of course, is highly amusing in hindsight and only really disconcerting if I try to figure out what I'd like to be doing by my 30th birthday. Which I won't do. At least until after my birthday. Or after I finish all of this left over pie. Whichever comes first.

All That Later

2011-06-15T14:22:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to a baseball game for the first time in ten years. It was the first time, in fact, that I've ever been to a ball game voluntarily; every other time was part of some mandatory family bonding. It was also, notably, the first time I didn't bring a book to help me wile away the hours. I had a lot of thoughts while there -- thoughts about heckling, thoughts about whether I was too cool to wear a baseball cap at a baseball game, thoughts about how stressful I find it when there's just one guy out on some random base and no hope of another hit -- but I'll get into all of that later. (I'm currently a bit exhausted from a late night and a heap of garlic fries.) So pictures. You're spared, momentarily, all of my thoughts about which names are the sort to look beautiful flashed across a giant Lightbright in the sky.

I suppose I could stand it if I actually took to baseball. Or maybe even hockey. Not football, though; I have a little geek pride left.

Ergo and Also

2011-06-13T16:59:00.000-07:00

It’s finally, and suddenly, hot here, and because I’d rather think about mundane organizational tasks than about anything else, I’m thinking about packing up my winter clothes. I know this is the sort of thing that people usually think about during the early spring — prompted, undoubtedly, by all of those blog entries come out talking about spring cleaning, the kind that I gobble by the dozen while forgetting to actually clean — but it’s been downright cold.

Unfortunate aside: last Saturday I was supposed to attend my cousin’s graduation up in Redding, but as the result of some particularly adroit spasms on my part, we instead spent a fair chunk of Saturday afternoon standing in the wind and pouring rain, locked out of our house. It was horrible and hilarious (later) but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been: I was wearing a cardigan and my trench coat and Kevin was rocking a thermal layer under his flannel shirt. Cold-weather clothing in June saves the day again.

Fortuitous as our unseasonal layering was, the fact remains that the weather has finally caught up with the calendar and I’ve been toting a sweater to work everyday just to drape it over the back of my chair. And although I have my very own closet it’s a little cramped because I’m a combination packrat and neat freak; I insist on keeping several file boxes with labels like “Random Sentimental Junk” and “Things I Might Need Later” but only in places completely out of the way. Ergo, my cluttered closet. Ergo, also, I need to pack up my winter clothes. And that means, mainly, cloistering a bunch of black sweaters.

Usually I wouldn’t have gone out my way to point out the disproportionate number of black sweaters in my wardrobe, but I was out shopping over the weekend with my main squeeze and found myself repeatedly gravitating towards sale racks full of sweaters. My eye wandered specifically to rails full of black sweaters of which I have a goodly number. It’s odd but I have this strange notion that I should always be stockpiling black sweaters, like they’re canned goods or something.

In my defense, this logic isn’t completely, completely crazy. Black sweaters are damn handy. They go with most everything and very nearly fill the hole in your heart that colorful hoodies leave once you enter the cubical world. Sure, I’ve got other sweaters, too many sweaters, probably, in other colors. (Also a few in some pretty bad patterns. I once had this cropped, cream-colored sweater with an embroidered chicken on it. I always wore it with slightly baggy chinos and thought I was so terribly cool and vintage. Later, when my husband and I were first dating, we went out to this Mexican restaurant in an old bank where you got to eat in the vault, and at some point during the meal he looked at me and said, “Okay, what’s the deal with this chicken sweater?” I remember this very clearly because at that moment I was thinking, “What’s the deal with this bank-themed Mexican restaurant?”)

I know that clothing crutches probably aren’t a good thing. For one thing, every repetitious sweater is another thing to clean and store for another year. But there’s something so soothing about swathing yourself in an undisputable sweater. I just wonder how many ¾ sleeve black sweaters I’m going to discover while unpacking my, um, “summer” clothes.

Pretend it Was Awesome

2011-06-08T15:23:00.000-07:00

Some months I fall in love with Harper’s. Other months (usually, I grant you, months when I’m feeling particularly frivolous and the magazine is behaving in a particularly severe manner) I only just like it. Sometimes it’s hard to get properly thrilled over the idea of a beer and a new magazine when the cover is trumpeting the demise of the healthcare system or other distressing, if relevant, truths. Sometimes I’m so depressed by the time I’ve finished reading it that I start to wish that I’d paired my beverage with the Vermont Country Store catalog and its surprisingly entertaining descriptions of $100 hairbrushes. (What? I love reading catalogs. Also, apparently, I love mid-sentence links. Who knew?)

That said, the May issue is pretty awesome. An article by Nicholson Baker on pacifism and an article on depresso indie rock by David Samuels? Oh, Harper’s, it’s like you knew that I spent my formative years re-reading The Mezzanine and listening to Belle and Sebastian. It’s also like you knew that it got sunny suddenly after weeks of rain and I was in the mood to drink a brewski, read a magazine, and pretend the world was awesome.

(Back in early 2010 Harper's linked an article I wrote in the"Links" section of their site...at the very, very bottom of the entry. Barring further life achievements, I might have to get that tattooed somewhere. Ankle bone?)

Tofu Thinks Not

2011-06-06T13:17:00.000-07:00

The Portable Dorothy Parker? This hunk of tofu probably disagrees.

(I picked up the idea for the plate-on-plate tofu attack while ogling lettuce wraps here. Previous attempts to press tofu involved long, ineffectual cheesecloth massages; smashing is preferable to soy-cuddling.)

No Mood For The Bounce House

2011-06-02T16:05:00.000-07:00

I was silly enough to go to a supermarket over Memorial Day weekend. When I realized my mistake — it came to me as I eased my car into a spot in the last row of the parking lot — I was prepared to be jovial about it. Wasn’t I just another person buying food to feed others in my backyard? It was rainy and cold out, but I managed to stay positive even while getting crowded into pyramids of charcoal bags by ladies with carts full of packaged shortcake. It wasn’t until I angled my cart into a line beside the pastry case that I started to have that familiar daydream about never leaving my house again. The pastry case was full of graduation cakes. Graduation cakes always make me cranky.

This is crazy, I know, because cakes usually make people happy. Personally, I’ve never been one to frown through a mouthful of frosting. But graduation cakes, with their chalky mortarboard corner-pieces and flowing scrolls of frosted diplomas, just irk me. I think the first one I ever really noticed was my sister Nicole’s and that was because the chunk of cake I was handed had a portion of her face on it. This was back in the early days of digital cameras and fancy-pants edible paper. My parents had Nicole’s graduation picture printed and frost-glued to her cake. Thus, we celebrated her by ingesting her filmy, weirdly-textured likeness.

Actually, it might be graduations in general that make me crotchety. (And not because I’m still preoccupied with the fact that Buffy should never have continued into the college years. You know you agree with me.) Don’t get me wrong; graduating from anything is a huge accomplishment. It’s just that I, personally, happen to be really shitty at graduating.

I’ll spare you some painful imagery and skip the story of my eighth grade graduation — a big, robe-wearing deal in my hometown — and the khaki skirt I wore to the End of Middle School Dance and go straight to high school, the crown jewel of all graduations. I actually don’t remember much about the event, only that I was angry at my mother and so concerned about looking stupid in the hat that I took it off and stood bareheaded in group photos where everyone else was fully clad in graduate gear. I was angry at my mother, in part, because I was 17 and always angry at my mother, but also because she insisted on throwing a huge graduation party for me.

I know. That’s an absolutely horrible reason to be angry at your mother. But I was painfully shy, just out of braces, and slowly realizing that there was nothing special encoded in the banal yearbook message from that boy I’d had a crush on for two years. I was in no mood for the multi-kegger with a bounce house that my mother planned. I don’t remember the lecture exactly, but the gist of it was quite reasonable: keep quiet and smile, that the party was about me and not for me, and that I was too young to know the difference. Which, in hindsight, is all very good advice.

Later, when I graduated from college, I was less angst-ridden and much more acquiescent to my mother’s keg + bounce house celebration formula, though my eagerness for a beer probably had something to do with the total mess I made of my college graduation ceremony. I went to university where the graduations were enormous and marvelously sterile: graduates were crowded onto the floor of the stadium and paraded in a ceaseless line across a stage while their relatives (four relatives each) in the stands squinted at the jumbo projection screen. The ceremony went on for hours with a uniformity that pleased me — I’d had my doubts about walking but the cavernous space and splintered sound system seemed to swallow noise and identities. Hell, actually walking seemed just like not walking without having to explain to anyone why I wasn’t walking; it was going to be perfect.

Of course, my hat fell off when I was crossing the stage and pictured on the Jumbotron, so in the end it was a little less than perfect.

If you’ve ever wondered how a bunch of young people about to be awarded with liberal arts degrees react when the person in front of them in a long line seems to be stalling and causing a fuss, the answer is badly. I stumbled and crouched inside of my robe trying to swoop up my hat and the girl behind me, intent on waving into the faceless crowd, stumbled into me, which, in turn, caused me to panic and trot forward, crowded the person in front. It was a whole shit-show. My boyfriend, watching from the stands, later assured me that there was too much confusion and he couldn’t really tell what had gone on. But my roommate, a more honest source, only nodded when I stopped by the apartment to change and unfurl my tale of woe. She’d already heard.

The best part about all of this is the reason that my hat was perched so precariously. Back when I was graduating from high school I thought I looked stupid in the hat; four years later I was absolutely certain of it. (I’ve got a small forehead!) Right before I walked onto the stage I gave my mortarboard a compulsive little tap towards the back of my head, thinking to push it back off my forehead. Thus, when the chancellor gave my hand the perfunctory shake, the wiggle sent it toppling off my head and sent me skittering out of anonymity.

Some things, I guess, never change, no matter how many stages you walk across and how many horrible hats you don.

Completely Coincidental Note

2011-05-31T14:26:00.000-07:00

I’ve been having great luck lately with documentaries. Unfortunately, through some twist of fate and Netflix, the best ones I’ve seen in recent months (Bill Cunningham New York and Exit Through the Gift Shop) were both about finding your life’s work and pursuing it honorably. When watched within a matter of days, the movies seemed practically related; they book-end the space between a pure, obsessive vision and well-marketed hack-dom. On a completely coincidental note, both films are also "street" themed, since they discuss, respectively, street fashion and street art.

I’m fully capable of sustaining emotional hangovers brought on by movies — the ones I get after documentaries are nothing like the ones I get after movies about orphans befriending animals better left in the wild — and both of these flicks made me a little sad. Exit Through the Gift Shop made me sad about the world, specifically L.A.; Bill Cunningham made me sad because 1) Bill Cunningham only loves his work and won’t marry me and 2) I felt like a wholly and completely unaccomplished human being after watching it. (This might be a middle child thing; he probably hasn’t lived on a cot in his studio for years just to make me look bad.)

Scope 'em out!

Biding Time

2011-05-24T19:57:00.000-07:00

Sometimes things don’t exactly go my way. Sometimes, for example, a lady will run into my car while I’m sitting at a stoplight in the rain. And sometimes her car will be much larger than my brave little hatchback and cause quite a bit of scuffing. There have also been times when I’ve gone to get a rental car and the smartly dressed rental car dame has award me with a huge, obscenely red Chevy baby-SUV. And sometimes I fall prey to errors of communication; occasionally I find it impossible to explain exactly why I’d want something smaller when my insurance qualifies me for a “full-size” car, even when using phrases like, "really, really, amazingly bad driver." (This is especially hard to explain to someone who seems to take it for granted that everyone who drives a small car is simply biding their time and expanding their garage for the large car of their future.)

Well, I’ve always, always, been too much of a sissy to cause a scene when someone in a pencil skirt looks down their perfectly powdered nose in my direction. I guess it gave my coworkers a good laugh to see this boat parked in my spot. Plus, I’ve never driven something shiny enough to see my own reflection in. Too bad it’s something that I sort of don't want to be seen in at all.

Probably Something Freudian

2011-05-23T14:35:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the way that my two-person household resembles two separate one-person households amazes me. For example, yesterday I realized that we have fully twice as many sets of twin sheets as queen sheets. Of course, before that we had two separate twin beds in two separate apartments, and for a short time two twin beds pushed together in a single apartment — believe me, nothing makes your lady friends say “I’m not sure this is such a great idea” like two twin beds pushed together — so the ratio kind of makes sense. On the other hand, we’ve got a queen-sized bed now. And we’ve had it for like two years

(Don’t you kind of hate talking about beds? We’ve got a rather nice bed — one of those adjustable jobbies — but I could sleep anywhere. I’m a vagrant like that. Yet I find myself in horrifically boring discussions about beds with near-strangers all the time. It’s what’s left after the weather; everyone sleeps. I’m stuck in this perpetual loop of smiling and saying, “Oh, the one you could set a wine glass on?”)

Linens are a persistently independent quadrant of housekeeping, I think. Long after we blended finances and started grocery shopping together, Kevin and I did our laundry separately. We lived together; we chucked our laundry onto the same floor and grouchily bunched it into the same hamper. But we always separated our clothes, however time consumer, for doing laundry. Even now when I open up the dryer and find it full of Kevin’s clothes, I have to remind myself that this isn’t a laundry mat and he isn’t a stranger — there can be no laundry rage or passive aggressive placement of garments on the lid of the washing machine. Our socks live a life of careful, isolated politeness.

The silliest manifestation of this segregation is our towels. Before we moved in together, we each had that strange surplus of towels that young adults sometimes acquire from concerned and seemingly color-blind relatives. I had four bright teal towels, two mauve ones, and two sort of nice dark blue ones. Kevin had an army of red towels in varying states of fading. We’ve lived together for three years now, long enough for me to have remarked often on the clashing of the towels but not nearly long enough for either of us to need new ones. Thus we have a large collection of mostly teal and red towels, both of which look horrible in our bathroom, which is a subdued sort of blue.

What’s worse is that we usually have one teal and one red hanging in the bathroom, rather than pretending purposefulness and placing a complete set on the hangers. It's not intentional, but we both tend to stick to our own towels and after a few weeks we’ve surely blended the ones on display. Probably something Freudian going on there.

Bobs Her Hair

2011-05-18T18:22:00.000-07:00

I cut my hair a few weeks ago, which is notable both because I am so rarely get around to going to a salon — though I’m very apt to discuss the possibility of getting a haircut and to be distracted by my split-ends — and because I got a fairly substantial amount cut off. It was the kind of drastic haircut that makes you reluctant to leave your cubicle the next morning because you know you’ll be beset by shouting and head-petting. My hair used to cascade lumpily to the middle of my back; now I’ve got something closer to a hair helmet. (The good kind of hair helmet, I’m almost sure.)

Cutting off so much hair all at once was strangely nerve-wracking, though I spent the day before making jokes about those old episodes of Ricki Lake where the husbands would threaten divorce if the wives wouldn’t cut their floor-length hair. My relationship with my stick-straight brown hair has always been friendly, if unsightly. (I remember growing my bangs out as a teenager because I was tired of looking so square-faced; I wore the same horrid beaded headband all summer with determined pricks of fringe sticking straight up between the flowers in the pattern.) I consider myself well-adjusted, if a little indifferent, about my hair. But boy-howdy did I work up a mean sweat under my black plastic cape in the salon. Before she started cutting, the hairdresser (who’s a good friend of my mine) spun me around and looked me in the eye.

“Whitney,” she said in so serious a tone that I forgot for a moment that I was wearing a cape and all of my hair was twisted into little pre-cutting nubbins on my head. “Are you going to freak out?”

I assured her that I wouldn’t and after a certain amount of hemming and hawing over cutting a fringe (the headband!) I kept my promise. The cut was inspired by a revelation I’d had while trying to backcomb a section of my hair into a bouffant the weekend before. Poised over my bathroom sink, I was irritated to find that I couldn’t reach the ends of my hair with a comb while holding the length outstretched. As I leapt around, trying to achieve a balance between the necessary tautness for backcombing and the shortness of my limbs, I started wondering why I’ve persisted in having such long hair for such a long time. I wore my hair pinned up almost everyday; I practically leak bobby pins. And after all, wasn’t I fond of counseling my color-experimenting friends that hair was only hair and always grew back? Once proposed, there was no way I could change my mind. Sort of like that Fitzgerald story, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, with less prohibition.

Besides, the salon where my friend works is small, four chairs crammed into a room in a neighborhood that’s recently become trendy in that painted-over way; there’s a fancy tea shop below the salon but the water in the hair-washing sinks turned icy whenever someone downstairs filled a kettle. I could practically reach out and touch the other ladies getting their hair cut. I have my pride, misguided though it often is: that’s not nearly enough room to panic over a few inches of hair.

When she finally spun my back around to see myself in the mirror, I was surprised to find, yet again, how little a haircut actually matters. Don’t get me wrong; I fully believe in the uplifting power of a good haircut or the demoralizing effect of a hack job. I like my new, short hair, and I have no doubt that she could have cut my hair into a hair helmet that I absolutely hated, something that would have shoved me backwards into the mid-‘90s and the embrace of newsboy caps. But when I think about it, or when I'm down 8 inches of hair and thereby relieved of thinking about it too much, it doesn't seem like anything to get upset over. It's sort of just hair -- at least for another 6 weeks.

Gratuitous Cake

2011-05-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

Frosting recipes stolen from here. Making strawberry shortcake as a "yellow" layer cake is an idea stolen from my mom and the majority of my childhood birthdays. My enthusiasm for detailed descriptions and meticulous blogging, however, was stolen by my exciting but tiring trip to Los Angeles and the bridesmaid shenanigans thereof.

Cake = gratuitous.

Composite Scene

2011-05-11T14:16:00.000-07:00

I’m leaving this Friday for a whirlwind trip to Los Angeles, a 72-hour wedding-planning, friend-seeing, hey-there’s-a-celebrity-no-wait-just-some-guy extravaganza. And although the climate down there only varies slightly from the climate up here (I hope you picked up on my classically Californian “up/down/here/there” rhetoric), I’ve still managed to make an elaborate production of my preparations. That’s fine, though — I’m into it. After finally finishing The Wire and Babbit in one weekend (do I like Main Street more because I'm a girl?), I needed something to obsess over. Plus, regardless of scale, micro-planning vacations is one of my favorite things.

When I say that planning vacations is a minor hobby of mine, I don’t mean I troll the internet for B & B deals. I’m frequently broke. Also, I’m cool, so I know that B & B’s are a little creepy. Mostly I stay at home; the trip we took to Hawaii this year was the first time I was successful in getting my husband on a plane. It was also his first time somewhere tropical, so I got to be uppity and say things like, “The water will be warm and clear, which is different, but salty, which is the same.” I forgot to tell him about the sharp coral, though, and he cut himself on our second day and had to stay out of the water for the rest of the trip. That was not to plan. And believe me: I planned the hell out of that vacation.

Anyway, I’m off to L.A. because my friend, Ariana, (who runs this charming Etsy store) is getting married in October. I’m a bridesmaid in the wedding — okay, technically, I’m a bridesmatron but that’s the grossest term I’ve ever heard — and need to get my gear in order. I'm very interested in dress shopping in Los Angeles. Maybe it’s my provincial upbringing, but whenever I think of retail in L.A. I think of girls with walk-in closets and shoe trees with robotic arms. Also square bags made of colorful pasteboard with lots of tissue paper. Actually, this might be one of those fabricated memories that’s actually a composite of scenes from Clueless.

Whichever.

The Occasional Best/Worst

2011-05-08T11:32:00.000-07:00

Occasionally the best part of my day will involve something completely random and horrible. Like yesterday, when I ducked into a Big Lots to use the bathroom after drinking an alarming number of Dr. P's at my favorite tacqueria. (I recently achieved my lifelong dream of having someone call me "a regular" there. It was a self-fulfilling prophesy, really; I was so flattered that I started going there constantly. I always fall for marketing ploys.)

Anyway, going into a Big Lots usually depresses me more thoroughly than a Bob Marley song on a mix CD, but this time I had the delightful misfortune of wandering through the long aisle of inspirational plaster figures. The shelving units were practically bowing under the weight of hollow (hallowed?) ceramic animals with over-sized eyes. It was the worst/best thing that's ever happened to me while scamming the use of a restroom. Also the worst/best thing that's ever happened to me involving a dog statue with flowers and some butterflies growing out of its spine.

(The standard for enhancing cuteness on these things seems to be adding a friendly bug-friend. Can't say that I agree with that logic.)

Trick Pony

2011-05-04T14:59:00.000-07:00

To the extent that I’ll admit to pre-pondering my blog entries I’ll admit this: I spent a few minutes debating whether I really wanted to say that I’m a little excited about the Kentucky Derby. Horseracing, as a sport, has an uncanny way of polarizing people. Folks are either hat-wearing, stat-spewing racing zealots or wholly against the practice, citing the very relevant question of animal rights. A few years ago I would have perjured myself with exaggeration and proclaimed that no one is properly indifferent to horse racing. But bad press and a bad economy have encouraged track owners to court the indifferent; now I know a couple of people who go to the races for the dollar beer and hot dogs. Also several ladies who go for the opportunity to wear hats that otherwise would be deemed disproportionate. But mostly, you either love or hate it.

(A perfect opportunity for a royal wedding joke and I’m going to leave it there. Big hats? Am I right? So g.d. timely!)

So, I came down on the side of talking about the big K.D. this weekend. As a totally passive sissy I usually avoid controversial stuff; I’m usually all about riding that line between mundane and completely boring. I also don’t like confusing people. I’m youngish, a knee-jerk liberal (whenever I accidentally read the news, usually because someone is lame enough to have MSN as their homepage), and a decidedly indoor kind of person. Aside from the occasional Sandwich Spot sammie binge, I don’t usually eat meat, in part because I hate the idea of eating something with tendons. Also, my dog has both a bed and a pillow. If we’re going for stereotypes — and why, if the opportunity presents itself, wouldn’t we — I’m not a likely racing fan.* I am, however, someone who read every Black Stallion book at least 12 times and happens to be FB friends with one of the horses running on Saturday.

Okay, so when you get down to brass tacks, I’m not really a real horseracing fan. I mean, I like it very well, in theory, but the scope of my understanding is very narrow. I like to think about horseracing and I like to read nonfiction about the Thoroughbred industry, which I think I’ve mentioned here before. I also like to make jokes about horsie YA fiction — poorly executed and even more poorly received jokes about The Saddle Club and the marvelously incestuous Thoroughbred series. (Other lameos who like these kinds of jokes should scope out this site.) Note, though, that I never read serious, adult-caliber books about horseracing. Nonfiction on the topic is usually written in a tone of horse-crazed rapture sufficient to fulfill my need for drama; there’s always a horse with hawkish eyes accelerating around a misty track at dawn.

So I’m a dabbler. As the Derby approached, I tried to be good and earnest. I read some blogs and FB-friended Uncle Mo, the favorite in Saturday’s race. But I’m not really a numbers gal and the serious appreciation of horseracing is more about numbers than about making kissy noises at pretty horses — I’ve always been one to pick my Derby favorite by balancing the best name against the cuteness of a muzzle. But I can’t pretend any real indifference. I don’t have a TV, so I’ll probably be trooping off to a bar midday with anyone I can cajole into joining me. And then I’ll probably embarrass myself when I ask the bartender to change the channel on the television.

Maybe I’ll try to explain it by telling him that The Black Stallion and Satan used to be my favorite book. (Fact!) I’m a one-trick pony like that.

*I got kind of excited about listing stereotypical horseracing fans: beautiful, fluffy-haired Southern ladies; chubby, jaded men with bad hats but lots of “horse-sense”; rich guys in waistcoats with watch chains; horse-crazy kids; passionate depression-era journalists with rolling radio voices; evil trainers who only care about winning; sleek equestrian dames in tall black boots; and starry-eyed Michael-Cera types who’ve raised a horse from the cradle and want to use the winnings to buy back the family farm.**

** No, really. Someone make this movie.

Kiddie-Snobs in Eveningwear

2011-05-01T17:56:00.000-07:00

Okay: Metropolitan (1990), directed by Whit Stillman: why didn’t I know about this movie? Also, why don’t any of the people I’ve gushed about it to know about this movie? I love movies with tiny scopes and no real plot! This one focuses on a bunch of high-minded preppie kids home from college during the days between Christmas and New Years Eve. It was very silly and falsely philosophic; I had a bucket-full of chuckles while watching it.

I watched this movie last week when I had an evening to myself at home. Sometimes when my main squeeze isn’t around I like indulge in things that I know he’d make fun of me for doing. Like reading books I’ve read three hundred times while eating heavily-processed cheese snacks. Or ironing all of my clothes and organizing my closet. Or someimes watching coming-of-age movies about kiddie-snobs in eveningwear. I felt bad when I finished this movie without him, though. I had no idea that it was going to be more scathing than endearing. And with a silly ginger chap as the misguided quasi-socialist protagonist, too. That's a keeper.

Accidentally Vegan

2011-04-27T16:49:00.000-07:00

So I definitely meant to make these muffins and alter the recipe to make them vegan. It certainly wasn’t that I wanted to make a peach and blueberry cobbler but got swindled buying mealy peaches. And the whole vegan thing wasn’t the result of me transitioning to muffins without checking to see if we had eggs. No way. I’m a responsible baker and a shrewd judge of fruit. I intended to spend five frantic minutes doing an internet search on egg substitutes in baked goods. I’m awesome. And sometimes accidentally vegan...kind of like this awesome cookbook that I checked out from the library and photocopied the soy-loving hell out of.

Despite the chaotic preparation of these muffins (and the fact that I used 1 Tbsp cornstarch and 2 Tbsp water to stand in for the egg), these were actually pretty good. I took them to a BBQ I went to on Easter-Eve. It was a delightfully irreverent BBQ — as Easter-Eve BBQ’s with largely vegetarian attendees tend to be — we ate veggies, drank gin & tonics, and fed the dog chips for the sheer joy of watching him eat them. In the end we were more optimistic about spring than it was about us: it was overcast, the out-of-season peaches were mealy, and we all ended up with jackets on over our huzzah-spring! outfits.

But the company was good, as were the muffins. And the next day I went to my mom’s house and ate guacamole, hardboiled eggs, and homemade strawberry-rhubarb ice cream until I thought I might die. At least my mom had eggs — accidentally vegan Easter might have been a real drag.

Criss-Crossovers

2011-04-25T13:17:00.000-07:00

I just can’t decide how I feel about crossovers. You know, like crossover episodes on television, or when an author is inclined to randomly plop a character from a precious novel into a new novel for a cameo. I like it, in theory. It’s kind of secret-club-y, knowing that you’re indentifying characters and jokes that another — god-forbid — casual consumer might dismiss as an a simple walk-on of little significance. Boy, I used to gather with my lady friends and cry over crossover episodes of Buffy and Angel. [Remember that ep when Angel turned human and he and Buffy shacked up in his crypt/apartment and ate ice cream until it became too good to be true and her memory got erased (!?!). The college years were brutal.]

On the other hand, and please note that this is the hand of self-indulgent nitpicking, crossovers can be irritating, especially when it feels like a writer is too enamored of a character to let them go properly to the grave of fiction or confine them to their own universe. I'm no harsh critic: I don’t have a problem with people reproducing the same character in every book, as long as they trick me by giving them a different name. And maybe change their occupation if it's something particularly eye-catching (i.e., underwater medic or vegan cupcake bakerista); I tend to fixate on whimsical fictional employments.

It seems that my reaction to a particular crossover is directly related to how much affection I’ve built up for the individual characters. It’s like anything else; the more emotionally invested you are the more indulgent you tend to be. Once I went on a date with a guy who said he was really into The Three Musketeers, which is usually a bad sign — even for someone who can reiterate the plot of Buffy episodes. But I let it slide, because I was emotionally invested. Also because I didn’t realize that he meant the movie starring Kiefer Sutherland.

All of this rambling has a point beyond general exhibition, I promise. Last week I read Cheryl Mendelson’s novel, Love, Work, Children, in part because I really enjoyed her first novel, Morningside Heights. (What can I say? I sometimes get my jollies reading books about moneyed folks in New York with too much culture and no common sense; I also love Woody Allen movies.) My only complaint was what I thought was some very grating crossover action between the two novels. As it turns out, Love, Work, Children is the second volume in a trilogy (starting with Morningside Heights and finishing with Anything for Jane), though there wasn't any indication of that on the cover.

Despite that, Love, Work, Children was a satisfying read. I like long books that ramble a bit when describing apartments and food, especially when they’re implying that clean apartments and good food will cure all ills. (Not a surprising undercurrent, as Mendelson also wrote a brick of a housekeeping manual that I couldn’t get through.) The ending was a little optimistic for my taste, but I suspected that going in — Morningside Heights concludes with unlikely marriages and windfalls of money all around. The villains were also hilariously villainous in both novels; in Mendelson's opinion there's no shortage of evil lawyers with their hands in the pockets of elderly philanthropists/well-meaning but socially awkward scientists/liberal families who have too many children because they can't help loving them too much.

Reading Love, Work, Children I was unaware of the official relationship between the three books, so I was shocked to see such blatant borrowing. At one point Mr. and Mrs. Unlikely Marriage are having dinner with their parallel characters from Love, Work, Children — Mr. and Mrs. Unlikely Late-Twenties Dating Relationship. It wasn’t a bad thing, just a little jolting. I feel like people should clarify a continuation of a story — is a subtitle or a little colored bar on the spine really in such bad taste? But, in the end, the themes of the books were so similar that it would have been okay to call the second one, Morningside Heights: The Younger and Even More Precocious Generation.

And I’m not being mean, really, by calling them precocious after I've already copped to seeking out that genre. It's just that all week I’ve been asking myself why I don’t pal around with an attractive chess champion/opera singer who’s super jaded, an attractive genius musicology student, a mish-mash of attractively rich lawyers who’d rather work at nonprofits and stunningly beautiful journalists with soul. Optimism: it’ll mess you up every time.

Rooms with Names

2011-04-20T13:52:00.000-07:00

As of yesterday I've been married for a period that I like to call "hella long" but that you might recognize as two years. In honor of this occasion, my main squeeze and I scampered off for a mid-week fiesta involving fancy beverages, the kind of hotel where the rooms are given names as well as numbers, book shopping, park-napping, and lots of wandering.

(What, can't I love overland narratives and bookshelves with the same silly name as the room?)

(I know that I should be uploading pictures of us being adorable, but believe me, we've never taken an adorable picture. We've quit trying and just pose American Gothic for every photo op pressed upon us. So just pretend this picture of my faux-leather jacket and shoes cuddling is us.)

Tweed Trousers and the Pride of Cattlemen

2011-04-18T13:29:00.000-07:00

Most afternoons I work at my kitchen table. These sessions are usually marked by a procrastinator's urge to jump up and do something that doesn’t really need doing; the disadvantage of working from home is that you aren’t afraid that anyone will steal your laptop if you wander off to make a phone call. Still I enjoy working there, leaning back against my fridge and staring at the window to spy on kids at the school behind our house. Sometimes my dog comes in a hangs out with me and I feel a little picturesque, though not nearly to the degree I would have when I was young and thought dogs should sleep curled up at the foot of your bed.

That I’m drippingly romantic should come as no surprise at this point, but when I was young and read too much James Herriot I wanted to be a vet. Not the kind of vet who actually gives injections or performs surgeries, but the kind of vet who, like Herriot, wears tweed trousers and drives around in a junky car around rural England, stopping at dawn to think about baby sheep and the pride of the cattlemen. (Can you believe that you can watch all of the episodes of the BBC's All Creatures Great and Small on Netflix? It’s like they want me to bore my friends with stories about draft horses being replaced by tractors.) Anyway, I wanted to be a vet, though I was absolutely horrible at biology and a real puker when it came to blood and guts. I imagined I would rehabilitate otters and keep them in a pond.

It’s pretty fair to say that I was more interested in the sentimental attributes I projected onto animals than in the real things. I was definitely more interested in reading about the enduring bond of man and dog than with any of the bacteria floating around their insides. When I got a dog I had unfair standards; I expected her to sit quietly by my chair while I read books by Sterling North and show a distinct partiality for me. This backfired immediately since my dog, Penny, was an incurably good dog — an indiscriminate flirt and a very wiggly youngster. She loved me but only slightly more than she loved anyone who didn’t raise their voice needlessly and she was only content to nap while I read if I’d taken her swimming beforehand. She would never sleep properly curled up at the foot of my bed, either. She always insisted on sharing the pillow.

I was 11 when I got Penny, and I imagined that we’d grow old together and she’d be content to sleep while I worked at whatever ambiguous career I was taken with at the moment of the imagining. Now she’s quite old and I’m only medium-old, and while she’s content to sleep nearby while I work she’s also content to sleep nearby 85% of the time. A few years ago I worked in an office where we were allowed to bring our dogs in with us. I’d bring Penny and she’d curl up under my desk in my cubicle. Then someone’s dog bit the postal lady, so that ended. I wasn’t all that disappointed — I liked having Penny with me during the day but I felt strangely guilty as she followed me back and forth to the copy room. She was much too old to be starting at the bottom of the corporate totem pole with only utility carpeting to lie on.

But these days we’ve got this linoleum, she and I, which is colder I suppose than utility carpeting, but not as scratchy. And although I know better than to pretend that Penny is some hybrid beast of YA literature — Old Yeller, Sounder, those Oakie dogs from Where the Red Fern Grows — I still get a little punchy when she comes into the kitchen when I’m working. Someone cooler than me should write a YA book about goofy, well-meaning dogs that wouldn’t necessarily fight a mountain lion for you but steal socks from your hamper to sleep with. Stoicism isn’t the only way for a dog to be a good.

Sick Burn of a Minor

2011-04-13T14:43:00.000-07:00

My natural gait is somewhere between a skip and a flat-footed trot, but lately I’ve been running. My one pair of tiny green-and-white athletic socks, previously reserved for wearing under an uncomfortable pair of wingtips, has been getting an unprecedented workout. As a bonus, I’ve been at it for a couple of weeks now without any episodes of acute humiliation. This is quite the accomplishment for me, and not just because I’m lazy, uncoordinated, and prone to making and breaking resolutions. After teenagers, plantation-style homes, and using the words “If I could get your attention, please,” exercising in public is one of my greatest fears.

I’m not the kind of person who can look suave while exercising. I know those people exist —folks who can run like they’re strutting, sashaying down the street with good posture and a perfectly volumized ponytail bouncing in time with their footfalls. But I get sweaty and dismayed and my hands wave despondently at the ends of my arms. And no matter how nondescript my t-shirt and exercise pants, I’ve still got that unprepared look that some unathletic people have while exercising. Imagine sitting by the river and watching some guy run by in a pair of Chuck Taylors and cargo shorts. You ask yourself, “Why would a man jog with his belt on?” That’s me, but, you know, symbolically.

I have friends who think this is a completely foolish position. They argue that lone runners are romantic and stoic, that they radiate guilt from their upright spines and have the innate ability to ruin the Happy Meal you’re enjoying in your car. I can only counter by reminding my friends that they’ve never seen me run in earnest and that this is no coincidence: I try to shield people from my supremely spazzy behavior. And exercising is me at my spazziest.

I’ve got good reason to be wary. I’m no stranger to embarrassment and I know that only the luckiest of un-zipped flies goes unnoticed. For example, I tried to take up running before, a few years ago when I had just transitioned to sitting-only work and had extra energy to burn (also: candy bars). I was pretty good about it for awhile, getting up early and running a loop around our neighborhood before work. One morning I was running (ha!) late and the bus stop down the street from our house was full of teenagers waiting to catch a ride. As I lumbered nervously past, some youngster with a razor scooter sticking out of his backpack yelled across the street, “Jeez, girl, keep running!”

When you’re 24 years old and look like you’re 17, kids are rarely afraid enough to take you seriously. Being the incredibly mature and passive-aggressive person that I am, I responded by dunking my head and muttering, “Keep being an asshole, kid.” I would have added blushing to the mix, but I was already red-faced and wheezing. Unfortunately there was a group of kids on my side of the street who overhead my departure from good manners and started making that noise that teenagers make when they think someone has been duly insulted. All I was trying to do was run, and suddenly I had kids congratulating me on my “sick burn” of a minor.

If I was one of those athletic people, I could have run away quickly. But being me, I got to really relish the chorus of "Ohhhhhhs" following me down the street.

This and That Other One

2011-04-11T19:21:00.000-07:00

I’ve a very cyclic sort of person and at this moment I can’t stop listening to The New Pornographers. I’m going through a headphones phase at work and I’ve got many a CD rattling around in my desk drawers, but I hardly ever change the mix. It scandalizes everyone when I bring my archaic music devices into the office; folks keep shouting about Pandora. But Pandora always makes me listen to Vampire Weekend, no matter how many times I give it the ol’ thumbs down. (My hatred for Vampire Weekend has something subconsciously to do with it entering my awareness at approximately the same times as Twilight. I like to pretend it’s a fan band, like those Harry Potter jammers.)

Also I’m pretty sure Pandora wouldn’t stoop to coming out of my super trashy work headphones: I stole them off an airplane about 8 years ago. I’ve had nice headphones in between, but these suckers just stick around. And I abuse headphones — I’ve never gotten over the bashfulness of playing music aloud in your workspace. It’s too personal, like when you’re carrying a novel and everyone asks you what you’re reading and you sort of just show them the cover because it seems awkward to say the title because titles always sound dramatic and terrible as independent statements. (Which reminds me of this weird/endearing novel in which the mysterious love interest reads novels with the cover folded over. It turned out that she was reading this weirder book; I read it afterwards and was ashamed to have liked the first one more. I have no class.)

Anyhow, I’ve got ugly headphones and the plastic is cracked and catches my hair. It’s a sad state of affairs. But I’m busy — hence the headphones to prevent excessive chatting — so I’ll leave you with this rockin’ jam.

Pop!

2011-04-06T13:49:00.000-07:00

One day I'll be able to express my love of fancy soda.

But probably not today.

This Whole Thing

2011-04-04T21:09:00.000-07:00

I had this whole thing I was going to blog today and boy-howdy was it going to be good. I wrote it last night, pretty much. At least I outlined the main points on the back of a Trader Joe’s receipt, typed a few sentences in a Word doc and saved it to my desktop. But when I came back to it today I just couldn’t wrap my mind around the topic. You see, I got sidetracked by some serious drama this morning, and I haven’t been able to get back to business yet.

My family is heavy on females and quite stereotypically heavy on drama. In my immediate family, my dad’s outnumbered 5 to 1, not counting my mom’s two female lapdogs. I’ve got three sisters, all of us reasonable, employed citizens in our twenties, but at the first hint of trouble, we regress immediately into teenagers. We pry and rage and sympathize with ice cream and burritos the size of infants. It comes from over-protectiveness, frequently; the serious love of scandal is only a bonus sidebar item.

So this morning I was sitting at work and I heard my phone start vibrating inside my desk. My phone has a very severe vibrate function; it rattles every paperclip and stray pen against the metal of my desk drawers. And my phone kept vibrating all morning, until I switched it to silent. Gossip is the lifeblood of my family — we get overwrought a lot. Hell, I’m still overwrought and thus can’t blog properly.

Another notable feature in this little escapade — a casualty more tragic than my blog entry, I’m sure — is the slow degradation of my husband. When we first started dating he was appalled at how much I knew about the lives of my sisters and the familial satellites (guys and gals who’ve been around long enough that their personal lives have been upgraded to sisterly levels of importance). He once cornered my sister’s boyfriend at a dinner party and asked if he too was privy to everything that went on in the family. The chap said yes and my husband was absolutely scandalized.

Today, however, when I started in on the situation over dinner, my husband only nodded knowingly. He’s tapped into the hub these days (my ma); he gets and sends his own text messages to my sisters. He may carry it with more poise, but he's in the loop. And the only thing worse than being in the loop is being out of it.

Click-Click-Click-Click Camera

2011-03-30T19:22:00.001-07:00

Every weekend I remind myself to take pictures. I stuff my camera into my purse and trot off with the best of intentions. And yet every weekend I come back home again without snapping a single shot. I just forget, or I chicken out and don't want to impose on people with my painstaking, generally blurry shots. So I end up with no photos of my life, excepting the obligatory "four sisters" shot my mom takes every time we get together.

This weekend I was especially disappointed in my lackadaisical camera handling because I attended so many photogenic events. It was my dad's 51st birthday and I headed over to the family seat for a rib cookout. Then I went to a theme party where someone was actually dressed as The Voyage of the Mimi! (If you're a fellow denizen of underfunded public schools you probably know what that is; if you don't, you're missing out on something marvelously terrible.) And somewhere in between all of that I wore my favorite party dress, baked some rolls, got my sister to teach me about pie crusts and watched my husband replaced his radiator.

And through all that and with my husband and I taking turns pocket-sitting the camera, I only ended up with these obscure (and yes, occasionally blurry) pictures:

(Look Meg, you're famous!)

I need to work on my coherence.

Further More

2011-03-28T19:03:00.000-07:00

Maybe my inability to sleep has less to do with the aforementioned creepers and more to do with my habit of having a soda and a questionable novel (with line drawing illustrations!) for dinner.

I'm a person of very reasonable habits.

The Inevitable Post-Conclusion

2011-03-28T15:54:00.000-07:00

There’s been a lot of chat about the apocalypse lately with all of the strange weather and natural disasters we’ve been having. (There’s also this weird billboard by my house that keeps telling me that I’m going to get zapped on May 21, 2011.) As a result, I've seen a lot of little info graphics telling me that I should formulate a family escape plan and practice using rope ladders. Thankfully, I’m both cynical and paranoid; I’m not gnawing iodine or making an escape plan because I’m lazy and prefer to think I’ll perish immediately at the rise of a natural disaster.

Plus I've already got a escape plan. Only it's about prowlers and serial killers and includes a clause for psychos that live in my attic, watching me through heating vents and chewing noisily on the bones of bats.

While I make no attempts to hide my cowardly and squeamish nature, there are some aspects of my fear that are strictly circumstantial; call it, if you will, the scummy emotional residue of growing up with a mother whose advice for young women was composed of equal parts gory urban legend and statistics gleaned from chain emails. My mother firmly believes, and frequently vocalizes, that every extinguished light bulb is a message from the spirit realm and that every young man (10% of whom are cracked out on PCP at all times) wants to decapitate young women while hiding in the backseat of their car. That’s how things are when you grow up with someone for whom the most important “John Edwards” will always be the famous medium.

I don’t want to make too much of my upbringing, though I’ve got one sister who refuses to live in renovated Victorian homes because of the “bad voodoo” and another who walks to her car with her keys sticking through her fingers like pokey, ineffectual brass knuckles. After all, I have plenty of friends with overactive imaginations, people who believe that you can only be killed between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. on a stormy night. When it comes to escape plans, I’ve found that upbringing, like the size of the house, the sketchiness of the neighborhood, and the number of roommates, rarely matters. What matters is the possibility that someone — or for us particularly warped individuals, something — could be in your house.

Now I’m not completely nutso. And most of the time I’m not really that paranoid either — I’ve never carried one of those keychain bottles of hand sanitizer and it took getting robbed to break me of my small town indifference to deadlocks. I also don’t believe in ghosts or any of the other creatures featured in certain blockbuster teen novels. But I’ve got a hyper-active imagination and a solid base of subconscious material that falls into the science fiction and horror genres, which makes me a little jumpy.

I’ve got standard procedures, though. When I am washing my face over my bathroom sink I keep my eyes closed to prevent myself from seeing anything upsetting — like a black-robed serial killing dashing across the doorway — in the reflection of the mirror. Similarly, I never look back at my house when I’m pulling out of the driveway, just in case I see someone silhouetted in a window frame. I am wary and cautious; I don’t pick up hitchhikers and I never fall asleep in front of the TV in case that boney chick from The Ring climbs out of it.

(Have you noticed yet that my fear-base in composed almost entirely of images from movies starring Freddy Prince Jr.? FPJ jokes are my mas favorito.)

But for all that, there are still nights when I stay up too late reading and start to feel a bit suspicious about various noises in the other parts of the house. And while you certainly don’t want to get up to investigate (it’s probably nothing, after all), you lie awake, trying to separate the sound of your dog’s snoring from your heater, and both of those sounds from the possible suspicious one that you might have heard earlier. Lying there, alert for any repetition of that strange sound, there are only two things worth contemplating. First, the forbidding knowledge that if you only owned a TV you’d never have to hear the approach of your impending doom. Secondly, you think about your escape plan.

There are some nights (and all mornings) when the fear seems silly; the prowler seems radically improbable, the attic-dwelling hermit downright impossible. But on other nights, when the creaks and groans sound exactly like a someone chomping on a bat bone as they climb out of the attic, I sit in bed imagining my frantic climb out of the window, my panicked scramble over the fence and the heroic big finish where I save my dog and husband by ramming the serial killer with my compact car. Cars are handy against imagined prowlers — empowering but refreshingly impersonal for the gory bits.

I just try not to imagine the inevitable post-conclusion in my plagiarized escapades. I don’t want to get to the part where FPJ and I get the inkling that the fight might not be over yet. You know, when we find the message from the psycho saying he’ll be back, probably written on the backside of a picture of me sleeping. Until that moment, it’s oddly soothing. And much more affordable than rope ladders.

Saddest Salad

2011-03-23T13:51:00.000-07:00

I have a salad spinner, which I like to think makes me an adult. I’ve got two kinds of dressing, too, and while I don’t have any tongs, I’m perfectly willing to dirty two wooden spoons for the effort. But then I realize that my salads are among the saddest and most juvenile vegetable compilations to grace a shiny salad bowl. Nothing is more depressing than an all lettuce salad with a crust of carrots.

Usually I blame this on my complete inability to chop vegetables; my carrots, sliced willy-nilly with a steak knife, are obscene and I can't manage to cut an onion into pieces any thinner than my thumb. But I think the salad deficiency might be more about imagination than coordination. Our salads are always composed of some variety of lettuce (cut a little too large), carrots, and whatever else we have lying around (read: a wilting red onion). I usually skip tomatoes because they come out from under my steak knife in a mess and end up mushing all over the good part (the dressing?). Oh! Sometimes there’s cheese, when I'm feeling fancy.

And we usually have salad with dinner every night of the week. That’s the saddest salad story of all time.

Check Ranting Off Your List

2011-03-21T13:16:00.000-07:00

The weather has been pretty horrible here lately and since all outdoor activities have been rendered distinctly unpleasant (damp), I’ve been plowing through my biweekly stack of library books with serious enthusiasm. And just so that you don’t think I sit around all day having healthy, productive thoughts and empowering my feeble brain, I’ve also been plowing through several boxes of Girl Scout cookies and the early seasons of The Wire. (Really, it’s pretty good. A few years ago some professor of mine said The Wire was the best thing on television but I was mad that he made me read The Wasteland, so I assumed it was just another show where the justice system drags down cops in suits. Which it is, but way better than NYPD Blue.)

Anyway, I know that I talked about my library books a few weeks ago -- I didn’t intend to return to the topic so quickly. I don’t like being quippy about books. (Being cavalier about a book is just presumptuous unless you’ve read it at least twice.) But this week I ended up reading two memoirs by two writers: Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes and No Place Like Home: A Memoir in 39 Apartments by Brooke Berman. And, of course, now I want desperately to blather on about the experience. So I’m going to, because the best part of making resolutions is smashing them on the rocks of the internet.

I didn’t start out trying to read memoirs by writers — I actually tend to avoid memoirs. I can’t separate the medium from the glossy ghost-written memoirs of politicians in the bargain bin of Borders. But I’m freakishly experimental at the public library and I tend to grab just about everything in the “New” section that doesn’t have that torso-of-medieval-chick thing happening on the cover. So I took the books home because they had decent covers and I felt they might tell me something important, being as I try to write on occasion.

Anyway, the two books weren’t all that similar — very different styles and subject matter — besides being memoirs of living writers whose work I'd never read. But there was the kind of overlap that I suppose you’d find if you strung together most people’s lives: parental abandonment, mental breakdowns, broken leases, plays produced seemingly at random, saucy love affairs, waiting tables, ect. (Note on mental breakdowns in these two books: definite dichotomy between therapy and antidepressants, which stood out to me because I read this article that made me hate the world.) These folks also shared a fixation with trying to create replacement homes and families. Oh, and writing. There was a lot of that, too.

I liked No Place Like Home better, which isn’t surprising considering that Berman is writing about the experiences of a young woman looking for stability in housing while Mentor focuses on a middle-aged man becoming obsessed with his instructor as a father figure. I’ve been guilty of obsessing over housing myself, and No Place Like Home was peppy and less fatalistic, though both narrators ended up losing parents. Mostly, however, I liked Berman’s relationship with the writing process. She talked about writing about everyone she met and sort of evolving into a playwright through her love of performing. It was downright pleasant.

Grimes, on the other hand, focused more on his persistent need to write, how he doesn't exist without it, and the voices he hears in his head. At one point (and I’m not going to quote because I already explained that I’m too lazy to make heart-felt efforts with this) he talks about literally seeing the last paragraph of his novel materialize before he wrote it. Sometimes I read stuff like this and feel like I shouldn't even bother plucking at my smudgy keyboard; I've yet to hallucinate a single semicolon.

Now I’ve never been one to question the voices in someone else’s head, but I’m usually irritated by any suggestion of preordained occupation. Predisposition, sure, and certainly obsessive work-ethics, but the cynic in me that thinks there’s a decent pharmacist at the bottom of each artist, that there’s a kind of work that makes a person happy but that our DNA doesn’t include coding for a job title. And the suggestion of this undermines the persistent work Grimes put into his writing, and all the careful schedules he worked out to allow him time when he worked at other jobs. The book was decent and easy reading on a rainy day; there were just a few too many premonitions and floating paragraphs for my taste.

But then again, I’ve never tried to write to a novel. And maybe it’s because I don’t hear voices in my head. But when they get started, I tell you, I'm sure they'll be talking memoir-speak.

A Few of the Uglier Ones

2011-03-16T14:23:00.000-07:00

Last week at work we debated using tags on a site we were putting together and it occurred to me how infrequently I think about tags. The easy explanation for this is that I write infrequent bursts of unrelated flimflam, which is as logical as any assumption involving the word “flimflam” can be. But back on the blog of my youth, I was mad for tags. I tagged the hell out of everything. (I like to think of tag madness as a weird brain-filter; you finish a post and then look around for something clever to tag it. It’s a sickness.)

And since I’ve had too much coffee this afternoon, this casual realization became supernaturally interesting. So I hopped over to my old digital stomping ground and pulled off a few of the uglier ones, complete with parenthetical frequencies. (You see, I’ve progressed from mad tagging to copy/pasting like a fiend.)

• boring novels that I choose to read(34)

• hyperbole for cheap dramatic effect (27)

• shameless sentimentality (24)

• face-starers (16)

• lists are easier than paragraphs (16)

• scandalous disgressions (15)

• Almanzo (13)

• rice bowls (13)

• Tuesdays (12)

• dialogue with myself in quotation marks (12)

• kickflips (12)

• soft-lead pencils (11)

• Thursdays (10)

• Pony-boy (8)

• Ruby Red Squirt (8)

• Buffy (7)

• Shaker/Quaker demographic (7)

• Freedom Footware (6)

• wilderness people (6)

• bad granite (5)

• sons-of-bitches (4)

• how do you even upload a picture?(4)

• panic in the disco (4)

• rampant punctuation (4)

• someone told me recently that they loved Malcolm in the Middle (3)

• white cotton saddlepads (1)

I've set a deadline for myself. If I can't remember what "bad granite" means before I finish this next cup of coffee I'm cutting myself off. (I just haven't decided if I'm cutting myself off from coffee or thinking about tags.)

The 'Gienist

2011-03-14T13:40:00.001-07:00

Talking about hating the dentist is kind of like talking about airline food -- it makes people imagine a brick wall behind you and shoulder pads in your jacket. It’s totally late-eighties-early-nineties stand-up material and, as such, it’s considered trite and passé in these here twenty-teens. It’s completely unacceptable, except in painful small talk situations or if you have a blog and can do whatever you want. That’s what blogs are about, after all: doing precisely what you want.

So I went to the dentist last week. In all honesty I was leaning towards blowing off the appointment, which was one of those ones that you make six-months in advance with that little bib still strapped on. My ascension to the insured masses is so new that I don’t consider it a matter of routine yet; I only went last time because I thought I had this cavity that turned out to be completely psychosomatic. (What, this doesn't happen to you?) But my dentist's receptionist called to confirm the appointment and I remembered her as being small but severe — wool vest, string of pearls, the sort of no-nonsense attitude that comes from sitting in a waiting room and absorbing made for TV bullshit eight hours a day. I was too afraid to explain myself, so I confirmed the appointment in a surly manner.

I once worked with this guy who was always inviting me out for drinks with him and some new dental hygienist he’d met. I must have made polite conversations with at least three plaque-scraping babes, all blond, all tall and all proportionate in a way that might have made me envious if I didn’t know they wore elastic-waist pants to work. I questioned him on the pattern and he pretended confusion; I think it was a combination of nurse fetish and complacency. (One night this ‘gienist had a huge following of guys, all done up in button-down shirts and what the bros call “going out sneakers.” All this for a bar in a strip mall. It's a thing.)

On the other hand, my dental hygienist is a plump evangelist lady who starts most of her sentences naming the universities where her offspring attend and ends them inviting me to her church. I’m not going to discuss how awkward it is to talk with someone’s hand in your mouth because that’s understood. There is, however, the small matter of my hygienist’s constant blessing (“You’ve been flossing! Bless you!”). It's certainly kindly meant but when she lectures me on the good, clean habits that will be my salvation when I’m older, it makes me feel like she’s talking about something more than my gums.

I don’t mean to harp on about hygienists; this lady, like most dental hygienists I've ever met, really is very nice. It’s just that I hate the dentist and I want to whine about something. When I had my wisdom teeth out I got dry socket twice and my face stayed swollen for three weeks, resulting in a much-circulated picture of me on the night of my engagement with a chunk of gauze in my mouth. Another time I got pulled over for speeding after leaving the dentist and when I lamely explained my hurry, the officer ordered me out of the car and started checking me for signs of intoxication. My mother’s first words when I was thirteen and she saw my new teal braces were, “Perhaps that wasn’t the best choice.”

I really think the worst part — worse than all of the scraping and the tastes and the awkwardness of having someone stick their hand in your mouth — is how you feel vaguely chastised when you’re done. There’s that moment when the hygienist has you hold a mirror while she points at items of interest in your dental landscape. I always refrain from making eye contact with myself in such humiliating positions; I just nod and try not to register my extended tongue and spit-bib. Afterwards, when the hygienist is levering the chair back into a reclined position, I catch myself thinking frantic, contrite thoughts. I will floss more and I won’t drink soda. I’ll even give brushing the old college try on nights when I think that I’m too tipsy to be poking sticks at my face.

The mystery of the hygienist is how she can hover so smugly over you as you clench your hands in desperate resolution under the bib. She knows everything. She knows that the embarrassment of being lectured about things as elementary as brushing your teeth can only mutate into guilt. She knows that you're using off-brand mouthwash and she definitely knows what you had for lunch, even when you remember to bring a toothbrush to work and brush before the appointment. Mostly she knows she's won, at least temporarily. You'll leave the office with your complimentary floss and a new resolve, determined to never see your tongue at such close range in a mirror again. Maybe this fundamental assurance is what makes a hygienist such a hot social commodity.

All I know is that it's a bad day when someone who’s flossing my teeth for me can look so damn superior about it.

Binge Week

2011-03-09T13:50:00.000-08:00

I'm having, this week, a complete public library binge. It's amazing; I'm splurging, and with that $6.50 in fines still unpaid. (Use the mechanized check out and you'll never have to pay your fines. Or marry someone in the library biz. I'm extra nervous about fines, so I did both.)

And so what if I want to read sentimental nonfiction about horse racing. At least I have the decency to turn the covers out when photographing my bounty.

Hella Arty

2011-03-07T13:35:00.000-08:00

I wear black tights with my skirts and dresses so reliably that I worry people will think I have some kind of leg-skin ailment. Of course, the best way to get people started thinking about leg-skin deformities is to make denials, so I just try to stay mysterious.

Black tights have emerged as something of a uniform for me this winter. Seriously, there’s an entire drawer in my superfluous clothing dresser full of black tights. (My superfluous clothing dresser is actually a nightstand, an off-white eyesore holding my impressive beanie collection and tights. When I bought said dresser, my husband — at the time just a guy who'd taken me on an awkward date that ended in playing marbles — went on a rant about my miserly habits and how he’d marry, marry, any piece of furniture he owned.) Anyway, I’ve got a whole mess of tights and they’re all black. I’m not good at matching, so I tend to play it safe.

I never used to wear tights, mostly because I had an aversion to wearing dresses; tights are a little redundant when your personal uniform consists of jeans and sneakers. I was one of those kids who got it stuck in their head that dresses were for dressing up and dressing up was for suckers. So through my pre-teen years and adolescence I sort of dressed like Daria (you know, from Daria) only instead of a shapeless pleated skirt I usually rocked some shapeless denim.

I bought my first pair of black tights from Target when I was working as a receptionist in a hospital; hospitals are serious places and I felt oddly underdressed date-stamping with bare legs. More importantly, I was a newbie at dressing for jobs that didn’t involve shredding documents with my headphones in. The hospital dress code allowed for skirts, khakis, and scrub outfits (weird, right?). I deemed myself too young and too short to pull off khakis in any convincing fashion. Scrub outfits I nixed on the slim possibility that someone would mistake me for a doctor in the cafeteria and insist that I give someone CPR.

So, skirts and tights it was. I’d just gotten back from a summer of riding commuter trains abroad and was fairly enamored with that whole tights-boots-long-wool-coat thing. Plus I had a inkling supported by this essay by Meghan Daum (who I was obsessed with at the time) that tights were for suave artists and nylons were for squares. But after years of jeans and off-brand Converse sneakers, I was oddly embarrassed by my attempts at business casual. I remember a few harried nights changing my clothes in my car after a shift, putting on something altogether grubbier to attend a party. I’m from a special breed of shy people who hate when other people think they’ve made an effort. That always reminds me of this — my favorite Achewood comic.

After I graduated from college I got another, serious office job with no dress code. (My boss told me, “I think you’re the first person who’s ever worn a dress in here,” which is one of the more discouraging things a person can hear on their first day. Later I wore a skirt and he asked me if I had a job interview after work, another discouraging tidbit.) Now I work either from home or in an office where the only thing we’re forbidden is cut-off shorts. With no dress code to make me dress up, I started missing my vast collection of black tights. Now I wear them recreationally — to work, home again, and then out to see people that I actually know. I’m sort of proud of myself.

I know that this probably isn’t the most interesting thing I’ve ever decided to thrust into the open maw of the internet. But it was sort of warm yesterday and I was thinking that I’d have to start reevaluate my generic black-tights-pattern-dress-sweater-without-an-embroidered-chicken outfit. I’m not creative. But you might mistake me for creative, ‘cause I’m wearing black tights and that’s hella arty.

Sundays on Wednesday

2011-03-02T13:17:00.000-08:00

As a person of very minimal goals I often achieve completely perfect Sundays. I like to get up, shower, and do just enough work to make me feel properly accomplished for the day. Then I like to adjourn to a late lunch at an Indian buffet, eat until my eyes pop out, and go home to putter around. (Puttering includes, but isn’t limited to, doing my laundry, charging my cell phone so that I can forget to charge it for another week, watching an upsetting number of Have Gun – Will Travel episodes, and taking scenic jaunts.)

Anyway, we went on a walk with some friends after an Indian buffet last weekend and it was unexpectedly delightful. We saw some baby horses frolicking about and this crazy grass creature.

( Right?!)

Someone out there has a general irreverence for natural paths that proclaim “No Touching” and a real artistic vision. I wish they’d been hanging around; I would’ve awarded them with very tentative high-fives.

Flesh-Colored Nubbins

2011-02-28T13:34:00.000-08:00

I used to go to coffee shops around here pretty regularly. Never regularly enough to achieve my lifelong dream of having someone ask me, “The usual?” but regularly enough for the baristas to smile at me in a way that I hoped was slightly friendlier than corporate policy required. I’m not actually a coffee fiend — I’ve gone through several phases where I’ve attempted to scorn caffeine and come crawling back to a Dr. Pepper — I just like to go somewhere with my laptop that’s not my kitchen table. But while I've been on a caffeine bender lately, I haven't been frequenting the local watering holes. So when I went this morning to a cafe with my laptop and some flesh-colored nubbins plugging my ears, it was kind of a big deal.

The obvious reason to cut coffee shops out of your laptop-ing routine is the expense, which, oddly, never bothered me. Don’t get me wrong: I’m pretty broke. But I always justified it by clutching self-righteously at my homemade chai while my coworkers filed past my cube with their emblazoned paper cups. As I sipped from the tricky drinking mechanism of my travel mug, I’d think of that Midwestern saying that I’d never understood — “The rich man gets his ice in the summer and the farmer gets his in the winter” — and pretend it was about me waiting until mid-afternoon for my coffee. I’m capable of some pretty nutso stretches in logic without my dosage of caffeine.

My reason for cutting out coffee shops is a whole lot less frugal. I decided that coffee shops required too great an investment in time (in preparation, driving and ordering), to achieve something that was often dissatisfactory for work. I’m a complete spaz for preparation, so I’d take my time packing my bag with my computer and any applicable accessories; I’d load the side pockets with paper for making lists and with novels that I’d meant to get around to reading. (Today’s list and novel selection: paper for a grocery list and The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins.). And after successful packing and driving, I might get to a coffee shop to discover that there weren’t any outlets or open tables or, worse yet, the music was much too loud.

I’m picky, I admit, about loud noises when I’m trying to think properly. I’m the sort who needs to turn the music off in the car while I’m trying to read street signs or parallel park. I’m that chick who suffers patiently through the loud band in the tiny cement room for the joy of chatting on the quiet street afterwards, uniformly describing the show as “you know, pretty loud.” I also get irritated by these epic chain restaurants with the combo industrial/faux European décor that people always chose for their birthday celebrations; the ceilings are so high and the voices are all bouncing off the mini Eiffel towers and the exposed piping so loudly that I can hardly enjoy my weird breaded food.

Since my main squeeze is both a recreational musician and a chronic loud-talker, I’m always trotting around our tiny house making vague, bitchy shushing noises. We used to be at a stand-still on this issue, as he maintains that I’m a loud walker, typist, and all-around neurotic. He also says that our elderly and partially deaf dog enjoys loud noises, which means it’s 2-1 in favor of shouting and harmonicas in the living room. (We’re democratic.) But then I discovered the majesty of earplugs. I’ve been a wholly content and alarmingly unaware person ever since.

Okay, earplugs are gross. You think of them as sitting all crumpled on your grandmother’s bedside table with a dozen prescription medications or out on the sidewalk where road construction guys chuck them after a day of bulldozing. I get that. I try to class them up by putting them in a shiny Mason jar, but I know I’m not fooling anyone.

On the other hand, these little flesh-colored suckers are great. I can sleep through NPR, read through guitar practice, and admire the wide array of colored tights at shows without a bass-related heart explosion. Most importantly, I can sit in the coffee shop for hours without having to comprehend a single Jack Johnson song. So what if I couldn’t hear that guy who came over to ask if I was using that extra chair. I’m just going to nod pleasantly at all passersby and hope they aren’t asking me to leave.

Laundry with my Dog-Friend

2011-02-22T14:43:00.000-08:00

Fake spring means doing laundry with my dog. By summer, I'm sure, I'll be coating myself in sunscreen and wearing hats that make old ladies in the supermarket shake their collective heads. But a few weeks of wind-blown mist makes a little sunshine warm the hearts of even the most chronically pasty.

Besides, actually enjoying laundry makes me wonder whether I have a deficiency in that vitamin you get from being in the sun. D, maybe? There's got to be some reason I felt like this was a pastoral garden party. Probably it's some vitamin-based delusion.

Trust Bustin'

2011-02-22T14:12:00.000-08:00

On Saturday I drove back to the town where I went to college to see some friends and hear some bluegrass jams. It’s kind of a long drive — one that I make far more often than I probably should — along a boring stretch of highway. There’s nothing scenic to see, only the jumpy patterns of brick retainer walls, and, towards the end, a brief jaunt on a causeway over the levy overflow fields. With nothing much to entertain us on this familiar drive, my husband and I debated which of us had behaved more patriotically on this patriotically-tinted three-day weekend.

I felt I had the initial advantage — we were, after all, driving my Ford automobile and listening to my husband’s The Kinks album. But he argued that we needed to consider all media consumption for the weekend, which put me in a decidedly less American light. My husband spent Saturday morning listening to a radio show broadcast from New Jersey. I spent it eating Mexican food and watching the North and South miniseries.

While I completely endorse the negative miniseries stigma, I can’t help watching them. They’re long enough to evoke serious emotional turmoil, without all of the messiness of a TV show that drags itself painfully through the college years. Besides, I’d just finished re-reading North and South, my favorite Pride and Prejudice knock-off. (Okay, that’s a lie; it’s definitely not a knock-off. I only said that because it’s a British novel with a similar title construction and an underrated miniseries. Plus it can't be a knock-off when I sort of like it better.)

Despite a flurry of un-patriotic behavior over the patriotic weekend, there’s a strange corner in our house that seems to draw American paraphernalia. (Corner as seen in this post.) At this moment we’ve got three presidents represented there: Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt (Teddy). George comes in the form of a portrait that I ripped out of an old art book and framed; Lincoln in a wooden statue that tends to frighten people with a Goosebumps-style fear of dummies. Finally we have a bust of Teddy Roosevelt. I think this one used to belong to my husband’s brother and I’m not sure how we came to claim it. But I like to justify our ownership and its prominence with a story I once heard about Roosevelt, though I can’t remember where I heard it.

Apparently when Teddy Roosevelt got his first girlfriend, he sent away to France for a set of dueling pistols. He believed that any man who presumed the impudence of going steady with a dame should be ready to kill for her. Such beautiful leaps of logic from our trust-bustin’ forefather.

Mind you, I have no idea whether that’s a true story and I’m not going to risk ruining it with a severe Googling.

Beef with the Tropics

2011-02-15T15:07:00.001-08:00

It took until the third day of my tropical vacation for me to remember why I always hated tropical vacations as a kid. At the moment of revelation I was lying on a floral comforter, which was stretched over a creaking double bed in a room that was reminding me more every second of a 70’s horror flick. If I’d bothered to extend my arm I could have touched the remote (as well as the fridge, bathroom doorknob, and television) but I was too miserable to move, let alone brave my way through an endless loop of local channels. Don’t get me wrong; any honest person without a television can tell you, we look forward to hotel televisions the way some people look forward to bathrobes and complimentary slippers. But I was sick, down with a bellyache borne of my own indulgences.

To make things worse it was hot in there, with that special sultriness that comes from dozens of running swamp coolers, and the windows opened like shutters to little chain-link screens. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why the hotel (a last minute reservation for our last night in Hawaii) reminded me of a horror flick but I think it had something to do with the special lamp in the bathroom for lighting up the shower stall or the way the elevator stopped at the fifth floor and you had to hoof it up to the sixth. I also couldn’t pinpoint exactly why I was feeling sick, though it probably had something to do with the glaring educator-level sun or maybe the four daiquiris I’d drank while reading some so-so memoir about chic modern Mormons. Or maybe it was that enormous chicken burrito that my meat-eating-vacation-self couldn’t resist. Or maybe all of the sunscreen fumes or the five glasses of the murky tap water I downed when I realized that I was dehydrated.

Okay, before I get to the bit about why I used to hate tropical vacations and how I found myself on this particular vacation, I’m going to do a little aside. The modern state of Hawaii (specifically Oahu) is made for indulgences: you can hardly pause on the sidewalk to adjust the heft of your shopping bags without a waiter appearing with a Maitai and a plate of fries. You’ve basically got to turn off any sense of Puritanical denial you possess in order to enjoy yourself; your sense of human decency gets chucked, too, but that’s only to make room inside of you stomach for more Ranch dressing. (It’s hard for us snobs to nap in the shadow of a giant beachside Cheesecake Factory, you know, but we make do.)

Anyway, even the architecture on the beaches is very indulgent and super colonial — all verandas and deep shady hallways filled with stuffed couches — which is beautiful but helps to turn an observant mind back towards guilt. I can’t help associating that kind of big-game-huntin’ décor with that trend in post-colonial literature where imperial greed is symbolized by personal greed. I’m not thinking Heart of Darkness here, more like Maugham’s The Painted Veil or The Moon and Sixpence. The classic example is The Secret Garden but the theme goes something like this: if you’re a greedy colonial person representative of a greedy colonial government you’ll probably get blinded or burned or killed in an indigenous epidemic. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll get the old cobra-hiding-in-your-jewelry-box treatment. (Cue: Ghostly-Photo-of-Hotel-Way-Nicer-Than-Mine.)

The point of all of this (and there is one, I promise) is that when I was curled up on that floral comforter I was certain that I was feeling nausea of retribution. And that again, my dears, is why literature is bad for your brain.

When it comes down to it, literature is probably at the root of why I always hated tropical vacations as a kid, too. I was a stalwart geek and like most geeks and single-faceted bookworms, I wasn’t any good in the sun; I was pasty and my temperament soured in directed correlation with how much I was sweating at any given moment. I also got seasick, hated eating fish, and felt like my knees looked knobby in bathing suits. I pretty much hated trips to the beach as a kid. By the time I was a teenager I was opting out of family vacations, forswearing shorts and mumbling about how my parents never wanted to go anywhere interesting “like Alaska or Canada or whatever.” What a punk, right?

Since I’m now able to occasionally adopt a point of view more nuanced than nerds v jocks, however, I was keen to join my family for a trip to Hawaii last week. I’m an adult and a hyper-packer, too; I know about shade and sunscreen and I rationalized that I could fill my duffel bag with enough novels and magazines to personalize any level of beach-bumming around. I planned a week of violent relaxation — I'd drink fruity beverages, people-watch behind the cover of giant sunglasses and a floppy hat, and take public naps. And the whole week went almost exactly to plan.

But the plot went awry on our last night in Hawaii, which I’d planned to spend watching one of those typically stunning sunsets, eating fried food at some open-air bar under the eerie flicker of florescent light bulbs shoved into tiki torches. I packed a dress and everything for the occasion — a green one with white splotches that were just ambiguous enough to miss being called flowers. I wasn’t taking any chances with that whole Hawaiian-print-dress-and-white-linen-pants situation, but as it turned out I had bigger problems on the way.

I had a bellyache coming and an evening listening to the quiet noises of my hotel-neighbor making the saddest, loneliest Cup of Noodle and watching Jeopardy with his blinds closed. I had that and a whole lot of thoughts about the indigenous epidemic I most certainly deserved.

This Looks Like a Popcorn Stand

2011-01-19T14:49:00.000-08:00

We’ve got quite a small kitchen. Most of the time it isn’t really an issue; there’s only two of us and we’ve got a scant supply of dishes and approximately two Tupperware containers. But after the holidays I found myself with an unprecedented amount of liquor in the house — unprecedented, at least, since those years in college before people discovered kegs — and pretty much nowhere to put it all.

The in-pouring of alcohol isn’t completely unreasonable, actually. I went out and bought some standard alchy before the holidays because I anticipated extra houseguests and overlooked the alarming predominance of beer-snobs in my social circle. And then we got some liquor for Christmas from family and buds, some of whom were super slick and made their own alcohol for holiday distribution. So now we’ve pretty much got a lot of gin with not a place to put it.

Turns out there was lots of space in the wine cellar/trash compactor/popcorn-machine-made-to-look-retro part of the house.

Yup, we're doing this up super classy-like.

Pizza Parties

2011-01-17T18:28:00.000-08:00

I went to a pizza party yesterday, the first pizza party that I’ve been to since pizza parties meant a pack of pre-teens, two medium Hawaiian pizzas, and that free 2-liter of soda that you get when you pick up your order. (Remember when sleepovers were the pinnacle of your social experience? For me this time period is a blur of trips to the movie rental place, the unanimous pick of a flick starring the son of Tom Hanks, and dying my hair, my bangs, rather, with cheap plastic-y dyes that faded by morning so that when I strolled through the front door my mom was more apt to ask why my hair was so greasy than to give the start of fright that I desired.) Anyway! Pizza parties — they’re not just for girls rocking badly dyed bangs and corduroy newsboy hats anymore.

So, the pizza party that I attended was a dual celebration for a couple of unrelated things. First, it was an excuse to get together with some cool peeps and make pizzas with fancy toppings, which is something I always relish. I’m notoriously lazy about toppings in my own pizza life —beyond cheese I’m likely to throw a can of sliced pineapples and some chopped red onions onto the thing and stick it straight into the oven. But yesterday, after clomping up a long staircase highly entertained by the fact that I was carrying a plastic baggy of pizza dough and a 6-pack of cola, I was awarded with fancy toppings, like mushrooms and zucchini. Some days — usually days when I’m not in charge — my culinary experience is unexpectedly awesome.

The second and more interesting reason for the pizza party was to provide snacks while watching The Social Network, a living room viewing populated by a bunch of people that I know who like to sit around and think about the internet. No one really believes that the movie is altogether true; I can’t pretend that anything with Justin Timberlake in it is anything but fiction. But I still wanted to see the movie and having failed to see it in the two theaters that it played in up here (including, regrettably, the drive-in), I was pleased to watch it with some people who would be keen to rip it apart afterwards.

I am, quite obviously, something of a fan of the internet. But I also enjoy making sweeping, poorly-researched statements about how the internet is ruining the world and how I instinctively click on my internet browser when I get bored at work, even on days when I know that I’ve turned off my wireless connection. (I also have a long history of thinking too much about Facebook: I wrote this thing about the virtues of nosiness last year.) It’s fun to have these sort of discussions with a passel of people who are also into the internet but ride that line of suspicious detachment — people who met online or make their living online, people who, like me, never answer their cell phone but compulsively refresh their email, people who always start a conversation talking about blogs and operating systems but end it with declaring that they’ve resolved to spend less time on their computer.

It’s this general mind-set that made me so eager to see a movie that didn’t (pointedly, I feel) star the son of Tom Hanks. It’s good to watch this sort of thing for cultural reasons and it’s better yet to watch it with a bunch of other people who are on Facebook but like to make snide remarks about the kind of people who are into Facebook. Of course, the I-have-one-but-I-don’t-really-use-it stance is mainly bravado; we only know what elements of Facebook fan-girlism to mock because we see them in our oh-so-jaded newsfeeds.

In the end I stuffed my face and had a bunch of thoughts, mainly about how Facebook is like a giant, endless, pizza-free pizza party that plays on the invite-accept compulsion, a point that The Social Network hammered into our heads with all of its Harvard jargon and fraternity tomfoolery. Usually I’d have a keen desire to rant in that direction. But like I said, I attended a pizza party yesterday and got all of that out of my system.

Loaf of Bagel

2011-01-12T14:21:00.000-08:00

I’ve been making my own bread for awhile now — it’s been almost two years since I added a bread machine to my shabby gang of kitchen appliances — but I’m still stuck in the roll phase. Also, I’m pretty sure that the “roll phase” isn’t an actual phrase, but rather something that I just made up to describe my fear of baking bread in loaves. Granted, I didn’t know “sando” was hipster speak for a sammie until yesterday, so it may be that I’m just ahead of the times with this roll phase thing.

I don’t like making bread in loaves because I’m really crap at cutting slices without completely mutilating the whole of the bread. If you gave me a bagel, a knife and some artisan cream cheese, I’d return to you a slightly stickier version of your toaster’s crumb tray. I’m a wreck with carbs and sharp objects.

And now in the spirit of the contrary and the arbitrary, I give you some photos of rolls and some (numbered!) statements about my feelings for bagels.

1. I used to eat a ham-and-cheese sandwich on an egg bagel everyday for lunch when I was 17 years old. No wonder I was such a chubby, wimpy teenager.

2. A few years ago when I was working at a job I hated, I stopped in the parking lot of a bagel place on my way home and saw that they were hiring for the graveyard shift. When I got home my husband asked how my day was and I told him that I’d filled out a handwritten application to become a nocturnal bagel girl, and if hired I would write that very thing in my resignation letter.

3. My freshman year of college I roomed with a beautiful sorority girl from Southern California, who thwarted all of my attempts at slap-stick by being really nice. She was the first person who told me that eating a bagel is like eating half a loaf of bread in one sitting. I've already forgiven her for being pretty and having a better laptop than me, but that's one grudge I'm holding on to.

4. Maybe I should just make bagels. No one ever expects a loaf of bagel.

A Hypothetical Showdown

2011-01-10T16:32:00.000-08:00

I could be cool and contemporary and blame my current Western kick on True Grit but it actually started a few weeks ago with Tommy Lee Jones and an enormous bowl of homemade popcorn. I know you’re thinking that I’m trying to earn my Coen brothers merit badge by slyly referencing No County for Old Men in the same type-breath as True Grit, but rest assured: I’m really talking about Lonesome Dove. (Besides, if I was going to make a sly Tommy Lee Jones reference I would totally try for Men in Black; my hyperactive squeamishness that only allows me to watch alien movies where the former Fresh Prince is liberally sprayed with slime.)

The truth of the matter is that I love Westerns. If I had to name my favorite cross-media genres, Westerns would be right up there with stories about jaded lady journalists, feel-good flicks where ugly girls get miracle makeovers but renege and hook up with their geeky best friend, teen dramas from the late 90s with overblown erudite dialog, and anything with Alan Alda in it. (Especially moody Woody-Allen-Alan-Alda. Don’t repeat my mistake and try to say that last part aloud.)

And I don’t just mean just classic Western movies, the kind that make ex-film students and elbow-patched gents everywhere dust off their talking points (Technicolor! Theme music! A hypothetical showdown between Clint Eastwood, John Wayne and Gary Cooper!). It’s really the whole shebang. I like bad full-color Westerns starring Colin Ferrel, sexist television shows from the 70s where every dame is a frigid schoolmarm or a saloon girl named Kitty, and the occasional bad science fiction show with overt Western themes (Firefly!). Seriously, whenever I see a guy with a hat and a large belt buckle in Starbucks, I let him ahead of me in line and tear up if he orders something with “no whip.”

To return to something remotely resembling a point, I saw True Grit last week, hot on the heels of watching the Lonesome Dove miniseries on Netflix. Then I spent part of the weekend reading the novel Lonesome Dove, after learning that it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986. (Witness my thought process: random inspiration, brief internet research, search of local library, binge reading, and repeat.) The novel was something of a struggle, since it was ungodly long and had this weird boring mid-plot about chasing a band of renegades over the desert — the chunk, not surprisingly, that my husband slept through during the movie. But I consoled myself with the whimsy that the narrative exhaustion was part of the whole anti-climatic frontier experience and that while I might be weary, I had the luxury of drinking 12 pots of tea in the process and was never once attacked by killer water moccasins.

Now I’m binge-oriented person (never let me near a pan of cobble that you aren’t entirely done with), and for all of my whining and shimmer-tastic theories, I find myself on the other side of the epic Lonesome Dove experience still raring for some Western. I’m not surprised, particularly, but anyone who bothered to take a long-range view of my obsessions would be. Growing up in a small town where tight Wrangler jeans and a snazzy braided belt were emblems of studliness, I was notorious for scorning boys in fringed boots. In a fit of adolescent bitchiness I once told my father that a bolo tie was not interchangeable with a real tie.

Funny how things change and you get slightly older and after awhile you start to think that the real reason that you should be ashamed of having gone to a Reba McIntyre concert is that she had such a crappy sitcom, not because she was once in the movie called Buffalo Girls. That's right Buffalo Girls; she played Annie Oakley.

Now I wonder if that made-for-TV masterpiece is based on some gargantuan novel?

Suckers for Continuity

2011-01-05T13:51:00.000-08:00

A new year means a new planner for those of us still lame enough to be using physical day planners. I’m a sucker for continuity and I’ve been rocking this little devil for a couple of years now. (Wouldn’t it have been more awesome if I just linked to that section of the Moleskine site that’s all “blah, blah, Hemingway, blah”?)

Anyhow, I went last week to the local Borders to cash in a gift card (free planner!) and they only had the hardcover style in red. After a little internal debate about whether it was a particularly portable-bible shade of red, I bought it. I’m anxious not to talk too much about my fancy-pants planner — I only like to do that when I can be certain that my self-deprecating tone is coming across properly — but something new and garish and exciting came in the little hidden pocket of my notebook and I couldn’t resist comment.

My planner came with this series of stickers to mark pages and events, little slips in green, grey and red with different decals and symbols. Most of the little pictures are pretty self-explanatory but there are a couple of weird ones; I’m left wondering if I’m supposed to use the little shoe, cell phone and computer stickers on every single day that I have all three of those things on my person. And the weather ones are for the 14 days next year that I want to make note of the weather?

Okay, I’m stopping after one last comment, I promise. I’ve only gone on this long because I have such a strange and abiding affection for my little notebook friend. It’s my belief, and I’m frankly surprised that the company hasn’t noted it as such on their site, that when Hemingway used this notebook he relied heavily on the little sad face stickers and the guy in the corner with the barbell. Just a guess.

Earbud Related Bike Accidents

2011-01-03T13:25:00.000-08:00

Ever since I was a kid I’ve had this nagging desire to explain any lapsed time when writing in any kind of journal, as though some notebook with a trotting horse on the cover was begrudging each missed opportunity to hear about the drama unfolding in the three back rows of the bus. Laziness and absent-mindedness were the uniform culprits behind these missing months but that rarely satisfied me. Obsessive childhood consumption of YA lit, particularly of the fake-out-diary persuasion, had equipped me with the belief that a diary wasn’t worth keeping unless involved narrow brushes with cholera-colored demise. I was a snot-nosed overachiever, so I often lied to my diary with great vigor. And people want to think reading is good for kids.

The long and short of it is that I recognize the inclination to do what I’m about to do. Poised to announce my absence to myself alone, I’m pleased to have graduated at least to resigned honesty: I got hellsa lazy eating strudel and drinking fancy beers during the holidays, and I didn’t do a lick of work. Blog absence resolved.

However, for the sake of tone consistency, I’m plunging immediately into a topic on which I’ve bestowed a lot of unnecessary and self-conscious explaining over the last few weeks. Through some freak incident of corporate generosity and right-place-right-time-ism, I accidentally received an iPad as my Christmas bonus at work.

Now, an iPad is an insanely generous gift and a very shiny piece of technology — one that I’ve done my best to muss up with smudges from my greasy little Microsoft fingers. The thing works marvelously: I’ve devoted hours to that weird finger-pinch-zoom feature.

The trouble is, I’ve always been a little too broke to afford any of the many little white boxes that Apple produces, and as such I’ve had to console myself with making fun of them. (Hold on, that’s a lie. I received an iPod shuffle from my grandparents for Christmas in 2005-ish. I never really got into it because you couldn’t create playlists and never knowing when I was going to get wacked in the face with a Flaming Lips song made me nervous. Besides, it never worked properly after one of those damn signature earbuds fell out of my ear and got tangled in my bike chain.)

Anyway, after a several years I sort of let that mockery solidify into something of a personal resolve; it melded with my outsized sense of nostalgia and my hatred of people with smart-phones who google the lyrics when you’re singing the wrong words to some Journey song. There are potentially offensive things about iWhatevers, sure, mostly having to do with the ideology behind the way that I had to download iTunes to even get my iPad to boot up, but I generally didn’t fret too much over it (though there’s a good article about that ideology here). Mostly I like to amuse myself by yelling, “This never would have happened if I had an iPhone!” whenever I end up at a restaurant that turns out not to be open for lunch.

And then I got this free iPad and no one will let me forget it. There’s been plenty of razzing and compulsive overemphasizing of the word “free,” as well as one embarrassing incident where I was caught eyeing the iPad cases in the store where my sister works and had to pretend that I was really browsing some utilitarian leather fanny packs. Harassment has been heavy and well-deserved; I texted a friend after receiving the iPad and she responded from the safety of her Droid: “I hope this breaks your habit for liking old and shitty things.” I answered her jibe with steely silence, as my cell phone is one of the aforementioned old and shitty things and I wasn’t willing to undertake the herculean task of texting.

But for all of the ideological debate, relative shininess, and the cringe-worthiness of that old iPod ad campaign with the dancing shadow-people (is that still happening?), I’ve got to admit that the iPad doesn’t really enhance my life too much. It’s handy and snazzy and involves this bitchin’ WFMU app, but I’m a simple computing person with simple computing needs: I check my email, consume far too many text-based blogs, and type gallons of words with needless force. I’m not into touch-screen keyboards — I guess I just like the sound of my own typing.

The boundaries of gratefulness will only let me rail so far when the most expensive piece of electronics in my home gets dropped into my lap like some glossy Christmas miracle. The iPad seems to be nifty and capable; the lacking element is definitely me and my stunted appetite for techo gadgets. It's possible that after all of these years I may not be too cool for the iPad — whether this shiny little square is too cool for me, however, remains to be seen.

Disillusionment Ruled the Day

2010-12-20T17:40:00.000-08:00

The last time I got anything for Christmas that I really asked for — not something that I wanted or liked but downright asked for, Christmas-list style — was in 2005. It was a down comforter for my twin bed and it was pretty damn shocking.

There was nothing scandalous about the comforter itself. It was the one I asked for, edged in white cotton with plain stitching, stuffed with the feathers of some humanely denuded geese; the thing came in a cardboard JC Penny’s box with a retractable plastic handle on the side. And there was nothing shocking about my parents giving it to me, as I was suffering (rather loudly, I’ll admit) a second winter in an apartment that I’d chosen for its historic fixtures and not its insulation. The only mildly brow-raising element was that I’d listed a down comforter on my Christmas list and no one in my family abides by Christmas lists in the least.

Though my family members are all well-planted in the adulthood, we still relish penning and receiving Christmas lists from one another — our greatest joy, however, comes from glibly ignoring their contents. The justification is pure ego: Each member of the family assumes that they know the list-maker and the list-maker’s needs better than the list-makers themselves. We prefer to use Christmas lists as augurs; it’s no coincidence that I married a guy who once bought me a breadbox and a car safety kit for my birthday.

Of course, unbridled creativity is not always to be encouraged. For the past three years the items on my emailed Christmas list (subject line: X-mas Madness!!!!) haven’t changed; I’ve asked for a wristwatch (no Velcro), a pair of wellies, Barnes and Noble gift cards, and one of those bike lights that makes you look like a coal miner. In that same time period, I’ve received the following gifts from my family: a wooden llama with real llama fir affixed to the body, an oversized magnifying glass, two good pairs of flats, a set of books that are hollow inside, an hour glass, a statue of a hand giving the peace sign, a colonial girl in the shape of a Christmas ornament, three boxes of brown sugar Pop Tarts, and a pen that plays AM/FM radio.

When I'm feeling particularly whimsical I like to picture the evolution Christmas lists in my family as a montage in a Christmas movie (one about how families change and part ways but are always united by an intangible string of tinsel called affection). Think of it as a hackneyed slide-show mock-up, intended to show the quick passage of years, something that would also handily illustrate the progression of our Christmas glee into cold-hearted adolescent materialism and pragmatic collegiate begging.

In the beginning my sisters and I were innocent sorts. We clutched at the catalogs from the Sunday newspaper, filling each glossy page with circles drawn in marker as we lusted after dolls and brick-like electronics. From there things got ugly; so ugly that the ugliness became something of an inside-joke. Product names, stores, and underwear sizes were added parenthetically. The word “cash” entered the mix. Irony (“world peace”) lay beside gluttony (“a car”). Disillusionment (“tattoo parlor gift card”) ruled the day.

We were rotten kids, but honest; knowing that we would open our stockings to my mother’s signature mix of deodorant, hair ties and slipper socks didn’t make us want that N-64 (or that seafoam-green Vespa) any less. And we were safe in our greed, because it was guiltless: we knew that our parents would with completely ignore requests for bonsai trees and designer jeans and buy us antique stethoscopes and little colonial figurines.

I may mock, but I don't pretend to function any differently. This year I shall be gifting my family, in no particular order, the following items: a birdfeeder shaped like a flood lantern, a rug in the shape of a panda pelt, a pillbox hat, books by dreary modernists, a cowboy hat made of glass, and a pair of sock garters.

Multiple Facets

2010-12-15T17:28:00.000-08:00

I realize that lately I've been posting endless gobs of text with no pictures to break up the persistent landscape of black-grey ranting. Ergo, in an effort to seem multifaceted (I'm a person with multiple facets, I promise), I'm going all pictures today. Feast your tired eyes on our creepy Christmas figurines.

(Please note the consistent yellowness of any picture taken in my home; it's a combo of spaceship-esque lighting and weird orange walls that gives it that marmalade-y shade.)

Emily-Postian Wisdom

2010-12-13T20:52:00.000-08:00

Due to my fondness for reading advice columns — confronted with a newspaper I’ll do the advice column, the four angriest editorials, and Zits, in that order — I thought that I knew all there was to know about office Christmas parties. This time of year those sassy little paragraphs (heralded always by a demure photo of some hard-bitten, hair-poofin’ journalist dame of old) are full of tales of office party woe in marvelously cookie-cutter patterns. There are folks who drank too much and mouthed off to the boss, folks who drank too much and went home with the boss, or folks who didn’t drink enough when the boss was drinking and are now branded proverbial sticks-in-the-mud, and all of these folks are writing in to Dear Whoever.

On the whole I don’t mind the festive flavor of these entries; I like a little holiday spirit in my manufactured human interest. Besides, they’ve always got great alliterative aliases like, “Stranded with Santa” or “Reluctant Reindeeress.” But on the whole I’ve never been too impressed with the drama of these dilemmas — I’ve always been too aware of the pervasive aura of authority surrounding authority figures, to say nothing of the loudness of my own two-drink giggle, to get properly soused in the same building in my boss. Thus, I’m a bit of a hard sell, and not always sympathetic to folks who puke eggnog through the sunroof of their bosses’ limo. (I'm sometimes a bad person, but I try to make up for it by crying during every movie featuring a dog as the title character.)

Then, of course, comeuppance: I got invited to a fancy office Christmas party and realized the true weight of attending an open bar event with my coworkers, smiling politely, wearing some form of hosiery and something more in the beautification department than my usual toothpaste + deodorant regime. My head about exploded.

I’ll break here, not because it seems logical in the flow of the narrative but because I always get a lot of flak about advice columns from my delightful literary friends and I’ve only got two-paragraph’s worth of self control when it comes to defending myself. So here, my friends, lies the justifications and context for the above claims. I don’t read the advice columns because I think they’re real letters or because I think that the advice particularly applies to me. I read them in part because I like reading features of the newspaper that take up little physical space on the page, the kind that you can read under your desk after you’ve folded that section of the paper into a purse-sized square for easy transport. It’s a holdover from my crossword-in-the-notebook college days.

I also read advice columns because I used to be obsessed with Evelyn Waugh, especially the story The Loved One, in which a girl kills herself on the advice of an advice columnist. I read advice columns with the idea that some nutso might be waiting with bated breath for that little paragraph of Emily-Postian wisdom, swearing to follow every bland suggestion to the letter (or the ledge, whichever comes first).

And suddenly, as I opened the Evite to my company’s Christmas party, I became precisely as anxious as the advisees of my overactive imagination. I worried about the appropriateness of my shoes, how many and what kind of beverages one should consume when you want everyone to forget that you’re the youngest person in the room, and what kind of alliterative aliases I should assign my coworkers to help my husband remember their names.

I read this novel once, probably ten years ago. The title slips my mind, but I remember that the main character had a girlfriend with endometriosis (the things that stick, eh?) that he cheated on and a job proofing manuscripts for clichés. Anyway, at the end of the novel this dirt-bag guy finds some kind of redemption and writes a book full of clichés that have occurred in his sordid life and the point is that clichés aren’t clichés when they’re happening to you. I had that sort of dirt-bag redemption moment this week with regard to social etiquette questions in the newspaper.

Now, if I could just remember the title of that novel, I might have some kind of conclusion here.

Oh, It's Applicable

2010-12-08T15:22:00.001-08:00

I’m frequently told that I don’t exhibit enough Christmas spirit during this time of year. Usually the person who tells me this is wearing a Santa hat, a reindeer broach with some kind of light-up mechanism, and a bright red crew-necked sweatshirt, and it’s usually because I’ve done something like send a mass text containing a picture of my neighbor’s enormous inflatable Noah’s Art display (the coupled animals, like my tormentor, are wearing Santa hats) with the caption, “I’m not up on my bible verses but is this even applicable?”

My other notable infractions include protesting the local classic rock station, which decided mid-November that there’s “nothing more classic than Christmas” and started playing Christmas jams, whining about the way the mall traffic prevents me from making an easy left turn into the parking lot of a preferred burrito joint, and pointedly not eating any free candy canes. I’m known around town as a fully-formed but painfully soft-spoken tyrant. But I ask you this: would a real Christmas-hater take the trouble of setting up this yuletide bait and tackle shop to satisfy the semi-mandatory requirement for holiday “desk flair” at her workplace?

I think, emphatically, not. (What’s sad is that I decorated my workspace before I made time to decorate my house; the, um, "houses" that go beside this one are still boxed up with some garland and a single string of colored lights.) This is the action of perfectly regular Christmas citizen, a person who was so bowled over by the jolliness of the display that she puked her credit card all over Etsy in a fit of bait-and-tackle induced Christmas shopping.

If getting Santa hats works anything like that angel business in It’s a Wonderful Life, I’m pretty sure this little number just earned me some points.

Deceptively Chewy

2010-12-05T12:15:00.000-08:00

Today I went to a pizzeria after work instead of going to a coffee shop. I don’t know what possessed me; it was cold outside, perfect coffee weather, and I sat, intermittently, beside about 13 different coffee shops in traffic on my drive home. Besides that, coffee shops, especially midday coffee shops attended by inattentive teens preoccupied with flirting and daring each other to do espresso shots, have the best single-purchase-to-laptop-loafing ratio. If I had to put a name on it, I’d say that I was just hungry and that I’ve had a few too many cookies from the deli case — somehow generically while deceptively chewy — for lunch lately. Fancy that. A pizzeria in the middle of the g.d. day.

Anyway, this pizzeria is a sad sort of pizzeria in my neighborhood, down the block from the un-sad but complete depressing new Best Buy shopping center. The pizza place used to be a Taco Bell; you can tell from the windows. My husband says that he would have known from the visible piping along the ceiling (red now, once purple) and the way the grout between the tiles is deep enough to evoke the image of someone mopping up spilled Pepsi and nacho cheese, easing the mess along the grooves and into a big drain in the floor. For me it was all windows, though; they’re low and wide, with a big arch and porous sills. Totally fast-food windows.

I won’t bother to go into describing my pizza, which I knew from experience would be a good deep-dish, a pit of sauce contained in a cup of slightly burnt crust. And I won’t go into my warbling attempts to figure out what people eat when they go to pizza alone. (Personal pizza, by the way, is still a thing). Surely no one’s interested in another tale of profound social awkwardness and besides, pizza is a family food and tales of solo-binges are never funnier than they are sad. It’s like going ice-skating alone — Something really amazing could happen at the rink, but everyone will be too busy making whimpering noises to hear anything besides that you were alone.

The important thing about my midday trip to the pizzeria is that it proved itself a far superior place for writing and snacking than the coffee shop that I usually frequent. It was quiet for one thing, with no Christmas music by bands that sound sort of like The Decemberists but just, you know, aren't. There’s none of that communal feeling that you get in a coffee shop either (something that I’m sure only appeals to people like me, who require a vacuum to be properly productive). People here aren’t a little proud of themselves for looking slick in their beanie and carrying on the great intellectual tradition of coffee shop culture. A pizza parlor at 1 p.m. is a silent, slightly ashamed place; the counter is vacant and the television shows muted infomercials.

The plusses keep piling up. There’s no one to fight with over outlets because no one else has their computer. There’re fewer crazy homeless guys using the bathrooms. The pizza-themed art is downright inspirational. They give you refills instead of encouraging you to buy a new beverage. I didn’t see a single Kindle or self-satisfied Kindle user in the whole place.

Of course, the pizza + soda bill came to a towering $6.89, which trumps my usual $1.80 latte by a fair few dollars and marks it as a one-time indulgence not the start of a bitchin’ new habit. Shelling out to be productive is illogical even in latte-sized increments; anything over 5 dollars is downright criminal. Still I think there is the potential here for a real loitering breakthrough: When seeking quiet one should go to places where the grub is less about, you know, getting all jacked up on caffeine and more about stuffing your face and taking a nap.

Rain Forest-Derived Strength

2010-12-01T21:16:00.000-08:00

I have absolutely nothing to say about blinds. They’re a useful thing, a completely necessary thing for marathon sleeping and pointed mind-your-own-business shuttering. Even the crappiest blinds present a somewhat impressive melding of little plastic strips and nylon rope pulley systems. And then there’s the distinct zip noise of blinds being pulled violently, the sound of those concave plastic strips coming neatly together when someone wraps that ugly cord (always with a few knots and tangles) around their hand and bears down. Beyond that, there’s nothing interesting about blinds. I used to have some, myself, and then a dog from the jungle ate them.

To be fair to the dog on all points of nationality and feats of rain-forest-derived strength, he wasn’t just out of the jungle when he ate them. The dog was, in fact, a veteran resident of 7 days, certifiably Honduran-American with papers, vaccines, and a dog collar from Petco. But he came from the jungle, more or less; he was adopted by a post-Peace-Corps lady-pal of mine and shipped home to the American suburbs, where he quickly assimilated. By day 7, I was mostly calling him a jungle dog to keep myself amused.

But in the end Igor (that being name of the aforementioned jungle dog) justifed my disproportionate sense of suspense at his arrival, though I suppose nothing could justify the number of jokes that I made about Jungle 2 Jungle. He tricked me with all of his demure raw-hide chewing and delicate napping poses -- I left him alone and he ate my wooden blinds.

To be clear about the nature of this incident, I should mention that the blinds in my home were there when we moved in and that I had given them absolutely no thought until I came home to find them in shambles. It was only while picking up the splinters and chucking them into my recycle bin that I realized that the blinds were made of wood and came from some conglomerate window company with a disgustingly catchy jingle. (There were many tags, all in places that I might have seen if I’d ever bothered to dust things as uninspiring as blinds.) It wasn’t until later, when we were eating pizza and toasting the unnerving yellow of the jungle dog’s eyes, that some chunk of cultural intelligence wiggled to the forefront of my brain and informed me that blinds are a rather expensive sacrifice.

As a tragedy the blinds situation was a minimal one; I didn’t care a lick for the blinds themselves and it gave me something to say in a scandalized voice in the breakroom at work this week. And there was probably something of a silver-lining hanging about philosophically, maybe about the value of the things you can’t be bothered to notice, or maybe an opportunity to replace the blinds with something I actually liked and cared about. Too bad it was the blinds he ate and not something I’m remotely interested in replacing.

After an embarrassingly long period of consideration, I decided against the cardboard and beach towels approach that graced our apartment long ago. I went to Lowe’s, like all lost suburban souls, and bought the knock-off version of the same blinds. I think you could tell the difference, if you were looking closely at the grain of the staining and at the ugly little knobs at the end of the pulleys. I’m banking on the fact that no one with any sense ever bothers to look at blinds.

Fold and Ball

2010-11-29T17:57:00.000-08:00

The days following Thanksgiving are ritual ones, usually, full of standing in special, suspenseful lines at the mall and sitting in booths at Chinese restaurants where (only minutes before, mind you) paper snowflakes have been weaseled beneath the glass tabletop beside the Zodiac calendars. For a lot of us, the aptly if dramatically heralded “Thanksgiving weekend” is spent embroiled in a host of traditional post-turkey transition acts — we buy a tree for the next holiday and gather on the side of the highway to watch the local corn-maze crumble beneath an enormous mower, all the while digesting the same food that we digest every year. Me, I like to spend my long weekend thinking about how I don’t own any flannel sheets.

Okay, I suppose if you were to look at it on a calendar or something equally square and nit-picky, there’s probably little evidence or truth to the above claim. But I do ponder my lack of flannel sheets at least once every winter and since I dwell in a special world of obliviousness and made-for-TV brainwashing, I tend to mark the beginning and end of seasons with the preparations for the next commercial-holiday-shit-show; ergo, winter starts when Christmas “starts” and in winter I tend to think of flannel sheets. (What I enjoy most of about this paragraph is that it’s composed entirely of justification for the first paragraph — there’s no glory in being correct the first time ‘round.)

The impressive thing — if I can venture to say that anything on the topic of linen is impressive — is that I have a helluva stash of sheets. Many years ago I only had one set, extra-long twin sheets of blue “t-shirt” material, purchased in the “College Prep” section of Target for my pointedly not extra-long twin bed. They swooped a bit in the middle, because of their excessive length, and I threw away the top sheet because I knew a girl who studied in Denmark and said that the top sheet was completely passé in Europe.

Anyhow, now I’m absolutely silly with sheets. I’ve got a linen closet full of neatly folded top sheets and balled up fitted sheets; all of them slightly cheap, in hues of blue and brownish-grey, slick without being particularly soft. They stand all day beside my impressive collection of towels — far more terry-cloth than a family of two would ever reasonably need. The towels, too, reflect the popular theory that a bottle of lotion and some form of linen is a good gift for your strange niece or your son’s seemingly serious girlfriend: I’ve got, in staunch pairs, towels in teal, blue-green stripe, red, dark blue, and mauve. I’m one of those people who could use a separate towel for their hair every day and not run out.

It’s getting cold here now, some nights near 30 degrees, and flannel sheets would be welcome, but I’m still fairly certain that a person shouldn’t think of sheets with as much reverence as I do. My sheets aren’t nice and I don’t take any particular pains with them — fabric softener is for sissies and chaffers as far as I’m concerned. But I like the look of a full linen cabinet; I’ve been in a state of considering this linen cabinet from Ikea for almost as long as I’ve been thinking about flannel sheets.

It’s probably a throwback from reading all of those novels where linen played into the dowry of women…Sometimes I walk down the sheet aisle at the ultra shady Linen Outlet beside my favorite taqueria (always in a state of “Closing Close-Out!”) and think, “Some chick once had to hem a whole sea-faring trunk of these suckers so that she could marry an old guy with a hard to pronounce name.” Those are usually days when I’m glad for soulless machine-made sheets but still a little sad about the Linen Outlet.

You’re probably wondering, if you’ve bothered to get this far, why I don’t just go out and buy some flannel sheets to fold and ball, respectively, into my linen cabinet for the winter. I’m sort of afraid that flannel sheets might be that kind of pointless post-Thanksgiving ritual, an effort at keeping warm that’s more trouble than it’s worth in the end. Like when you wear knit tights under your jeans to a bar-type event and spend the whole night visiting the bathroom with bar-type frequency, where you are delayed with the general hilarity of wrestling with your layers.

The Fish Bowl Never Got Cleaned, Either

2010-11-24T15:21:00.000-08:00

I shuffle around most of the time about 3/8th of the way into a good-natured panic attack, so I suppose that I shouldn’t be shocked when I come down with a gnarly case of hostess anxiety. It’s not that I worry about the cleanliness of my house or the quality of my snacks; it’s a nervousness born from too much planning and preparation — the classic nerves of a girl who used to pack her backpack for the first day of school 3 weeks in advance. For me, hostess anxiety is that strange state of waiting for the guests to arrive, that bleak period when, not wanting to muss anything up, you wander about examining your house for symbolically misplaced knickknacks. Blame it one that nervy personality, but I somehow managed to be surprised — frequently downright shocked — pretty much every time.

I wish I could say that I get this worked up over fancy-dress dinner parties — you know, the kind you always read about throwing in magazines that list the best butchers and the suavest florists. On the contrary, the most I’ve got on my plate is a possible gathering of old friends for some mid-day brews and left-over pumpkin pie. But still I worry, going around stockpiling snacks and staring at my bookshelf for hours, wondering if I really want to be the kind of person who has a wooden statue of Abe Lincoln in their living room. (I do.)

Like most people I know, I love making sweeping and unjustified claims about my whimsical liberal arts education; in this particular case, I’d like to pretend that my brain, over-heated and weary from too many nights circling every occurrence of the color red in primitive German fairy tales, got stuck in symbolism mode. You see, once the floor is swept and the dog-bed thoroughly lint brushed, I frequently find myself glaring around my home with the eye of someone stuck between critical reading and uber clichéd set production. I ask myself how my house would be torn apart by undergraduates if I were to sit down and describe it — I’m fairly certain that the crumpled up toothpaste tube in the bathroom suggests my disheveled appearance and, undoubtedly, my impending doom.

I don’t know when, exactly, I got to be this way about having people over. When I first moved out on my own (“own” being a relative term to include a passel of ladies), we were shoddy housekeepers and gallant, if infrequent, hosts. We’d give the bathroom an once-over, sure, before some major event (heralded, always, by a cleverly-worded invite on everyone’s favorite social networking site). But we never bothered to, like, vacuum or clean the piles of recycling off of our balcony. The fishbowl never got cleaned, either, but I think that was because we always hid the fish in one of the closets to prevent people from feeding the fish people-food, a seemingly unavoidable result of cheap beer interacts with cheese snacks.

I definitely got into it later, during the time I lived in a coy little apartment with crank windows and a stove that threatened constantly to burst into flames. I only had rule over one room and I didn’t have much furniture, just a bed, desk, and bookcase, but I prepared painstakingly for guests. My desk was the only real display surface and I took it seriously; I would set my day planner out at a right angle in one corner (so organized!), a teapot and half-filled cup at the other (so hardworking!), stack a few documentaries behind my monitor (so edgy!), and then scatter half-finished crossword puzzles amongst the framed pictures along the wall-edge of the table (so smart, yet so potentially-family-oriented!).

[Oddly, people were always more impressed with the way the stove smoked than with my symbolic impersonation of collegiate perfection.]

Though I'm perfectly willing to prattle on about it, this nonsense about house-symbolism and hostess anxiety shouldn't be taken seriously. You can’t go around shrieking about foreshadowing every time a light bulb burns out in your oven or a curiously knife-shaped shadow crosses your shadow on the ground. Just keep your dying houseplants out of sight; it makes people awfully nervous.

The Water Fountain is Unrelated

2010-11-22T14:49:00.000-08:00

If you haven't heard enough nonsense out of me today, give this link a little clickeroo.

An essay I wrote about the trials of holiday negotiations and the wonders of sitcom reality is up at The Bygone Bureau. And if I seem a little cynical about people who can't get over Friends, give me a break. I'm acting tough so that no one guesses that I can't get over News Radio.

Today, as a matter of interest, is also the first day that it's felt remotely like winter out in climate-bleached California. I'll be pulling out my thick woolen tights soon -- there's just enought time to get a couple of good runs for my mother to despair over when she lines the family up for the annual holiday photo shoot.

Metal Bikini = Ancient Greece

2010-11-21T18:37:00.000-08:00

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a nerd; I don’t have any pretensions at being elected to the post-collegiate Homecoming Court. But I like to monitor the level of nerdiness that I’m projecting at any given time. Currently I hover around the I-go-to-the-theater-to-see-period-pieces-and-my-glasses-fog-up-when-I-open-the-dishwasher level. To maintain this status, I try to keep my interest in literature of the fantasy persuasion on the so-called "D.L." Pasty chicks with an aversion to wearing sandals have enough trouble without reading books about lady-necromancers in public.

All of this worry seems needlessly self-conscious, I’m sure but imagine that you're scanning the “Missed Connections” section of the Personal Ads, and you see an ad reaching out to a young woman who rides your bus line and meets your description. It closes: “Everyday I think of speaking to you but you seem so immersed in the book that you are reading about that chick that was raised by dragons, wears nothing but a metal bikini and a dragon-claw talisman, and moves things with her mind.” Sure, it’s still romantic, but consider how much more romantic it would have been if you were reading just about anything else.

Even as I type the above sentence I’m wincing; periodically-reformed and closeted as I may be, I know that I’ve been that little-lady-thick-paperback chick before and probably will be again. My affection for fantasy works like that. No matter how many jokes I make about the formulaic nature of the plots and the lunacy of the fan-base, I still finding myself inching towards that magnetic section of the bookstore, just passed where the anime-kids crouch on the floor over their manga.

No number of “fantasy interventions” (performed by friends who seize unguarded books and read aloud at random about the sizzling sexual tension between the prince and his female guard who cross-dresses in order to earn her knighthood) or bad TV movies can stop me. I tell myself that admitting a fondness for fantasy is like presenting your hands, palms up, to strangers to examine for WOW calluses and Renaissance Faire dust under the fingernails, but I always falter.

My most recent transgression started, like most transgressions do, as a joke. My husband and I planned an evening at home watching movies, classy ones where the phallic symbolism is tastefully rooted in skyscrapers, savings bonds and oil rigs, not swords. But when I signed into my Netflix account I that Netflix, with its boundless wisdom and demographic foresight, was recommending Xena: Warrior Princess for me.

One episode wouldn’t hurt, I decided, especially if I played up the camp factor and pretended to think that the whole things was "hilarious." Of course, when the first episode ended, I started another, transfixed by the voice-over intro and arm-swish sound effects. As I fell asleep to the sound of pummeling, my only regret was that my Netflix account would remember my actions and list them, mockingly, in the “You Recently Watched” column the next morning, like a bad metal-bikini-means-ancient-Greece hangover.

My fantasy regressions often start like that, with the earnest acknowledgement that the whole thing is a little ridiculous. I’ll pick up a giant fantasy tome in a bookstore, something paperback with raised lettering and a leering dragon on the cover, and make a joke about it. But as I’m flipping through the italicized preface with mockery in my heart, I’m also glancing at the price tag.

If I fold and buy the book with the leering dragon, it will kick-start a fantasy binge. Once the first book in a series is consumed in a blazing whirl of multisyllabic names and treaties with clansmen, there is no closure until I’ve read the whole series. And the bad thing about fantasy series is that they rarely end. Or it could be the very good thing about them.

Knitter Quitters

2010-11-17T13:44:00.000-08:00

I got it into my head that I’d learn to knit, partially because I like wearing beanies but also because I like going to the fabric store with some purpose beyond smelling the puff paints. I crapped out, however, and while I still swoon over the hand-knit sweaters of my more devoted textilite pals, I never really picked up the knack of knitting. But like every dork who fails to knit, I can crochet; crocheting is the veritable bastard-child of the yarn world.

I learned to crotchet when I was a kid staying with my grandmother. She was a demonic crotchetier — the cupboards of my parents’ house are full of afghans woven in big, blocky patterns — and when she wanted us to keep quiet during her soaps she’d hand us crotchet needles to play with. (I know; what ever happened to the shut-up-kid popsicle, right?) My sisters and I would hook-and-loop long lines of single crotchet and go home again clutching our needles and vowing to weave beautiful doll clothes and fashionable drawstring purses for ourselves. None of us ever did, of course, but I did once run over an abandoned crotchet needle with the family vacuum and break it (the vacuum).

For the most part my interest in crotchet went out the window with my interest in the BSC (Baby-Sitter’s Club). [Now I’ve wasted 20 minutes reading the Wikipedia entry on the Baby-Sitter’s Club and clicking on all of the links. I had no idea that Mary-Anne and Logan eventually broke up (in Mary-Anne’s Big Breakup) over “incompatible differences.” And Mallory ended up going to boarding school because of bullying? Well shit.]

To return to crotchet, I realized when we moved a few months ago that we had, for some reason, a rather substantial amount of yarn. I’ve always had a few random crotchet needles rattling around in my desk drawers, so I decided that I would try to redeem my knitting failures by crocheting a blanket. I decided on a blanket because it was getting rather chilly and a giant, flat square seemed far easier than anything with bends or arm-holes.

And I’ve been diligent, I tell you, downright devoted. Unfortunately, my diligence hasn’t really translated into much visible progress. You see, my first mistake was also a serious one. I didn’t consult a pattern; I figured that I would just hook-and-loop a long baseline string and build symmetrically from there. The one thing I didn’t count on was the ease of the single-crochet knot. By the time I was two or three lines in, it became apparent that I’d made the blanket far too long. This thing is mammoth but I can’t stop now; crotchet is the last paradise for knitter-quitters.

(Know anyone super-naturally tall in need of a scarf?)

Veggie Special

2010-11-15T19:30:00.000-08:00

I love eating in shady places. Not uniformly shady places, like a chicken-based fast food restaurants; I want to see slummy entrepreneurial spirit — I don’t like my greasy franchised. The advantages of the shady restaurant are few but poignant. Small, suspicious places are usually quiet and almost never busy. Many of the eateries in the suburb where I live are hip because they’re owned by ex-Food Network celebs and are tacked on to crappy end of a high-end mall. Most of the time I’m alright with the theoretical threat of food poisoning; I’m hardly ever alright with the idea of standing around in a mall parking lot with one of those beepers.

One of the best shady eateries I had the pleasure of frequenting was this place called Ali Baba’s in Davis, California. The first time I went there I was a freshman in college and on my way to one of those dreadful freshman activities (my guess and no lie: a Christmas screening of a movie staring Colin Firth). It’s a Middle Eastern place, with card tables, garage-sale art on the walls in gaudy frames, and a single counter with those free-standing condiment pumps, but my first time there I ate a hamburger. I did this because I was the sort of young person who mostly ate a rotation of meat and ketchups and subscribed to the irrational belief that eating meat in a place with multiple health-code violations was the safest thing to do. Later I started going more regularly and always ordered the unchanging special, dubbed with amazing mystery, the “veggie special.”

The veggie special was always the same and it was always served by the same heavy-set guy, who, upon seeing you open the door, would heave himself up from one of the small tables, saunter through a doorway, and emerge behind the counter with a leer. The portions were huge; a Styrofoam to-go bucket of rice with a sloppy soup bowl full of “the special” and a paper cup full of Greek yogurt. It was enough to share between two people, but on rainy days when my silly undergraduate coursework required that I watch 5 adaptations of Northanger Abbey in a single weekend, I’d definitely muddle through a serving alone. (I can't help myself, so I'll link this picture from Daviswiki of the veggie special, though the main site discusses the recent change of ownership and regrettable transition away from being a shady place.)

The veggie special turned me on to a number of tastes and textures that were missing from my Americana upbringing. Somewhere, floating in all of that tomato-y mystery sauce, were chickpeas and lentils, which now number amongst my favorite filler vegetables. I’d also never had yogurt that didn’t wear a little tin hat and taste like strawberry jam. (Or, more accurate but more obscure, like that syrupy red gunk in strawberry pies sold at 24-hour booth places, like Denny’s or a Black Bear Diner.) I was woefully ignorant of things beyond corndogs and cheeses of the brightest orange.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to recreate the wonderful salty stew. Most recently I used the Dahl recipe from The Accidental Vegan cookbook (by Devra Gartenstein who writes this blog) and it turned out alright. The recipe was simple and the stew was tasty, but there was something missing. It might be my poor sense of Indian cooking and my fumbling attempt to use spices beyond cinnamon, but I sort of think it was the troop of flies that used to wander Ali Baba’s. Some things are kind of about the atmosphere, however crappy.

Cake Half Full

2010-11-10T19:34:00.000-08:00

When you’re in a two-person family and one of the members isn’t really into eating cake, you’ve got to figure out a way to make cake-eating something else than an Olympic-sized, solo gorge-fest. Especially if you’re the person in the posse inclined to make cake and you're, you know, also the party who wants to eat some.

There are a whole slew of obvious answers here: you could halve the recipe, take some cake to work, or just practice some good old fashion cake resistance. But there are moments in my life when I don’t feel like the bready texture of a scratch-made cake; I’d like to grub on the neon-yellow of a box cake and glory in all preservative madness. And then, provided I have eggs (always my limiting factor), I usually do it.

Recently, however, it occurred to me that a box cake could be halved as easily as anything else and the rest of the mix set aside for another moment of weakness. So I’ve started to separate the dry ingredients of my cake mix into two (approximately) equal batches and then making a single 8-inch cake. It’s amazing how something so simple took me so long to figure out. It’s also amazing how much I like that distinctive taste of box cakes.

What’s less amazing is how often I think making cake is a good idea. I mean, it’s amazing in that “I’m frankly amazed” kind of way, but not in that “You’re spelling test was amazing, little Susie” way. Come on, don't be coy. You know what I mean.

Just Eat the Rolls

2010-11-08T13:45:00.000-08:00

The holiday season always gets a bit of a jump-start in my family, sometime slightly before Thanksgiving. The weeks between the first Christmas catalogs and the actual holidays are always tricky; people are still drunk on the fun of family-free puesdo-holidays like Halloween and “Labor Day.” This lull encourages you to believe that yes, you do like the holidays, and no, Drunk 3rd Cousin Larry didn’t really mean it when he said that all vegetarians were communists. For my family that strange mid-season optimism always leads to a jump-start gathering — usually a bloody, feathery one, clad in an attractive blend of camouflage and dog hair.

Here goes: People in my family hunt things. Mostly fatty birds, personality-free mammals, and smelly fresh-water fish but I have known some of them to take a shot at something as endearing as a man-deer. Thus, we historically get together on the first weekend of pheasant season in California and, um, watch the men-folk hunt. It’s marvelously feudal and afterwards there are plates of mayonnaise-based salads.

This odd traditional is sometimes a little hard for my friends — especially those friends who haven’t had the pleasure of venturing to my childhood home and meeting the giant pig named “Monkey” who lives there — to reconcile with my squeamish personality. And it is trifle freakish; I can’t even muster up enthusiasm for those shooting range bachelorette parties that I keep getting invited to and yet I consent to a yearly weekend of wandering amongst double-barrel shotguns handled by men who’ve been drinking Bud Light since dawn.

Family obligation is an odd, odd thing and pheasant season, while annual, is no different than any other family reunion for me: I regard the weekend with optimistic hesitance, squirm my way through it by making polite, unfunny jokes and eating 12 rolls at dinner, and spend the ride home making bitchy did-you-see-how-many-rolls-she-ate remarks, content in the knowledge that my relatives are doing the same. And here you thought this was a story about how cruel hunting is to animals.

(Speaking of animals, this sad-eyed minx is my dog. She is, however woefully, a hunting dog, and was a gift from my parents. More like a fluffy blond piece of adorable subliminal messaging.)

I think fairly often about the rampant weirdness of trying to find a place in old family traditions for the mid-twenties-looks-fifteen-years-old members of the family. Of course I don’t expect these pheasant outings to go unchanged as I get older. For one thing, I no longer consent to wear camouflage coveralls and to let my parents take my picture holding the birds that my dad shot. But coming from a position of entrenched social awkwardness, compounded by a redneck family who still considers a girl wearing glasses something of a pity, things can get a little awkward. Especially once they figure out that you’re married and that your husband doesn’t have his hunting license, drives a Saturn, and sometimes wears cardigans.

Things get worse when they realize that the real reason that you don’t want to watch the hunt isn’t because the guns hurt your ears — you gesture vaguely at your ears and everyone grumbles about young people and their headphones — but because you don’t want to see dead birds. You really get into trouble when they realize that your reluctance didn't evaporate with the rest of your teenage petulance and that you might be, like, off pheasant hunting for life. As for not eating meat, you’re really in a bind there: If you admit vegetarianism you’re a commie and anything less is an insult to their buckshot-removal skills.

(Like I said: Just eat the rolls.)

Pheasant season starts this weekend and I’m as prepared as I can be. I’ve made my reservations at the nearest Indian casino, dusted off my over-night bag, and practiced three ways to politely change the subject away from politics and the way that I’m letting my best child-bearing years pass me by. Now all I’ve just got to figure out what to talk about while the all of that silly blood is draining out of that charmingly dead bird.

Blocks. Of. Text.

2010-11-04T13:28:00.000-07:00

I’d love to raise my novelty mug on this fine Thursday in honor of PBS documentaries. (Yes, I hear you. PBS, public library fines, and state parks, it’s a little too grotesquely do-goodery. I never yield to pedestrians; I promise.) But seriously, there are few things that ride the line between hilarious and educational as cleanly as a PBS documentary, to say nothing of the totally amazing quill-signing sound effects that tend to permeate the entire thing.

I enjoy the predictability of the shots, how no faces are shown besides those in painted portraits of the main players (cue the slow zoom while the narrator recites the early-child anecdotes), and the inevitable period-style boots pacing the floor and the ominous foot-shuffling sound effects. I like the exaggerated southern or eastern accents during voice-over speeches and how there is always a moment when you see the lower-halves of men rushing into battle and get to listen to the generic battle sounds — sounds that I suspect are the same ones used in those popular coliseum shots in ones about ancient Rome. All of that careful, measured narration behind scenes of decapitated historical reenactors signing letters, polishing swords, and blowing out candles…Ah, the drama.

I’ve had occasion to watch a couple PBS documentaries lately, one on FDR and another on the Alamo (titled with deadpan shamelessness, “Remember the Alamo”) and I mean no insult to the medium of documentary in praising them. There is just something pacifying, I suppose, about a documentary from PBS, a characteristic that’s enhanced by the fact that the documentaries from the 70’s look exactly the same as the ones produced three years ago.

Don’t get me started on that stock footage of that circling hawk over the plains and that eternal, echoing bird-squawk noise (substituted for a squawk with more reverb and slowed down footage when used to suggest a vulture attack). I tear up for that one every time.

Barkeep is Never Funny

2010-11-01T15:50:00.000-07:00

This is what Halloween is like if you enjoy being lame. (I do.) More on beers and being lame — what a marvelous tagline! — below this fine picture in which you can see part of my embarrassing Henry VIII pen holder.

I have this obnoxious tendency to be on time. (I say “obnoxious” because I realize, quite cheerfully, that in the age of the belated “Are you here?” text message being prompt is downright inconsiderate.) But don’t worry; this isn’t a discussion of time v. watches v. cell phones, as discussed quite pleasantly in The Atlantic last week. It’s about the amount of time that I spend hunched over the steering wheel with my book (punctual people should always carry emergency paperbacks) because I’m early for a dinner-date, and how I can never get up the gumption to wait in the bar. I’ve never been good at bars — ordering at bars, standing in bars, the pull-up bar in gym — so I choose to stay in my car or do the uncomfortable standing-while-reading dance of the uncommitted in the foyer.

I know that it’s silly and endearingly paranoid to say that that I’m not good at a kind of place, especially a sub-section of places that encompasses so many different tones, stools, and an entire spectrum of hilarious and unsanitary sawdust floor coverings. But believe me, as the champion of all awkward people: it is a nonsensical failing I’m quite capable of. Awkward people were made for booth-y places; a booth is practically a cave and unless you’re in a re-run of Happy Days, no one will ever expect you to dance in a place with booths.

I should also clarify that my bar-failing isn’t for lack of trying, either; I’m no serious drinker — no jug of moonshine under my bed — but I’ve partaken of liquors in many public forums, hovered at the end of many bars with my eyes averted and a terrible instinct to raise my hand to get the bartenders attention. In essence, a bar is just like a those high-intensity specialty salad bar restaurants, only with worse lighting and nicer people, and I’ve never been too good at getting salads either.

This is, of course, a much more hilarious than serious affliction. I’m a noncommittal sort and I came of age in a college town where you had to be serious about achieving your drink — elbows were thrown and eyelashes were batted with a vengeance — and even more serious about using the bathroom. (Not the worst combination: It takes 15 minutes to get a drink while constantly deferring to others, so I never was able to drink enough to have to pee more than once.) Tables had to be scouted, poached and then scurried to. Add this to the fact that I suck at doing that weird nodding-while-smiling-while-looking-around-and-also-at-your-phone thing when the jams (epic classic rock is my favorite part of college bars) are too loud and you’ve got a recipe for a bar failure.

Because I moved after graduation to a city of seriously intimidating wine lounges and then to a suburb where I had to lure people to visit with a 6-pack, it happens that at 24 I’ve done most of my copious drinking at parties in apartments where the cops were always pounding down the doors, leading to the inevitable shushing and the whispered rumors that the cops can’t do anything if you don’t answer the door, an alluring but never-utilized strategy, since the flashlight-to-door pounding always scared someone into martyring themselves. This is an oft-repeated joke among my friends from school: Someday we’ll all get together and drink warm alcohol (mixed with Gatorade from a soda machine) very quietly in an effort to recreate those special youthful moments.

But because most of my life goals are stripped straight from movies where people scornfully extinguish the cigarette at the end of their long cigarette holder in someone else’s highball, I have a certain hankering to be good at bars. It’s a classically misplaced desire to be suave and carry the kind of purse that can call a clutch. It’ll come in time, perhaps, after I’ve learned through trial and error how to exude that level of bar-leanin’ sophistication. Thus far I’ve learned that “on the rocks” isn’t a term that you can tack on to just anything, “Rita” is a catchy shortening of “Margarita” on menus and isn’t intended to be spoken aloud, and that no bartender, no matter how tipsy you are, thinks the word “barkeep” is funny.

Every Superhero and Elvis Who Walked By

2010-10-27T15:14:00.000-07:00

Strange as it may seem, there was a Halloween costume contest at my place-of-work today and I had the misfortune of showing up, half-asleep, in a t-shirt, sweater, and jeans. I’m always the first one in so I had plenty of time to realize my mistake; my sluggish brain was sharpened by the subtle increase of heart-rate that came from periodically shaking off the fake spider-webs that dropped from my monitor and clung to my hands. I had time enough, even, to look desperately around my workspace for something that would save me from the title of “jaded nonparticipant who makes people with team spirit feel uncomfortable” — a label that I’m only a few eye-rolls and gnawed fingernails away from on a good day.

I imagined myself making a little pilgrim bonnet out of printer paper like we did every year in elementary school and stapling a plain white sheet to the front of my t-shirt for an apron. I’d tell people, “These are the only parts of my Sexy Puritan costume that are work-appropriate,” and then I’d start laughing desperately and hope they’d join in. In the end I figured that I was already in enough “unofficial but strongly encouraged” trouble without mixing in the waste of office supplies, so I sat down at my desk, steeling myself to explain to every superhero and Elvis who wandered by that I’d simply forgotten my costume.

I have a hard time, I think, feeling certain feelings at the appropriate times. I dig the holidays but I don’t feel infused by them. I can get a little emotional over a can of cranberry sauce that retains its can shape on the plate but I’m also entirely capable of forgetting a Halloween party, simply because I haven’t had a single Halloween-y thought all year. (Aside: This is particularly prevalent with Halloween, ‘cause it’s a pretty dumb holiday. But I have also been known to shoot incredibly blank looks at people who say things like, “It just doesn’t feel like Thanksgiving!” when they have a perfectly good plate of cranberry sauce in front of them.)

I have friends who seem to inherently understand the ins and outs of the holidays. These are ladies who know how to set up little seasonal displays in their living rooms without giving the impression that the gourds and wheat sheaves are there for ironic entertainment. (That’s always my problem.) These are ladies who know when it’s “officially” fall and immediately pull out their wellies and green-brown shirts, dames who intuitively understand when it’s polite to take off their beanie and don’t suffer hat-hair in the process. These are people who put wreathes up — on their doors, no less — and don’t spend the holidays being shunted from one lame family event to another because all of those relatives were satiated by the tasteful tin of flavored popcorn (obligatory Golden Retrievers painted on the side) that arrived in the mail the day after Thanksgiving.

In the end, inconclusively, it’s probably better that I’m not the sort to inherent feel the changing flavors of the seasons, a swaying that’s so adroitly mirrored by the changing of the specialty coffee flavors at the end of the grocery aisles. Sure, I forgot that the Wednesday before Halloween is the booze-less, skank-less Halloween of the corporate world. But if I’d remembered, I’d have had to spring for a costume and then I’d really have something to whine about.

Extra, Extra

2010-10-25T14:36:00.000-07:00

This is going to be a disappointing sort of entry because it’s Monday and I’m tired and I spilled a glob of ketchup on my shirt while eating lunch. Fortunately, there are good reasons for all of these unfortunate things. It’s Monday because yesterday was Sunday; I spilled ketchup on myself at lunch because I simply eat too much ketchup; and I’m tired because I was up until the dark of the night watching this guy perform.

I went, I admit, mostly to humor my husband and with plenty of hip-hop prejudices swimming around in my little indie-pop-loving soul. But like most situations where I pit my stunted-in-the-mid-90s cultural understanding against that my husband’s, I was a little wrong. The show was great; Tim Fite is super neato.

And in honor of his stellar performance and my awesome day wandering the topsy turvy city of San Francisco, I should probably have some arty pictures and spot-on anecdotes to tell. Unfortunately, all I have are a few pedestrian comments to make:

While hiding from a particularly determined torrent of rain, I ordered a side of fries and a can of Coke in a painfully hip-ish cafe (crepes and lots of sun/moon themed art). The barista gave me this look of sheer, pesto-fueled pity, and I immediately wished that I'd sprung for the cob salad and a microbrew; and
I tried to remember what single people did at shows before they had cell phones, leading my husband to describe his pre-cell loitering tactics as leaning on things "exactly like the Fonz;" and
I spent too much time in thrift stores waiting for the show to start, leaving me concerned about the lingering "thrift store smell" in the crowded club; and
I usually write this blog entries on Sunday morning because Sunday mornings seem cozy and because Monday afternoons usually leave me incapable of forming paragraphs and grasping at bullet-point straws.

Like Anything Relatively Pointless

2010-10-20T13:40:00.000-07:00

I don’t know what “PDF” stands for or what techo-magic makes it go, but I do know that PDFs are my lot in life. Over the last three years I’ve spent innumerable hours altering, creating and recreating PDF files. I occasionally have this terrible dream about scrolling through a document that never ends. The sad part is I don’t really mind that much.

I have an uncanny ability to get really jacked up on simple administrative tasks — my relationship with cross-referencing is a little too steamy to describe here. And I can’t stop loving filing and stuffing envelopes though I know that I should feel hemmed in and stunted whenever anyone asks to me do them. But my gooey insides don’t rebel over things like that; I don’t bother feeling hemmed in at work unless there is some kind of company picnic. And when you feel like a peaceful afternoon of brain-deadery, there’s nothing nicer than creating PDF forms.

Yes, you heard/read correctly; I add those obnoxious blue fields. It's what gets me through to my 10 a.m. morning snack (pictured below). A carefully prepared PDF just screams, “I was anticipating your desire to screw with my document, sucker. Please confine yourself to the specified boxes and the carefully selected and sized font options.” I like to email documents that way to folks as a way of letting them know I’m in charge. But then again, maybe that’s the passive aggressive in me.

Of course, like anything relatively pointless, it’s easy enough to go a little overboard. I have to take a few deep breaths whenever I catch myself adding signature lines in fonts with names like “Quill.” I periodically put myself on a diet of Courier New. (If I put myself on a diet of Arial I might have to give myself a face-stabbing.)

It’s fun that never stops. When I’m done I lock the whole thing and save it with some important sounding file name, usually involving the word “Template.” I have to get my jollies somehow.

Trashy, Cowboy Things

2010-10-18T13:24:00.000-07:00

The strangest part about the whole thing is that I started drinking tea to be rebellious, when I was 17 years old and I didn’t know anyone who drank tea when they weren’t sick. My parents had a set of tea cups in their cupboard, far above all of the fanciest wine glasses and the dip-bowl shaped like an apple, with scary little winking faces on the sides, but they never used them. For a chick with a typical set of small town literary pretensions in small town full of coffee-smelling gas stations, the fact that my parents didn’t drink tea was almost enough to sell me on it. Add the fact that tea was so British (I hadn’t yet realized that everyone hates young women who think the Brits are superior because the Pride and Prejudice miniseries where Colin Firth takes his shirt off was based on a British novel), and I swore up and down that I’d be a tea-drinker for life.

But lately, I’ve been thinking about getting a coffee machine, something little and retro, with one of those cloudy plastic bobbles at the top so you know that it’s percolating. And after years of stained Nalgene bottles and soggy tea bags in the sink, I found myself ordering a cup of decaf at a diner last month. The change is part weather, I think; it keeps promising to get cold here and then swelling back up to the 90s. But because I hardly ever do anything for reasonable reasons, it’s safe to assume that it’s also a change of attachment. I don’t need more energy in the mornings and I don’t like coffee anymore than I ever have — I’m just starting to like the idea of it.

Lately I’ve enjoyed the idea of coffee in thermos, coffee while camping, and coffee black in a mug that’s a little too hot to hold. I've even enjoyed coffee as a prop — the inevitable coffee cup in the grasp of sitcom bosses, hung-over bachelors, and reporters working in dark rooms under single lamps. A friend recently commented that I’m developing a distinct affinity for “trashy cowboy things,” and it’s true; I wouldn’t drink it but I especially love the idea of coffee with the grounds just floating at the bottom of the cup, tempered with a shot of whiskey, and warmed in a dented tin pot on a rock.

It was easy for me to hold out this long against the temptation of coffee. As a young adult I was much more enamored of places where a tea stainer and set of 4 glasses were brought to your table than I was of any coffee house. I also have the disadvantage of always having lived somewhere that’s mostly warm and periodically in places where the only coffee shop was a sad, strip-mall Starbucks full of moms in workout clothes. Then there is the fact that my idea of being suave and intellectual involved drinking copious amounts of tea, preferably right after eating something cutting edge like Thai food and before seeing some independent movie in a refurbished theater with some guy who had better bangs than me.

(Short aside: My husband, who does have better hair than me, claims that he simply likes tea and that his consumption has nothing to do with pretensions or a hipster anti-Starbies affiliation. Of course, he was a tea drinkin’ vegetarian when we met and those are the worst kind.)

I first started drinking coffee several years when I was working as a hospital receptionist from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. every morning. There was free coffee in the break room and a stack of new Styrofoam cups just to the side of the Styrofoam cups full of leftover condiment tubes — dozens of ketchups darkened with age, mild sauces from Taco Bell, and mayonnaise from the caf that separated out into various liquids after a few cold mornings. The mornings were usually quiet and I spent them drinking coffee and methodically tearing the rim of my cup into little squares and dropping the squares into the empty bottom of the cup, working my way down until I couldn’t tear any further without spilling the confetti.

Although I appreciated the jolt and came to covet my daily dose — milky brown with three packets of sugar — I saw these cups as a necessary byproduct of the early morning and slight workload; not for a moment did I assume that I liked coffee or that I would ever want to drink it outside of work. I wasn’t, I thought, a coffee person. I was a tea person; I loved those little sammies with cucumbers and no crust. I had a tea kettle that I left out on my stove like a badge, and I used it religiously to prepare a pot of English Breakfast before I settled down to study. (procrasti-shower, meet procrasti-tea.) I lived in a constant state of anticipation: Surely someone, someday, would ask me for some tea and I’d have occasion to whip out my matching milk pitcher and sugar bowl.

But lately, though my taste for English Breakfast hasn’t slacken, I’ve started to doubt my position as a tea person. It’s getting colder and I spend a lot of time in coffee shops pretending to work; the coffee smells delicious and hearty and there are only so many Chai lattes that a person can stomach on an unproductive afternoon. I should probably think about my convoluted assumptions — perhaps if I gave it a little thought I’d realize that there isn’t a reason to choose between the two and that a person’s vehicle of caffeine has little or no bearing on their personality. But I’d rather waste my afternoon thinking about percolators and how there is something soothing in the burble of the coffee pot when compared to the shrill whistle of my kettle.

Dingy Proofs

2010-10-13T15:36:00.000-07:00

Lately I’ve been getting into doing my laundry by hand. Of course, by “laundry” I mean “select vintage dresses that I suspect are near disintegration." And "getting into” is code for “tolerating with enthusiasm.”

There are some advantages of washing your clothes by hand, especially if you (like me) have fallen into the trap of buying and becoming emotionally attached to vintage clothing items. The washer can be a brutal place for clothes when they are substantially older than the machine. And don’t even get me started on the destructive shenanigans that can go down in a dryer. When you wash your clothes by hand you can control the entire process; you’ve got your hands in the water to monitor the temperature, pressure and amount of soapy goodness. Thus far I’ve been using my usual guilt-tinged chemical detergent in the sink, but I’ve heard good things about soap chips. (I have the kind of life where I not only hear things about soap chips, but good things.)

Washing things by hand isn’t terribly time consuming but it can seem that way if you’re a violent laundry abuser like me. Growing up I would jam my entire legion of black hooded sweatshirts into my mom’s industrial-sized washer, heave the sopping pile into her big white dryer (which toppled, back and forth with each rotation), wait 20 minutes, take out a single item and leave the rest. As an adult I frequented laundry mats or over-priced apartment laundry machines and I always stuffed my loads, adding sheets and towels to armloads of jeans and sweaters. I rarely separate by colors and my white socks are dingy proof that I’ve never bleached anything in my entire life.

It’s only lately that I’ve become slightly conscious of my bad habits. It helps that I own my own washing machine now (somehow its square body seems more delicate than my most threadbare dresses) and that I have more room to line-dry my stuff. But I think the real difference is that I no longer have to pay by the load. Somehow that extra $ 1.75 always seemed worth risking two baskets full of clothing. The logic is part of a special economic category (and time period) that also made drinking Natural Light seem like a good idea.

Big, Reptilian Scale

2010-10-11T13:18:00.000-07:00

I'm not into dinosaurs, really. Reptiles, like birds, make me wary. I think it's that not having lips or eyebrows thing; it makes it impossible to tell if you’ve pissed one off. Everything I know about dinosaurs was learned that summer between fifth and sixth grade when every swim party ended with the inevitable chorus of Otter Pops and Jurassic Park. (To say nothing of that slightly later summer when everything ended with Otter Pops and this site.) I probably should have learned something about them in that lower division anthropology class I took back in freshman year of college but the whole thing was more Jane Goodall than T-Rex and besides, I always skipped the lab.

Nevertheless, I checked out The New Illustrated Dinosaur Dictionary from the library last week. I picked it up because the three-horned illustration on the spine seemed to be smiling at me from the stolid ranks of the limited nonfiction section; I took it home because the tagline (“Includes 50 New Dinosaurs!”) made me giggle. I’m notoriously weak before the temptations of the public library, especially nonfiction. I just forked over $17.00 in fines for a book on making soups, a DVD from the third season of The West Wing that turned out to be the Special Features disk, and six biographies of random gin-swilling poets. (Between paying to park at state parks and my library fines, I’ve been a damn upstanding citizen lately.)

It’s my habit to leave my library books in plain sight — usually stacked on my kitchen table or my sad, TV-less entertainment center — so that I stand the best chance of remembering to return them. In addition to being wildly ineffective, this system leaves my library books open to comment from any aimless passersby. The presence of a dinosaur book in the home of a confirmed science-hater (the last time I wore lab goggles I was trying to BBQ over cheap charcoal) elicited a few raised eyebrows, no shortage of questions, and some pretty good jokes about the endless saga of Land Before Time. It’s like the coffee table book that just keeps on giving — only I don’t have a coffee table and I have to return it in two weeks.

But after all of the clever jibes about how I’m sure to win first prize in the science fair are used up, I’m forced to admit that I haven’t really read the book. I’ve browsed a little, snickered over some of the illustrations and snapped a few pictures but I haven’t really read it. And it’s not just because the book was initially published in 1983, which probably makes most of the information in there obsolete. (Watch me not make a joke about Pluto being a planet. We call this self-control, people.) I keep explaining to people that I kept the book around because it amused me and I thought I might be able to write something about my relations with it. I haven’t, but I’m not yet ready to admit that it was bad idea.

I consider myself a champion of pointless musings, a title based on sheer volume and not any particular skill. I’ve got a long history of missing the boat of relevancy: Back in high school when my friends were penning exposes on freshman hazing, I vied for the janitorial staff bio beat. And no matter how thoroughly I keep up with world news and how many trend-tracking blogs I read, I still find myself spending hours thinking about outdated illustrated science tomes. I think my brain functions best in small arenas; I can never remember what it was like at the top of the Eiffel Tower but I have a couple of pretty funny stories about how I thought an undergraduate understanding of Spanish literature qualified me to speak French.

It’s this particular perversion that makes a person see a silly dinosaur book in the library and think, “Well, I like this and thus there must be something here.” Don’t get me wrong; sometimes, there’s something there. But sometimes there’s nothing except for a couple of really silly pencil drawings of talons clutching at dinosaur eggs. And while those dino eggs might make some people contemplate fate on a big, reptilian scale, they only leave me wondering one thing: Why do people always draw dinosaurs with such sad, soulful eyes?

With the exception of the T-Rex (the long-branded sole villain of the dino realm), every dinosaur in this book is sporting an expression that suggests that they've wisely resigned themselves to their fireball fate. Such uniformed long-suffering expressions seem a bit unrealistic to me. But as I believe I've mentioned, I don't know much about it.

Quiz Machine Madness

2010-10-06T18:53:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid I played a Native American for one of those mildly racist community productions of Peter Pan. I also played a Lost Boy but for reasons that had something to do with the skunk fur costume and something to do with a preteen disinterest in being called a boy, I preferred to overlook that half of the role. After it was over I wore that Native American costume (a thin cotton smock with squared shoulders and a beaded fringe) whenever my mother allowed it. In hindsight her version of appropriate differs slightly from mine: I think I sported that thing to every Thanksgiving pageant and history museum field trip until I was ten years old.

I went to a state park museum a few weeks ago (clad in a perfectly inoffensive sweater and jeans) and I was surprised to find how little the average state park museum has changed since my twin-braids-and-beaded-dress days. Everything is still wood-paneled and quiet and there’s still that one attendant who carefully guards the gift shop display of local history books and saber tooth tiger figurines. And right next to that display of art done by local kids (always so many blue ribbons) was one of these Quiz Machines!

Now, it’s not that I like that state parks are under-funded. I fully believe that the parks are important and that a person should be able to see a change over 20-years of state park attendance. But I do like under-funded state parks. There is something charming about them. It’s that something that encourages me to put my 10 dollars into that paper envelope to pay for admission, though I’m certain nobody will ever check. If they aren’t going to get better, I’m perfectly willing to do my part to freeze them in a time period where little lights hooked up to buttons were the cutting edge of technology.

Did I mention that I only stopped wearing that Peter Pan costume when I got a pilgrim one with a shnazzy little bonnet? It's a true story. A very true, very sad story.

If I was the kind of person who had skills I'd put a big MS-Paint-style arrow and the word "Me!" pointing to the kid on the left. I don't have skills, so you'll just have to Nancy Drew it and assume that I'm the kid in the costume. (I am.)