Have van, will travel ineffectively

Once in a while I will suck it up and drive to work. Normally I just suck it up and leave the house by 7:45am to walk to the train, get on it, get off it, walk some more, and get to work by 9am. But on the days that I suck it up and drive, I can leave the house around 8:15 and have a pretty good chance at getting to work a few minutes before 9.

Driving to work takes less time than going by train, but it's (a) more expensive, with the price of gas these days; and (b) so much more aggravating. The only way to get theah from heah is to go through the Caldecott Tunnel. Which, if one is driving away from San Francisco in the morning and towards San Francisco in the evening, isn't nearly as bad as the other way around. But it still sucks, because within the space of about half a mile, four lanes and an entrance ramp must suddenly become two lanes and no entrance ramp.

No, let me rephrase that. Over the distance of about half a mile, four lanes and an entrance ramp filled with impatient, me-first Bay Area drivers with their cell phones glued to their ears must suddenly figure out how to use their turn signals and merge in a polite fashion and somehow wind up with two lanes of completely intact cars. During commute time, this can take anywhere from 5 to 25 minutes in the direction I head. And, as noted above, this is the less trafficked direction.



On Thursday I drove to work because I couldn't get my butt out of bed on time, my wife and I couldn't get our butts out the door in time to get mine on the train, and I really needed my butt to be in a meeting by 9am. The drive in was actually quite smooth. But on the way home, there was apparently a horrendous accident on the interstate, several miles after my exit, and I traveled maybe 3 miles in 20 minutes. Although things were megatons better once I got off the interstate, I was not a very happy camper. I was rather irritated, and I had to pee.

So I came upon the tunnel and its snarl of cars all trying to be in the same place (i.e., first) at once. My strategy for the tunnel merge is to let anyone in front of me as long as they (a) use their turn signal and (b) haven't already tried to cut someone off. This often pisses off the person behind me, but I think I'm modeling good behavior, you know? Around here, getting ahead by a single car length seems to be cause for orgasm; and there are much better methods, yo.

I'd already let a few cars in front of me when I noticed a beat-up turquoise van three cars in front of me. We were at the point in the merge where the signs no longer read 2 LEFT LANES CLOSED 1/2 MILE AHEAD or 2 LEFT LANES CLOSED 1/4 MILE AHEAD, but rather 2 LEFT LANES CLOSED MERGE RIGHT. Our lane wasn't going anywhere. But the driver of this van was. He zipped over to the far left lane, where there was practically no traffic because the lane was ending in about 500 feet. He zipped along, periodically slamming on his brakes to avoid rear-ending those trying to merge. His passenger evidently thought this was great fun, for he was laughing hysterically and gesticulating wildly with a half-full Dr Pepper bottle (presumably containing Dr Pepper, but one can't be sure).

I let maybe 5 or 6 more people in front of me as the far left lane ended, the turquoise van cut someone off at the last minute, and the second lane began to disappear. When the second lane ended, I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw none other than the turquoise van right behind me. Among the two people initially behind the van and me, we must have let at least 10 people in front of us while the turquoise van was partying it up in the not-so-fast lane. One step forward? At least thirteen steps back.

Schadenfreude or no, I couldn't help but start to feel better about that day's commute. And I think California needs a new class of moving violations:

Driving While Stupid.

Public transit story #4: The magic seat

When my wife and I were in tenth grade, we had this chemistry teacher who was, um, a bit odd. I had him first period; my wife had him second period. He liked to play with the bunsen burners. His favorite one was right next to my seat. One day he wanted to show us how different chemicals made different colored flames. So he lit some newspaper on fire. Next to my head. Little bits of burning newspaper flew about the room. I wrote him a note that said I did not appreciate him burning things next to my head and would he please allow me to go to the other side of the room when he wanted to light something on fire. He agreed, but he mocked me severely every time.

This man told racist jokes, made sexist remarks, and was generally an ass for 50 minutes at a stretch. He was also the coach of the girls' tennis team. The girls' tennis team was very good. His chemistry lessons--not so much.

He taught us about electron valences using what he called the Bus Seat Rule. The Bus Seat Rule goes like this: When most people get on a bus alone, they head for a pair of empty seats. Most people will not sit next to someone they don't know unless there is no remaining pair of empty seats. In that case, they will stay as far away from their seatmates as possible. And when an empty pair opens up, most people will abandon their seatmates to go sit alone. He demonstrated this by telling my lab partner to get out of her seat. She did. He sat down next to me and began invading my personal space. I scooted my chair away.

This, he said, is what electrons do.

Either I was an easy target, or he just didn't like me.

Today I was riding the bus. I got on at the beginning of the line. Here is an approximate diagram of the bus at the start of its journey:



Note how many empty seats there are. Note also that I was not sitting in a seat that must be yielded to seniors or people with disabilities. I make a point not to sit in those seats unless all the rest are occupied. I'd sooner sit next to a person I don't know than sit in one of those seats. I don't like people with mobility issues having to wait for me to vacate the seats reserved for them.

When the bus made its first stop, about eight people got on. The first of these was an old woman with a paper grocery bag. I was peacefully reading my book (Donald Barthelme's Forty Stories, a favorite of mine from, well, tenth grade) and all of a sudden I hear "MOVE IT! MOVE! EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME!" from this old woman with her paper grocery bag.

I wasn't going to argue with this woman about how I was there first. Nor about how federal law says nothing about who gets dibs on this seat. Nor about how this particular seat actually had less legroom than most of the other forward-facing seats. Nor about how the rows across from and behind the seat were both open. Nor about how the bus was practically empty. I'd already had a traumatic enough day. If this seat was really that important to her, then by G-d, she should have it.

I moved across the aisle. She maneuvered herself into the seat, put her grocery bag on her lap, and sat there scowling at least until I got off the bus.

She would've made one hell of an electron.

No fooling

Saturday was, of course, April Fool's Day. But none of the following three things that happened to me that day was a joke.

One.
The doorbell rang around 10 in the morning. I opened the door, and there were two middle-aged Latina women on the stoop. "¡Buenos dias!" one of them said. "Do you speak Spanish?"

"No," I said, "but my wife does."

"Oh," the woman said, "we are looking for people who speak Spanish."

"We are both English speakers," I said, "but my wife does know Spanish. You can talk to her if you want."

"No, that's okay," the woman said. "Have a nice day!" The two of them left.

My wife had been peeking at this whole thing from the end of the hallway. "I think they were missionaries," she said. "The one was definitely carrying a Bible."

"She also had a newsletter or pamphlet or something that said 'El Reino' on it," I said. "Does that have something to do with Jesus?"

"It means 'the kingdom'."

"Maybe you should've talked to them," I said.

"But I'm already Christian!" my wife said.

"Well, you could've told them that in Spanish. Whereas all I could've said was, um, 'no quiero el Jesus'."

My wife stuck out her tongue at me. And then we realized we'd just been visited by our first Spanish Jehovah's Witnesses.

Two.
The telephone rang around 2:45 in the afternoon. I answered it, and on the other end was a guy who introduced himself as Jorge. He was calling from Nielsen, the television ratings people. He wished to speak to the lady of the house.

He said all this in Spanish. I am learning Spanish. I'm not especially good at it yet. My approach to foreign languages is to learn some random words and with them, master grammar. I became so good in German so fast because I refused to limit myself to boring statements like "ich komme mit dem Bus in die Schule" (I take the bus to school) and "ich sammle Postkarten in meiner Freizeit" (I collect postcards in my spare time). No, I needed something more, like "ich komme mit der fliegenden Untertasse in die Schule" (I come to school in a flying saucer) and "ich zerlege Leichnamen in meiner Freizeit" (I dissect cadavers in my free time).

So I understood what Jorge was saying, but I knew I'd never be able to formulate a reply unless it involved my cat, grapes, cows, eating, headaches, monkeys, stealing things on a regular basis, or testicles.

"Speaking," the lady of the house said, "but I don't speak Spanish."

Jorge dutifully delivered his spiel in English. "Are you the lady of the house?"

"Yes," I said, "or, well, I'm one of the two."

Jorge asked me what kinds of programs we tend to watch--comedy, children's, news, or drama. I said drama. Then he asked whether anyone in the house was Hispanic, Latino, or other Spanish-speaking.

"No," I said.

"Okay," he said, "thank you very much, have a nice day."

We live in a neighborhood where native English speakers are in the minority. We'd been geographically profiled twice in one day.

Three.
Around 4:30 in the afternoon, we were in the car. That song "Breathe" by Anna Nalick was on the radio. We heard this car honking. It sounded like someone was honking the horn in 3/4 time, with a rest on the downbeat and a honk on 2 and 3. "Breathe" is in 3/4 time, so we thought someone was being cute and having a honk-along. And the honks were off the beat by about the same portion of a second it takes for the horn to beep when you press the button.

But the song changed, and the honking didn't stop. We looked behind us to see who was doing all that honking.

Behind us was a green Rav 4, with a giant banner across its rear windshield. The banner read "JUST MARRIED." The car behind it was doing the honking. I asked my wife to move to the other lane and slow down, so the Rav 4 could pass us and we could join in the honking too. But she was not big on that idea.

In the two miles or so before our house, the honking faded in much the same manner as a two-year-old's temper tantrum does. You know: after the long sob, there are a few isolated squawks just in case you forgot that there is a tantrum going on here. That kind of thing. Eventually the Rav 4 turned right, and that was the end of that.

I swear I did not make any of this up.

Wrong number

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and
over again and expecting different results."
attributed to Albert Einstein

So you know how I ranted about people who just can't accept that they've dialed the wrong number?

Today, around 3 in the afternoon, I happened to look at my cell phone. It showed not one, not two, but three missed calls from a number I didn't recognize. It also showed that I had voicemail. So I called my voicemail. I had one lonely little message. And it was from my wife. And she'd called me from her cell phone.

I did a reverse look-up on this mysterious number. It is either someone's cell phone or someone's unlisted number, and it's registered in Hercules, which isn't all that far from our humble abode.

It seems to me that one of two things happened here:

1) Mystery Caller dialed my cell phone number by mistake. My voicemail picked up. MC figured out that it was the wrong number and hung up. MC dialed my cell phone number by mistake again. My voicemail picked up. MC figured out that it was the wrong number again and hung up. MC decided to try one more time, got my voicemail, and hung up. MC then tracked down the person who gave out this number and bitched him/her out.

2) Mystery Caller dialed my cell phone number by mistake. My voicemail picked up. MC figured out that it was the wrong number and hung up. MC then hit redial (send-send, or whatever). My voicemail picked up. MC figured out that it was the wrong number again and hung up. MC then hit redial (send-send, or whatever) again, got my voicemail, and hung up. MC then called his/her phone company and bitched the representative out about the defective automatic redial on his/her phone.

My money's on #2.

I'm a hazard to myself

I am updating my blog right now because my printer is taking a break from producing three copies of my dissertation.

HOLY CRAP. I AM PRINTING MY DISSERTATION.

Let me tell you about my dissertation. My dissertation was about the classification of deliberate self-injury. But really it was an excuse for me to do a ton of esoteric multivariate statistics. Multivariate statistics are HOT, baby. They are even hotter when very few people (occasionally including me) understand them.

My topic is near and dear to my heart, but it's not one that most people like to discuss over tea and crumpets. This is fine with me. I have no shame in talking about many things. I could go on and on about methods of self-injury, how this type of self-injury is distinct from the fairly bizarre injuries that people with psychosis may inflict upon themselves, and so forth, without batting an eyelash. (This helps me at work, too, because I can talk about everything ranging from specific intimate acts to ablatio penis without batting an eyelash. What is ablatio penis, you ask? Look it up! Then practice defining it out loud until you no longer giggle.) And I know that, in reply, some people will make jokes; because that is how they deal with difficult topics of conversation.

But sometimes I myself am the joke.

My wife and I have a lot of books. When we moved into our current apartment, we found that we had a lot of space to put books, but we had more books than this space could accommodate. So I put many of my textbooks and assessment materials in boxes, for storage in the back of one of our many built-in bookshelves. This particular shelf is about three feet deep, three and a half feet tall, and five and a half feet long. And (this is the important part) the top is a little less than 64 inches above the floor.

The top of my head is also a little less than 64 inches off the floor.

Three days after we moved in, I was attempting to shove one of these godawful heavy boxes of textbooks into the back corner of this shelf. I leaned in to push it agasint the wall, and when I straightened up, there was this incredible pain in the top of my skull. I shouted a couple of four-letter words, then started crying uncontrollably. And the only thing I could think to do was to go to bed.

So that is what I did. I climbed into bed. My wife came along and asked what I was doing in bed. I told her to take me to the ER if I fell asleep. She read me some silly stories. Then I started nodding off. So we called my mom, who is a physical therapist. After a brief conversation (which I began by asking, "Mommy, should I go to the emergency room?"), we set off for the emergency room, where I continued falling asleep while waiting to be seen for my head injury.

The physician assistant who saw me was in his first day on the job. He asked why we'd just moved to California. I told him I was working on my dissertation.

"What's it about?" he said.

"You're going to laugh," I said.

"No, really," he said, "what's it about?"

"Deliberate self-injury," I said.

"Are you your own case study?" he asked, with a big silly grin on his face.

Honestly, I am not now, nor have I ever been, my own case study. I am just a klutz. But let me tell you a representative sample of the purely accidental unpleasantries I have inflicted upon myself, just today, the day I finally printed out my dissertation:

1. Whacked my right hand against a table at work.
2. Scratched an itch on my leg a little too hard.
3. Burned the back of my throat on dinner.
4. Picked up a bag of groceries the wrong way and got a twinge in my back.
5. Slammed my hand into a grocery cart, in the process of slamming the cart into the side of the store exit.
6. Stepped in what I thought was a pile of wet mulch, but was actually an ankle-deep rain puddle with some mulch floating on it.

You know, I'll probably still be a klutz once my dissertation's in.

HOLY CRAP! I AM HANDING IN MY DISSERTATION.

Random hookups

When I was in high school, I had a long-distance boyfriend.

(Yes, I have had boyfriends.)

We met at geek camp. We were together for about a year, during which time we were in the same place (i.e., geek camp) for a grand total of six weeks--three at the beginning, and three toward the end. We wrote each other lots of letters, talked on the phone a few times a week, and chatted online. My pediatrician (of all people) found this all very sweet, because she and her husband met at a geek camp.

Obviously, things did not go the same for me.

My mom thought this was all very sweet as well. But she wanted to know: How could I be going out with this boy when we never actually, you know, went anywhere? Eventually one of us realized that "going out" was exactly the same as "going steady." By that point our conversations about the definition of "going out" became more about teasing than semantics. (Now I hear kids say they are "talking to" someone. It took me a while to figure out that this is the same concept too.)

Then off I went to The Fairest College. I learned pretty quickly that there was this elusive thing called the Hookup, which no one could really define but everyone knew was An Essential Part of the Amherst Experience. Contrary to what my friends elsewhere had heard, "hookup" was not synonymous with "sex." The set of hookups included sex, but it also included many things that were not sex. The only criteria seemed to be that hookups had to be intimate and had to occur in private. "In private," however, could mean "my roommate is a very sound sleeper and besides is quite drunk."

I don't like loose definitions, and I certainly don't like having to explain some ill-defined meme like the Hookup to someone else. So I decided to do something about it:

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of College Disorders

312.34 Intermittent Hook-Up Disorder

A disorder characterized by several discrete episodes of failure to resist hormonal impulses in which the degree of physical intimacy attained is largely proportionate to the amount of alcohol consumed. May only be diagnosed in college students but is not limited to either males or females.

Diagnostic criteria for 312.34 Intermittent Hookup Disorder:

* At least one "hookup" per month, for a period of at least two semesters. "Hookup" is defined as consisting of kissing ("first base," "tonsil hockey") and at least one of the following:
-- groping;
-- oral gratification;
-- intercourse;
* Embarrassment upon seeing one's hookup of the previous night at the dining hall.
* If one partner in the dyad stays overnight, this person must participate in the “Walk of Shame.” The “Walk of Shame” is characterized by a trek across campus in EITHER the same clothing worn the previous night or clothing owned by the other party. Clothing MUST be rumpled. Also necessary for the “Walk of Shame” in diagnosis of 312.34 Intermittent Hookup Disorder is an embarrassed, downcast glance for at least 60% of the trip. Three episodes of the "Walk of Shame" per month UNACCOMPANIED by embarrassment is sufficient for diagnosis of 296.30 Major Hookup Disorder, Recurrent.

296.30 Major Hookup Disorder, Recurrent
See 312.34 Intermittent Hookup Disorder for general description.

Diagnostic criteria for 296.30 Major Hookup Disorder, Recurrent:
* At least one “hookup” per week, for a period of at least two months. See criteria for 312.34 Intermittent Hookup Disorder for criteria for identification of the “hookup.”
* If hookups occur with the same person more than twice a month, NO embarrassment upon seeing the other party in the dining hall. If hookups are “random” (occurring not more than once per semester with the same person), parties MUST be embarrassed in the dining hall.
* Three episodes of the "Walk of Shame" per month UNACCOMPANIED by embarrassment constitute sufficient criteria for diagnosis of 296.30 Major Hookup Disorder, Recurrent. See criteria for 312.34 Intermittent Hook-Up Disorder for description of the “Walk of Shame.” If the first two criteria for 296.30 Major Hookup Disorder, Recurrent, are met, the “Walk of Shame” is required for diagnosis but does not necessarily have to be accompanied by embarrassment.

Then again, maybe this is just all very silly.

Is this the party to whom I am speaking?

I hate cell phones.

Mind you, I have a cell phone. My cell phone is kind of a necessary evil these days. At first I got a cell phone because I was supposed to see clients in the psychology department clinic, and I needed a phone number that wasn't my home number and wasn't either of the numbers I shared with about eight other students. So I got a cell phone.

Even though I ended up not seeing anyone in the department clinic, my phone was still useful. My minutes were free after 9pm and on weekends, and, owing to my long-distance relationship, I tended to make a lot of long-distance calls. My cell phone turned into a cost-saving measure. Then my mom got a cell phone, on the same plan as I had, and so we could talk to each other for free whenever we wanted. It was still a cost-saving measure, I swear.

But here's the thing I hate about cell phones. Cell phones feed right into our collective quest for instant gratification. They promise to make you constantly accessible. But they accomplish this by interrupting whatever it was you were just doing. Call waiting (which I've never had on my regular phone, and which I turned off on my cell phone) lets your phone interrupt you while you're already using it. How arrogant can a little piece of circuitry get?

According to a collection of polls, 15 percent of US respondents have answered their cell phones during sex, 38 percent said it was okay to use a cell phone in the bathroom, and 87 percent said the most frequent forms of bad behavior they observe involve... the cell phone.

There's an interesting corollary of this instant gratification business, which is that people get phenomenally stupid when their gratification is delayed. My cell phone number is made up of 4 different digits. Anecdotal evidence (i.e., my own observations) suggests that the potential for misdialing is inversely related to the number of unique digits in a phone number. Less variety, more misdialing. I, of course, get a lot of wrong numbers. Most of these calls start out like this:

me: Hello?
other person: Hello?
me: Yes, hello?
other person: HelLO?
me: Yes?
other person: helLOOOOO?!?!

And very often they proceed like this:

me: Who are you trying to reach?
other person: helLOOO?!?!
me: I'm sorry, you have the wrong number.

One call went like this:

me: Hello?
guy: Hey, Jeff!
me: I'm sorry, you have the wrong number.
guy: Jeff! How's it going?
me: I'm sorry, I'm not Jeff. You really do have the wrong number.
guy: Is Jeff there, then?
me: No, this is my personal phone, and I don't know Jeff.

And this one is my favorite:

me: Hello?
crazed-sounding woman: Hello?
me: Yes?
CSW: helLOOO?!?!
me: Yes? Hello?
CSW: Is this the pharmacy?
me: No, I'm sorry, you have the wrong number.
CSW: But I called the pharmacy. This is the number for the pharmacy!
me: I'm sorry, you have the wrong number.
CSW: Why isn't this the pharmacy?
me: Because you've called my personal phone.
CSW: What's the number for the pharmacy, then?
me: What pharmacy are you trying to reach?
CSW: THE PHARMACY! I AM TRYING TO CALL THE PHARMACY!
me: I'm sorry, I really can't help you, except that this isn't your pharmacy.
CSW: WHAT THE HELL?!?!?!

I am not making this up. And I don't think she was trying to reach Walgreens, if you know what I mean.

I don't know why it is so hard for people to say "is so-and-so there?" as soon as I pick up the phone. And if one is trying to call Joe's Pharmacy, and the person on the other end doesn't say "Hello, Joe's Pharmacy," the proper thing to do is to ask, "Is this Joe's Pharmacy?"

But at the same time, that "hello" dance cracks me up every time.

Doogie

I am seriously thinking about chopping off all my hair. I've been coveting a cute little pixie cut. Or a cute little dyke cut. Or a cute little pixie dyke cut. I don't know. Something that will make me look more than 15.

This is getting OLD--no pun intended.

On Thursday morning I was supposed to have a meeting with my supervisor, the principal, and the counseling coordinator at the high school where I work. The principal and my supervisor was running late, so the counseling coordinator and I just stood around in the main office to wait for them. My supervisor often runs late, but she was really late this time; and so I decided to give her a ring to find out where she was.

No sooner did I pull out my phone and dial her than one of the secretaries barked, "YOUNG LADY!"

Now, there were several potentially misbehaving young ladies in the office. And I've met this particular secretary before. So I figured she couldn't possibly be talking to me.

"YOUNG LADY!"

Oh, but she was.

Still waiting for my supervisor to pick up, I looked over at the secretary.

"YOUNG LADY! You are on your cell phone!"

"Yes, I am," I replied. I mean, what else could I say?

She glared at me evilly.

"I'm staff," I said simply.

Still the glare.

"She's one of our therapists," said the counseling coordinator.

The glare quickly became a look of panic.

Just then my supervisor picked up. "I'm parking my car," she said. "I'll be right in."

"I'm SO sorry!" said the secretary. "I didn't mean to offend you! I hope I didn't offend you! Did I offend you?"

"I'm used to it," I replied.

"But you--I'm sorry, you look like you're 15!"

"Wanna guess when I graduated from high school?" I said. (Okay, it was kind of cruel.)

"No!" the secretary said. "I mean, no, I don't want to guess, because I'm just going to offend you more."

"I'm so not offended!" I said. "But anyway, I was in the class of 1997."

My supervisor had walked in by this point. "Oh," she said to me, "did she think you're in high school?"

"You know, it's going to be even worse after I get my degree in May," I said. "When I went back to defend my dissertation in the fall, the guy next to me on the plane got all nervous and accused me of being some kind of genius kid when I told him the purpose of my trip. Then I told him I was 25, and he softened up a bit."

But here's the thing. If I chop off my hair, I probably wouldn't be mistaken for a 15-year-old girl anymore.

But I might start being mistaken for a 15-year-old boy.

One foot in front of the other

I got a little note in the mail from my doctor the other day, with the results of my bloodwork. She had ordered all these various tests because I have been gifted with a family history of such things as high blood pressure, heart disease, high cholesterol, and diabetes.

Happily, I am still just fine. In fact, I am a little embarrassed to report that I am so fine as to be, well, pretty much off the charts, in the good direction.

Well, except for HDL cholesterol, a.k.a. "the good cholesterol." That was a little low, but not so low as to be dangerous, nor as to make the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL fall anywhere near the charts.

My doctor's advice was to increase my exercise.

Now, I'm pretty sure she was not looking at my chart when she wrote this. I haven't been to her all that often--after all, we haven't even lived here a year!--but I have seen her enough that I know she knows kind of what I look like, or at least how I am built. By which I mean her first thought was most likely not that I need to lose weight.

The reason I doubt she was looking at my chart was that it has a little survey in there about my health habits. And on this survey I indicated that my primary form of exercise is walking several miles per week.

I indeed walk several miles per week. I walk 5 or 6 miles a day, three days per week; and up to 3 miles on any of the other days. That is a lot of exercise, right there. But also I walk fast. And I'm usually carrying a lot more than I really should.

Increase my exercise? Honestly, Doctor, I don't think I have room in my schedule.

Gerbil Jumble #2

I am very proud of this one, from 3/7/06.



Why am I so proud of it?

Because "EARRTH" is an anagram of "TERRAH," but still wrong!

I rule!

Roy G. Biv

This morning I had to have some bloodwork done. I had to fast for 12 hours beforehand, and I get really icky when I don't eat, so I wanted to get to the lab right when it opened. Plus, in the past, I have actually passed out after this particular panel. I have a very distinct memory from about age seven of coming to on the sidewalk outside St. Mary's Hospital, with this enormous nun standing over me with a cup of orange juice in her hand and a big ol' halo around her head. I was really confused by the halo, but when my brain started back up again, I realized it was the sun behind her.

So I was not happy when the lab did not open on time. By the time the phlebotomist got there, half an hour late, there were three of us waiting for tests, plus two, well, chauffeurs. One of the other people waiting for a test was this guy who wanted to know whether my chauffeur wife and I were students. I said we were. He asked what we were studying. I said I was studying psychology. My wife did not answer, which I guess was okay because then the guy launched into this whole thing about photography, children, and color psychology. Also about his swim trunks and taking pictures of kids up at some pool where a lot of people learn to take pictures of kids.

Anyway, color psychology is not really the most scientific thing out there. It's all about meanings that are associated with colors, which sounds great except these meanings are not inherent properties of the colors themselves, but rather are assigned by cultures. For example, in the US, white is associated with weddings; but in China, white is associated with funerals. In the US, red is associated with anger and Republicans; but in India, red is associated with purity and weddings. There are lots of internet quizzes one can take about color psychology (aka Colorgenics). I took one of them and "learned" the following about myself:

Your Existing Situation
Working to improve her image in the eyes of others in order to obtain their compliance and agreement with her needs and wishes.
...Bullshit!

Your Stress Sources
Wants to overcome a feeling of emptiness and to bridge the gap which she feels separates herself from others.
...Bullshit!
Anxious to experience life in all its aspects, to explore all its possibilities, and to live it to the fullest.
...Too vague for judgment!
She therefore resents any restriction or limitation being imposed on her and insists on being free and unhampered.
...True.

Your Restrained Characteristics
Very exacting in the standards she applies to her choice of a partner and seeking a rather unrealistic perfection in her sex life.
...Bullshit!
Willing to become emotionally involved and able to achieve satisfaction through sexual activity, but tries to avoid conflict.
...Mostly true.

Your Desired Objective
Seeks affectionate, satisfying and harmonious relationships.
...True.
Desires an intimate union, in which there is a love, self-sacrifice and mutual trust.
...True.

Your Actual Problem
Does not wish to be involved in differences of opinion, contention or argument, preferring to be left in peace.
...BullllllllllSHIT!

Your Actual Problem #2
Needs to achieve a stable and peaceful condition, enabling her to free herself of the worry that she may be prevented from achieving all the things she wants.
...I don't understand what this means, so... Bullshit!

Score: Bullshit 5, True Enough 4, WTF 1.

I have a feeling all this conflict avoidance stuff is because I picked the black square last. Black is supposedly all about aggression. But the quiz asked me to pick the colors that make me feel good. I don't like black because I look jaundiced in too much of it. Ditto for green, orange, yellow, and brown. It has nothing to do with conflict avoidance--and everything to do with, well, vanity.

So this guy at the lab told me that my purple fleece jacket symbolized passion, and my green corduroys symbolized abundance.

"So I'm all about abundant passion?" I asked. My wife snickered.

"Yes," he said. "Come to think of it, I had a pair of green and purple swim trunks once."

Right.

Guess who else is all about abundant passion, then?



I love you, you love me, I rest my case.

Cookies

Windows Update is seriously a sentient being. My wife installed some Windows update kit thingie the other day because we thought it would help us get to The Book of Daniel. Alas, the show (this makes me want to vomit) seems to have been taken away from viewers completely at this point. And Windows, no matter how many times I command it not to do anything without my permission, keeps screwing around with all my custom settings and downloading random crap and attempting to crash my computer.

Unbeknownst to me, it undid all of my Internet Explorer settings. Among these were my cookie settings. I have no problem with first-party cookies. It is third-party cookies that I do not like. Windows seemed to think I should not accept any cookies at all. But it didn't think to ask me. Why should I know what I want? Really. I'm just a poor, defenseless, uninformed user.

I found out about this cookie thing while trying to log into Blogger. Quoth Blogger, "No cookies? No admittance!" (Well, that was at least the gist of the error message.) Easily fixed, yo. But the irony is that I was logging in to post a song about...

BAKING.

Without further ado, I present an anthem about my preferred method of stress relief.

I got pissed off; now I'm baking pie
You Betty Crockers can't deny
That when your spoon goes in for an itty-bitty taste
It puts a smile upon your face
I like peach. My neighbor is a leech
She don't care that my curtains are drawn
She comes over every mornin'
Says her man ain't never reformin'
Oh sister, you ought stop huffin'
And make some muffins!
Some relationships are born dead
And that man she got makes me think of cornbread
Now my phone is ringin'
Like hell you're not selling things!
So 'scuse me, 'scuse me
'Cause you're interrupting mousse, see?
I went to Wa-Wa
The cashier, he was la-la
He was strange, deranged
Too high to figure out my change
I'm tired of guys with guts
Whistling 'cause they like my butt
Take my springform pan and a dozen eggs
Instead of breaking legs
Some flour! (yeah!) Sugar! (yeah!)
And vanilla bean extract! (yeah!)
Then whip it! (Whip it!) Whip it! (Whip it!)
Whip that angel food cake!
Baby must bake!

You should come over for tea sometime.

Public transit story #3: Reincarnation

I met this woman today. She was the sweetest woman I ever met. I was walking down North Clark by Belmont, down there, and this little old lady comes up to me and she says, "Excuse me, but do you know where the Bryant Street Theatre is?" And I said, "No, I'm sorry, I'm from out of town." And she said, "Well, for Christ's sake!" That's what she said! And I said "I'm... I'm sorry." She goes "Well?" (Really?) Well, yeah! (Cool!) "I'm sorry, no, I don't." "Well, for Christ's sake!" I said, "I'm sorry!" "Well?" (You know she had been wandering round the same corner...) I actually felt bad. I walked away and thought I should have known where that was... you know, I really should, like, maybe I'll look for it and then try and find her. I was actually thinking stuff like that, then I thought, what am I doing? I should, like, go find her and say, "Lady, you're an idiot!" and when she goes "What?" I'll go "Well?"
from Barenaked Ladies' album Rock Spectacle

One day last fall I went up to the university library to find the book that contained the chapter with the scoring instructions for one of the measures I used in my dissertation. I found the book and photocopied the chapter, but alas, the instructions were for a different version of the measure than the one I used. I was pretty mad, because I'd gone all the way up there and spent more than a dollar on overpriced photocopies and it wasn't even the right version of the measure. My advisor eventually saved the day (and my dissertation!), but what made the trip itself worth it was this woman I met while waiting for the bus home.

This woman was one of Berkeley's many homeless people. She wore a black tank top that was several sizes too small, a long black skirt, and two plastic jack-o-lantern buckets. When I say that she was wearing two plastic jack-o-lantern buckets, I mean that she was wearing a sash around her waist from which hung two plastic jack-o-lantern buckets. She had a shopping cart stuffed with all kinds of things. And she seemed to have come to the bus stop to feed the homeless man with whom I was sharing the bench.

It was apparent that they had a regular arrangement. Although the man never said a word, she narrated the whole process to both of us. First she gave him two pieces of wheat bread soaked with balsamic vinaigrette. Then she took these back and squeezed a lemon over them. "I think some garlic might be good too," she said, as she sprinkled on a prodigious amount of garlic salt. She watched him take a bite, and then she said, "How about some peanut butter? That would make a good sandwich. You need protein!" Thus was added some chunky peanut butter. When he finished the sandwich, she said, "Here, I got you some plum sauce. Drink it!" He dutifully drank the little plastic container of sweet-and-sour sauce. She then proceeded to serve (and narrate) some salt and vinegar chips, some jelly beans, and some lemonade.

Then she turned to me and said, "I like to have a little bit of potato salad every day. It's good for my stomach. I get the free samples from the Safeway up there." She continued to tell me about all the other places in the neighborhood where she could get free food: the cheese store, the sandwich and soup shop, the candy store... I told her I was new in town and that it was nice to know where the good businesses were.

Then things got, well, weird.

"What kind of blood you got in you?" she asked. "Russian?"

"Yes," I said, "my great-grandparents emigrated from Russia."

"You see that guy down there?" she said, pointing to someone I could barely see. "I think he is part Russian. He has black skin, but I think he is part Russian. He has the evil blood in him."

"Oh," I said. Apparently it was not a problem that I am more than just part Russian.

"Were you born in 1980?" she asked.

"Um, yes," I said. "How did you know?"

"Well, my daughter was born in 1980. She lives in New Mexico. She's okay. You look like her. She's got some Russian blood in her. Maybe you're her sister?"

"No," I said, "I'm an only child. But most people think I look like someone born in 1990, so thank you for guessing my age correctly!"

"Are you sure you don't have a sister?"

"Yeah."

"The people around here are pretty nice," she said.

"Yeah, I guess they are. They're really different from people back East, though."

"Have you ever been to LA?"

"I was there once, but not for very long. Just a few hours."

"Those are some very interesting people," she said. She fixed me with a very serious gaze. "When you get reincarnated, you should come back as someone from LA."

"Hm?"

"When you get reincarnated, you should come back as someone from LA. One of those sci-fi people."

"What kind of sci-fi people?" I asked, thinking she meant actors or directors.

"They have these sci-fi people there. They wear these sci-fi suits, climate-controlled scuba suits, and they jump out of these sci-fi helicopters and they can live underwater. They can breathe underwater! And they are beautiful. Very beautiful. And they live a really long time because they are beautiful and they can breathe underwater. I don't think they ever die!"

"Okay, I will keep that in mind," I said.

"Well, I've got to go now," she said. "You have a nice day."

"You too," I said.

Off she went, her jack-o-lantern buckets bobbing with each step.

My bus pulled up a few minutes later. The man, who'd just been sitting there on the bench the whole time, gave me a wink and an almost imperceptible smile as I got on the bus. I wonder what he was saying.

And on this farm they had some...

My wife has this idea that we are eventually going to have an assortment of goats and chickens. I am okay with the goats and chickens, I guess, as long as someone else takes care of them. In exchange I will do the laundry, the sewing, the interior decorating, and other domestic goddess activities.

But then why stop at goats and chickens? Why not a donkey? I wholeheartedly support the idea of having a donkey. I would get a donkey just to be able to say things like...

"Excuse me, I've got to go feed my ass."

"I'm building a new barn for my ass."

"Oh, that noise from the backyard? That's just my ass."

"I need some high-quality hay. My ass is sensitive."

"I bathe my ass every couple of months."

"Hey, kid! Stop kicking my ass!"

"Give my ass that melon rind and you'll have a friend for life."

"My ass really likes being scratched."

"I woke up this morning and the fence was broken. Four hours later my ass turned up at City Hall!"

"Sure, you can sit on my ass."

"My stubborn ass is refusing to work again."

"I think something's been biting my ass."

"It's that time of year when my neighbor and I put our asses together and wait to see what happens."

With a rooster or two, the possibilities for juvenile humor are endless.

Earth logic, she go boom.

I think I might possibly scream the next time I come across the following argument for the Patriot Act, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Dubya's second term, or wiretapping:

"We are doing the right thing, because there hasn't been a terrorist attack on US soil since ______." [choose one]

• the Patriot Act was enacted
• we went into Iraq
• we went into Afghanistan
• eight months into Bush's first term
• we started listening to your pizza orders

Dude. This is so illogical that I want to vomit. But I will distract myself by waxing pedantic about this particular type of illogic. It is called the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, or "after this, therefore because of this."

Post hoc, as it likes to be called on the street, refers to a perceived relationship between two events. Event B happens after Event A, so therefore Event A must have caused Event B. You forget your umbrella one morning. Just before the end of the work day, you look outside. It's pouring. You berate yourself for forgetting your umbrella. Whenever you bring it, it doesn't rain; and when you don't, it does.

Post hoc has a sibling called cum hoc ergo propter hoc. Cum hoc, or "with this, therefore because of this," is known in statistical circles as a confusion of correlation and causation. Here, Event A and Event B occur at the same time, so either Event A must have caused Event B, or vice versa. Let's say you are taking a walk. Your cell phone rings. You stop to answer it. It's your dad, who is panicking because your mother has fallen and she can't get up. You happen to look down at your feet--and one of them is right on top of a crack in the sidewalk. As the guilt starts to set in, you start to hope that you still have your old therapist's number.

So obviously illogical, yet so disgustingly common.

So, okay. There hasn't been a terrorist attack on US soil since September 11, 2001. (I was in statistics class at that moment. It was my first semester of graduate school. We saw some stuff on TV during the break, but our professor didn't realize what exactly was going on, so we kept learning about standard deviations or whatever it was. Then right afterward we had our pictures taken for the student bulletin board. We all smiled, but those pictures turned out pretty creepy. But I digress). Guess what? Congress didn't pass the Patriot Act until late October. Guess what else? There wasn't a terrorist attack on US soil in those 6 weeks. There also wasn't one between September 11, 2001, and the initial invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor between September 11, 2001, and this creepy, unassailable wiretapping business. Nor in the first eight months of Bush's presidency. For that matter, there wasn't a foreign attack on US soil before September 11, 2001, in the first place.

Hm, if there hasn't been a terrorist attack on US soil since September 11, 2001, then there also hasn't been a terrorist attack on US soil since May 17, 2004. That's the day same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts. Therefore,

GAY MARRIAGE PREVENTS TERRORISM!

Eat your hearts out, ye defenders of homophobia, hegemony, and half-wittedness.

My dog ate my paycheck

I finally managed to catch one of the colds that have been floating around the Bay Area. I'm not sure if I got the one that turns into bronchitis, the one that turns into a sinus infection, or the one that just does what it damn well pleases for a really long time. But suffice it to say, where respiratory ailments are concerned, when I fall, I fall hard.

This morning I really did not want to go to work. I felt like crap, my voice is about half an octave lower than usual (and my job is all about talking), and on Mondays I have to walk up to 6 miles to get from place to place during the day. What with my weird cough, I was especially dreading the walking.

But I knew my name would be mud if I did not go in this morning, for Monday is quite possibly the most important day of my three-day work week. And with next Monday being a holiday, I perceived even less of a choice in the matter.

Of course, under normal circumstances, respiratory infections are perfectly reasonable excuses for staying home from work. Especially when one's job is all about talking. Heartburn, however, is not grounds for going home, even when one works in food service at Sesame Place right after one graduates from high school. Which I did [work there; it was a lousy job] and wasn't able to do [get sent home on account of heartburn; which I got, no joke, from the grilled cheese they served me on break].

On my grumbly way in this morning, I started to wonder whether anyone's tried any of the following, and to what degree of success:

"I woke up really stiff this morning. I think it's my rigor mortis again."

"My hip dysplasia is flaring up."

"I don't want to give anyone else in the office my case of FMD."

"My mother was in town this weekend; I think I caught parapraxis from her."

"My car's in the shop--my goniometer is broken."

In related news, as I was preparing this particular entry, I came upon these beauties of sponsored links on Google:

The bucket brigade

DISCLAIMER: This entry does not necessarily reflect my life. It might be an accurate description of things that happen to me; it might not be an accurate description of things that happen to me, although it might be an accurate description of things that happen to other people. But then again, it could be the spittin' image of my life, and you'd never know for sure.

So one day the overlord assigns the underling a piece of work. This piece of work is very simple. From start to finish it will take approximately 90 seconds. It doesn't even require opposable thumbs. It requires a rather bulky piece of equipment that consists of plastic, platen glass, a really bright light, a lot of mysterious moving parts that jam just when you need them to work, and a bunch of messy black stuff. This piece of equipment is located right next to the little hole in the wall in which the overlord puts things for the underling. The overlord sticks the piece of work in this little hole in the wall several hours before the underling will be in to check said hole in the wall. The overlord puts a note on the piece of work that indicates its somewhat time-sensitive nature.

The underling retrieves the piece of work from the little hole in the wall, walks a couple yards over to the necessary piece of equipment, does the piece of work, and puts the finished product in the overlord's hole in the wall.

The underling does this in about two minutes, including "warm-up" time for the necessary equipment.

Total elapsed time for this whole business: Approximately 4 hours and 30 minutes.

Another day, the overlord says to the underling, "I have a piece of work to be done by someone else. This work does not involve any tangible materials, but it involves a single intangible item. I am going to transmit it to you right now via a nearly instantaneous medium of communication. Then you must transmit it, via the same nearly instantaneous medium of communication, to the person who does this work. This has to be done as soon as possible."

Nearly an hour later, the underling leaves the overlord's chamber to go retrieve this intangible item. The underling re-transmits the item to the correct person, jauntily humming "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."

Shh! Don't tell anyone I'm here.

I'd heard rumors about this, but now I know it's true:

Gerbils are illegal in California.

Fearing for my gerbilly freedoms (what few there are these days), I tried to change my location on my profile to "Undisclosed." But no! Blogger wouldn't accept the update. Perhaps this is an honor reserved for Dick Cheney.

So I guess I really have no choice...

I can hear the sleep-talking of the girl that I love
As she lies here beside me asleep with the night
Her hair in a fine mist floats on my pillow
Reflecting the glow of the orange streetlights

But I’ve got to creep down the alleyway
Fly down the highway freeway
Before they come to trap me I’ll be gone
Somewhere they can’t find me

Oh baby, you don’t know what I’ve done
I’ve committed a crime, found out too late
I was born to a gerbil mommy and a gerbil daddy
But gerbils aren't allowed in the Golden State

So I’ve got to creep down the alleyway
Fly down the highway freeway
Before they come to trap me I’ll be gone
Somewhere they can’t find me

Oh, my life seems unreal, my crime an illusion
In a law badly written that I must obey
And though folks here aren't uptight by nature
They sure aren't polite to creatures
Who'd snack upon the vineyards every day

So I’ve got to creep down the alleyway
Fly down the highway freeway
Before they come to trap me I’ll be gone
Somewhere they can’t find me

If you need me, I'll be in my bunker.

Anyone listening?

In Washington the atmosphere was tense today as a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Un-American Activities continued its probe into anti-Vietnam War protests. Demonstrators were forcibly evicted from the hearings when they began chanting anti-war slogans. Former Vice-President Richard Nixon says that unless there is a substantial increase in the present war effort in Vietnam, the U.S. should look forward to five more years of war. In a speech before the Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in New York, Nixon also said opposition to the war in this country is the greatest single weapon working against the U.S.

Simon and Garfunkel, "7 O'Clock News/Silent Night"

I always feel some obligation to watch the State of the Union address. My wife wasn't planning on joining me last night, but then I said she could play Civ III on the laptop during the speech if she turned off the music and left on the sound effects. I don't play this game, but I really like its sound effects. Especially the grunts. I was hoping for some well-timed grunts last night. I was richly rewarded.

I don't have much to say about the speech itself except that more of its 50-some minutes were devoted to other countries than to the United States. I wasn't surprised, really, but I did feel kind of cheated anyway. I mean, I wanted to hear about how (if?) Bush plans to mend our broken democracy here at home, not about how he wants to mend supposedly broken countries by giving them a copy of Cowboy Democracy for Dummies.

My dear friend Kara took this picture, posting which saves me at least a thousand words:



May Google save my mortal soul.

You'll put your eye out!

When I was in tenth grade, my grandmother sold her house and moved into a condo. My mother received a lot of random stuff that had been in that house, including a pile of phonograph records. Most of these records belonged to my mom, but a few belonged to my aunt, and a few neither of them wanted to claim. My mom also got some high school artwork, reel-to-reels of family members' musical debuts, paperback books, hippie jewelry, and the Steinway parlor grand. All of these were very interesting to me, but most of all I was impressed by the Simon and Garfunkel LP's.

I already knew all the Greatest Hits by heart, but my G-d, this was a lot of Simon and Garfunkel! I decided that my favorite song was no longer "Cecilia," but rather a tie between "Patterns" and "A Poem on the Underground Wall." I made myself a mix tape which started with "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha," progressed to "Double Talking Helix Blues" (a geek anthem by my mom's homeboys Joel and Ira Hershkowitz), settled into a slew of classic S&G songs, changed direction with some tunes by the Vienna Boys' Choir, and finished with some Smothers Brothers skits.

I made a similar mix tape for the girl who would, eleven years later, be my wife. We spent a long time trying to parse the second verse of "Patterns":

Up a narrow flight of stairs
In a narrow little room,
As I lie upon my bed
In the early evening gloom,
Impaled on my wall
My eyes can dimly see
The pattern of my life
And the puzzle that is me.

At first I had this awful image in my head of eyeballs on skewers. I still have this awful image in my head of eyeballs on skewers. I realize, of course, that (1) the ABCB rhyme scheme is a harsh master and (2) 'twas not eyeballs on the wall, but some embodiment of hopelessness. Still, I can't imagine that eyeballs on skewers could see anything brightly. And still, there is no good way to arrange these four lines, for the following brings up images of whole bodies on skewers:

My eyes can dimly see
The pattern of my life
And the puzzle that is me
Impaled on my wall

I am reviewing a book. I hope I have a pre-press edition of this book, because the tables are so poorly formatted that I would really like to impale the pages on my wall. And this book, which shall remain nameless for the privacy of all parties involved, ends with short bios of all its contributors. These bios are of varying cohesiveness and grammatical correctness--very much like the chapters of this book. I read the bios last night while taking a break from the actual content of the book, and I was struck by the utter crappiness of these sentences.

Now, I get upset when professional authors use since to mean because, while to mean although, and the reason why instead of the reason that. I am fully aware that I swap since for because and while for although all the time in casual conversation. But I wouldn't do it in a publication. APA style strictly forbids stuff like this. So I guess it's not really surprising that I would be upset by crappy sentence construction in a professional book.

I should provide operational definitions of crappy and non-crappy sentences.

This is a crappy sentence:
Yesterday Jenny ate, slept, and played with her dog.

because as written it means this:
Yesterday Jenny ate with her dog, slept with her dog, and played with her dog.

These are not crappy sentences:
1. Yesterday Jenny ate ice cream with her brother, slept on the couch with her girlfriend, and played with her dog.
2. Yesterday Jenny played with her dog, ate, and slept.

Sometimes sentences appear quite nice at first, but upon inspection they reveal their crappiness:
Gillian has written blog entries on grammar, bureaucracy, and her disappearing butt.

My butt's not the Internet, honey. For one thing, the Internet is getting bigger every day. I do, however, write about grammar, bureaucracy, and my disappearing butt, though thankfully not all in the same entry.

Word.

I leave you with two final thoughts:

1) The sentence that inspired this entry goes like this:
I have published around cervical cancer prevention, heterosex, the vagina, and heterosexism.

I have small handwriting, but damn!!!!

2) My aforementioned grandmother is a retired editor. She says it's genetic.

Alterations

As much as I love new clothes, I hate shopping for them. I am small and short, but not at all proportioned like a 26-year-old. My limbs are just a tad too long for petite outfits, but too damn short for regular ones. I can hem up sleeves and pants all right, but the darts in the regular clothes are practically halfway down my ribcage. Juniors' sizes fit me the best, though I can't wear low-rise anything because of my aforeblogged lack of butt (thus ruling out half the department) and the tops certainly wouldn't help me look my age at the high school where I work (thus ruling out the other half).

I think what is stealing my butt is the 5 or 6 miles I walk to and from work. I work three days a week. On two of them, I walk a mile and a half to the train in the morning, a mile from my destination station to work, a mile back to the station at the end of the day, and then a mile and a half home. On the other one, I have to walk another mile between sites, both of which are a mile from the train station. On my way to one site, I pass by a formal gown store on a corner. It's never open at 8:45am, but it has the most amazing dresses in the windows, plus a great view of racks of other stock. I want to go in there sometime and try on the dresses. I don't need any more dresses, really--for one thing, I have no place to go--but they are just so pretty.

This morning, as usual, I walked past that formal gown store on the corner. As usual, while waiting for the light to change, I admired the dresses, imagining myself in some of them (and, yes, my wife in others). Those certainly are nice dresses, I thought. Very nice dresses. And then I noticed that one of these dresses had been altered for its mannequin in a most peculiar way. From a car, one would not notice the alteration, but from the sidewalk, I could peer around the mannequin and see that the bodice had been taken in by one of these:



Yes, a 2-inch steel spring clamp. But unlike the illustration, it had bright orange handles.

And the gown was hot pink. Couldn't they at least have found one that didn't clash with the dress?

My parents raised me to be savvy to social messages like lookism. When I was eleven, I churned out a one-page, typewritten treatise/rant on the dearth of intelligent female characters with realistic waist- and bustlines in mass-market cartoons. Around the time I Became a Woman, I began to notice not-so-subtle alterations in display clothes at the department store. (Not coincidentally, this was also when I had to stop shopping at Kids R Us and start going to the juniors' section.)

If you look at the average department-store mannequin, you will notice that the backs of its clothes are taken in, usually with basting stitches or safety pins. I was really angry the first time I saw a taken-in blouse on a mannequin. I mean, I knew Barbie wouldn't be able to walk if she were a real person, not because of her measurements (estimated at 39-23-33) but because of her freakishly tight heel cords. And the drawings in the pattern books at the fabric store weren't very realistic, either, but I dismissed those as artists' interpretations. The mannequins, on the other hand, displayed real clothes that you could find neatly folded right under them. Yet in a disgusting demonstration of the Thin Ideal, the mannequins were selling clothes whose smallest sizes were still too big for them! My G-d, people!

Not that mannequins would be able to stand up, either. Barbie doesn't hold the patent on freakishly tight heel cords. And at least all Barbie have heads, which is more than you can say for the average department-store mannequin. At least, until you rip Barbie's head off and discover her lone, bizarre, hot pink vertebral disk.

Dipstick.

It's unhealthy, the love I have for my car. I have sworn to myself, my wife, and this car that I will drive it until it absolutely, completely dies. My beloved Outback, a.k.a. the Big Gay Subaru, is almost eleven years old and still has its original clutch. It got its first new battery a year ago--not because the original went dead, mind you, but because it occurred to me one day that the battery was ten years old and it was probably time to get it replaced, if only on general principle. The dudes at Sears tested the charge before replacing it and asked me why I was having a perfectly fine battery replaced. "Because it's ten years old," I said. I had to say this a few more times before they finally believed me.

This car has a lot of rules to it. We turn off the lights, air, windshield wipers, and radio before turning the motor off, a practice which likely contributed to the longevity of the original battery. We do not put our feet up on the glove compartment, nor do we get into or out of the car if the emergency brake is not on (and, preferably, the motor is off). We do not leave things in this car that are not an ice scraper, the Club, the first-aid kit, or the Tupperware container for traction material. We do not eat messy things in this car. We do not consume any liquids in it that do not come in cups with lids, bottles with caps, or aluminum cans.

How much do I love my car? So much that I even had the airbags inspected last spring, "ten years after the manufacture date of the car" as suggested (in English and French) by the sticker on the sun visor.

When I got custody of this car, my dad showed me how to check and add fluids, how to take the hood cover (a.k.a. the Nose Bra) off and put it back on securely, how to check the tire pressure, how to use the tire pump that plugs into the cigarette lighter, and how to change a tire. I've never had to change a tire, but he had me practice lifting the jack, taking the regular tire off, putting the spare on, taking the spare off, putting the regular one back on, and lowering the jack enough times that I feel pretty damn prepared.



So yesterday I decided it was time to replace the front wiper blades. The rear blade was just fine, but the front blades were crappy to the point where it was easier to see in the rain if they weren't on. Off I went to the auto parts store. The last time I did this, across the country, there was a book in the wiper blade section where you look up your car and find the blades yourself, but at this store, there was no book; and the dude had to look it up in the Employees Only Computer. Armed with my "exact fit" blades, I went back out to the parking lot, only to discover that taking off the old blades is still a lot harder than putting on the new ones.

There I was, in my linen dress and embroidered blazer, jiggling the old blades around to release the catch, in full view of a 4-lane city street. I got the driver's side blade off and replaced all right, but the passenger's side one was harder. This middle-aged guy pulled up in a big shiny SUV, perhaps to return his movies at the Blockbuster next to the Car Quest. Then all of a sudden he was right next to me, asking if I needed any help.

"No," I said, "I'm just replacing my wiper blades, and the learning curve's pretty steep. I did the driver's side already--" and then, as if on cue, the catch released. "Well, thanks for the supervision!" I said cheerfully, and the guy walked away.

I'm not sure what it is about the combination of me and the Big Gay Subaru that is such an effective Middle-Aged Guy Magnet. About a year ago, when I was still living in Cleveland, I took advantage of a sunny winter day to get my car washed. (Those backwards Ohioans salt their roads, then wonder why their cars rust through.) I was already at the shopping center where the car wash was, so I thought, what the heck? Time to wash the car and return it to its rightful dark blue state. So I propped up the hood and set about removing the Nose Bra.

This middle-aged guy rolled down his window and said, much like a Yellow Pages ad, "Car problems? Need help?"

"Nope," I said. "Just taking off the nose bra so I can get my car washed."

"Need any help with that, then?" he offered.

"Um, no, but thanks," I said.

He shrugged and drove off.

Later, as I was putting the Nose Bra back on my sparkling blue car, another middle-aged guy rolled down his window. "What's wrong with your car?" he said.

"Nothing," I said. "I've just had it washed, and now I'm putting the nose bra back on."

"Need help?" he offered.

"Nope," I said, removing the hood prop and expertly dropping the hood gently into place.

If ever I were to wake up one morning and say to myself, "You know, self, what we are missing here is a Middle-Aged Guy" (note to my wife: this is never going to happen), all I'd have to do is drive to a random shopping center, prop up the hood of my car, and start memorizing the multilingual warnings on the battery. I'm good at memorizing things, but I doubt I'd get very far on it before my wish became reality.

If I had a million nuggets

When I was in elementary school, my mom worked late one night a week. My dad and I would amuse ourselves by going out for dinner and then to someplace to browse. Although we had to go down toward the mall for these activities, we were philosophically opposed to mall-crawling. Instead, we went to Hechinger's or Builders' Square, precursors to and victims of the Home Depot and Lowe's explosions. Or we went to the giant auto mall and looked at the minivans. Or we went to Staples, where I drooled over the Dymo labelers. Sometimes we went to Radio Shack, which back then counted most of its revenue from actual radio parts. On those Wednesday or Thursday nights, I got to be Daddy's little geek-girl. It was excellent.

For dinner we went to such purveyors of haute cuisine as Wendy's, Burger King, and Arby's. We didn't go to McDonald's because it was common knowledge among my elementary-school peers that the nuggets contained chicken feet; and also because my burgers always came with ketchup, pickles, mustard, and onion bits even though I specifically requested "Just ketchup and pickles. No mustard or onions, please. Thank you." Furthermore, McDonald's was inside the mall, and the others were across the road.

We especially liked Wendy's because they'd just introduced the salad bar. Not only did it have salad, but it also had tacos, pasta with three different kinds of sauce, and our personal favorites, Green Fluff and Glue Pudding. One time I served myself a bowl of Chocolate Glue Pudding and triumphantly held it upside-down over our table. My dad warned me that this was a very bad, very messy idea, but it turned out to be a very good, very clean idea, as the Chocolate Glue Pudding proved itself completely defiant of gravity.

We also liked Wendy's because their kids' meals had quasi-educational toys. They had little wind-up toys, bubble wands, detailed rubber models of animals... For a while they had these 16-page hardback books about jungle animals. I collected all four, but when I got my second book on pandas, I asked if we could maybe go to Arby's for a while until Wendy's got some new stuff.

All these places were great until I went completely vegetarian at 19. It wasn't really planned; I'd stopped eating red meat in high school, which wasn't that hard. That summer, after my sophomore year of college, I worked at a therapeutic camp for Bad Kids. They didn't serve much meat there, but what they did serve looked downright nasty. One of my Bad Kids came back from cooking club one day with a pizza bagel, topped with diced green peppers. "I made this for you!" he crowed. "You're one of those veggie people!" The bagel was pretty good, and I figured that I might as well just conform to his assumption. After all, I hadn't had any meat in 5 weeks, didn't miss it, and was actually starting to like veggie burgers.

I still love Wendy's. Of all the fast-food chains, they've got the best pre-packed salads. I was terrified in high school that I had developed an allergy to Frosties, because every time I got one from the Wendy's next to the school, I had an asthma attack. My allergist looked over the official list of ingredients and declared there was nothing I was allergic to in there. What I was allergic to was the cleaning solution they used in the Frosty dispenser. In true 16-year-old activist fashion, I complained to the manager, and they changed their cleaning procedures. I love small towns. And I love Frosties. They love me back--I haven't had an asthma attack from one in a decade.

But last night I saw a new commercial for my favorite fast-food joint. They were touting their 99-cent value menu (mmmm, 99-cent Frosties...) and the actors were saying things like "I get paid 16 hamburgers an hour [for babysitting]" and "Honey, you look like a million chicken nuggets."

I was very disturbed.

If that babysitter lives in a state where fast food isn't taxed, she gets $15.84 per hour. Dude. That's anal.

The wife (girlfriend? mistress? high-priced hooker?) looked pretty attractive to me, but to her husband (or whatever), she falls a bit short, at $990,000. My wife suggested that perhaps with the lights out, she gets the remaining $10,000. That's 10,101 and 1/99 orders of nuggets, for anyone who's counting.

We're so conditioned to think of 99 cents as $1 that it's perfectly reasonable to expect a million 99-cent orders of chicken nuggets to cost a million dollars.

And yet we congratulate ourselves for finding a gallon of gas for $1.999, which will truly be less than $2 once someone finds a way to tithe a penny.

A good turn daily

You know those emails that promise stuff like this?

For every person you forward this message to, Bill Gates will pay for one congenitally headless kid to go to Disney World!!!! Microsoft can keep track of how many people you forward this message to, so forward this to as many people as you know!!!! The kids are counting on you!!!!

I'd like to think that those are still floating around entirely for their humor value. I mean, really. I'd like to think that people know by now that Microsoft can't track how many people you send emails to, and that Microsoft can't even track your emails. Statistically speaking, at least a handful of the people who do believe that stuff use their Macs to compose messages on Gmail. But then again, I'd also like to think that George W. Bush isn't interested in my private emails... and I'll never know until it's too late.

Last Thursday I went up to Napa for an interview. Between here and there, as between most places in the Bay Area, is a bridge. Bridge toll is $3, except for the Golden Gate Bridge, which is $5; and thank G-d they only collect toll in one direction. It is apparently possible to route your commute so that you never pay toll, but then again that involves spending a lot more time on the highways than I would really like. So anyway, I arrived at the toll booth and went to hand my $3 to the booth worker.

"No," said the booth worker, "she already paid." She pointed at the car that had gone through before me.

"Huh?" I said.

"The car in front of you? She already paid. Go ahead!"

I went on my merry way, and then of course my way turned panicky. What had I done? Did I misunderstand the booth worker and commit a toll violation? Were the California Highway Patrol going to come zooming after me? Or maybe, as I was trying to find a cash lane, I got in front of someone who was following the person who'd already paid, and the person I'd passed didn't have any money and didn't have a cell phone and would be stranded on the wrong side of the toll plaza and it would be ALL MY FAULT.

Then I had to figure out the Napa exit and forgot all about this toll thing. The ramp was no longer under construction, as it had been the last time I'd been to Napa six months earlier; so of course I got partially lost while looking for the Shell station where I remembered having to do a near-180.

Last night my wife and I went to dinner with friends in Novato, and of course to get theah from heah, you have to go across a bridge. I told my wife about my fear that I'd stranded someone last Thursday.

"People do that all the time!" she said. She's been living in the Bay Area for four years, so she should know.

"It's a random act of kindness," she continued. "You pay for you and the person behind you."

"Well, I think now I have a karmic obligation to pay for someone else," I said. "Wanna do it?"

"Sure," she said.

So the two chicks in the eleven-year-old blue Outback paid for the chick in the brand-spankin'-new silver Outback behind them. As we (well, my wife) drove onto the bridge, I turned around and saw that brand-spankin'-new silver Outback take a rather long time to go through the plaza. Perhaps she was confused, too. Perhaps she was wondering who it was who paid her toll for her. I wondered whether she'd give us a wave or something when she caught up to us.

But within a minute she'd passed us at lightning speed, without so much as a glance at our Big Gay Subaru.

When I was a Brownie Girl Scout, I used to wonder what "one good turn deserves another" meant. Kind of like "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leaves the whole world blind and toothless," I thought that all those good turns could only result in a lot of dizziness and vomiting. Yes, I was a literal child. The "Random Acts of Kindness" thing came out when I was a teenager, and I didn't really get that either. Like, what good would it do to do something randomly nice for someone if they don't know who's done it for them? That's dumb.

Well, let me tell you, it's not dumb. The next time you pay a flat toll, hand the worker the toll for the next driver, too. Revel in the warmth and fuzziness.

My interview, by the way, went well.

And Ayn Rand? Eat your heart out.

Special note to congenitally headless children: If you ask me, Disney World's pretty overrated.

Who peed in the fountain of youth?

I turned 26 a week ago. For some things, like opinion polls, I am now in a new age bracket. No longer am I "18 to 25"; I am now solidly "26 to 34." I'm smack-dab in my mid-20s. And I had hoped that people might stop mistaking me for a teenager. But no.

My job takes me to a high school one day a week. Through some mysterious process, certain students at this school are able to become "student TAs," which means that for one period a day, they are assigned to a teacher or an office and get to do really fun things like photocopying handouts and stapling packets. (I haven't seen anyone clapping erasers, but they probably do that too.) To make their photocopies, they have to go to the copy room. But they can't start any of the jobs themselves without permission from the woman who guards the machines. There are big signs on the wall that say things like

STUDENTS CANNOT USE COPIERS WITHOUT STAFF HELP
TEACHERS DO NOT COUNT AS STAFF

So I go in there once a week to make copies of all the random forms I have to fill out every time I have a session with a student. I have been at this school for two months. And the Xerox Guard has yet to remember that I am not a student.

Every Monday, I end up making copies while she's stepped out of the room. She comes back in, and the following exchange transpires:

Xerox Guard: Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah! You can't do that!
Me: [knowing full well where this is going] I can't do what?
Xerox Guard: You can't make copies without me! You are supposed to WAIT!
Me: Um, I'm staff.
Xerox Guard: You are not staff. You are too young.
Me: No, really, I am staff. I'm a guidance counselor.
Xerox Guard: Oh, that's right, you are the Young One! Okay, have a nice day.

Okay, dude. I am tired of being the Young One. I have always been the Young One. I skipped kindergarten and so was a year younger than pretty much everyone in grade school, except the kids with September birthdays who just slid in before the district cutoff. I had, like, thirteen thousand strikes against me in the Grade School Coolness Book, because not only was I young, but I was short, had glasses and bangs and two long braids, did Girl Scouts and orchestra and math club, and most damningly, was that perennial oxymoron, a smart girl. Back then, it didn't really matter whether I looked young. Actually, I didn't care what people thought of my appearance; as far as I was concerned, pulling up one's knee socks in the summer was dead sexy.

But I started to care one day during my senior year of high school, when I was chaperoning an elementary school reading tournament or some such thing. The architects who designed my high school must have been high all the time, for they thought it was a good idea to have a three-story building with two wings (East and West), where you could only cross over between East and West on the first and second floors. To go from 3 East to 3 West, or vice versa, you had to go down to the second floor cross-over and then back up to the third floor. To make matters worse, the odd-numbered rooms were in East and the even-numbered rooms were in West. Every September, unsuspecting sophomores would ask upperclassmen where the third-floor crossover was, and much wandering around in circles would ensue. It just wasn't the same when they renumbered the rooms...

Anyway, there I was, charged with directing kids and parents around this stupidly arranged school of mine, and one mother asked me whether I would be competing in the sixth-grade finals after the cookie break.

"Um, I'm a senior," I said. "I'm a tournament chaperone."

"Oh," said the mom, "you look so young! You will be so thankful when you're older."

That was 10 years ago. I found my first grey hair just before my 25th birthday. I think I've had maybe two more since then. Maybe if I had more grey hairs, I'd get taken seriously. I'm not sure how to give myself grey hairs, though, because I've been under terrible stresses lately that succeed only in making my butt way too small for my pants. (And I don't have a large butt to begin with, or even a medium-sized one. I think I must be one of a handful of women in the world who want a bigger butt. In its natural state, my sad, bony little butt does not get along at all with folding chairs.) One year at camp, my friends and I tried out to be the talent show emcees. Our skit involved Benjamin Franklin and clothes dryers. I forget how it all fit together, but anyway, Sherri needed her black hair to be grey, and Liz suggested that she accomplish this with deodorant. Sherri's hair turned grey, but it wouldn't turn back, even with a long, long shower. From the bathrooms we could hear her yelling "LIFE SUCKS AND IT'S ALL LIZ'S FAULT!"

Yes, this was gifted camp. Our unofficial motto was "Smart people have no common sense."

You know, life really sucks when your airplane seatmate asks you why you are flying to Cleveland, and you try to figure out how to tell him that you are going back to defend your doctoral dissertation. That you have been in graduate school for more than four years now, and that no, you are actually not a real-life, female version of Doogie Howser. That yes, you did start your program when you were 21, but you really have been in graduate school for more than four years and you are going to be 26 shortly after Christmas and that is the G-d's-honest-truth. Or when a girl who's just finished her freshman year at a college near your alma mater asks you if you're in town for the summer enrichment program at the university, and you watch her turn a frightening shade of pink when you tell her that you got your bachelor's degree while she was still in junior high. Or when you've just moved to California and are trying to get your new driver's license...

DMV Dude: Where did you get your first license?
You: Pennsylvania.
DMV Dude: But your form says you are currently licensed in Ohio.
You: Yes, I have been licensed in Ohio since 2002.
DMV Dude: Then how were you licensed in Pennsylvania?
You: Because I lived there before I moved to Ohio?
DMV Dude: No, but I mean how were you licensed in Pennsylvania?
You: Because I got my first license when I was 17, and I moved to Ohio when I was 22?
DMV Dude: But you were licensed in Ohio for the first time in 2002.
You: Yes, and I was 22 then. This is my third driver's license since I was 17.
DMV Dude: But...
You: I was born in 1980. Do you want to see my passport?
DMV Dude: Um, no, that's all right.

Perhaps that sixth-grader's mother was right, as is everyone else who's said the same thing since then: I will be thankful when I'm older. Mathematically, this is beautiful: When I was 16, people thought I was 11. I've truly aged 10 years since then, but I only look like I've aged 5 years. So when I'm 36, people should think I'm 21. When I'm 46, I should look 26. But damn, if some 25-year-old hostess cards me when I'm 40, I reserve the right to make a giant scene.

This high school I work at? I do have to give them some credit. I was sure I'd get carded when I went to buy a soda in the teachers' lounge, and I was met with not even one sidelong glace. I started to think I'd gotten away with something, but then I reminded myself: I'm staff.

Public transit story #2: Sex ed on the 38

This afternoon, I learned to believe in second chances.

In the spring of my sixth-grade year, my Junior Girl Scout troop took part in a "Fun Day" with some of the other troops in the council. Mostly this was an opportunity for the Brownies and the Daisies to learn from the all-knowing Juniors. So we played a lot of games with parachutes, kickballs, and so on, and it was a lot of good, clean, girl-empowering fun. There was this Daisy Scout who decided I was The Best Thing Ever, as kindergarteners are wont to do with older kids. This little girl hadn't yet learned that, in most circumstances, it is highly inappropriate to lick people. Since I was The Best Thing Ever, I got my arm licked a lot by this loose-tongued, idol-worshipping six-year-old.

Then she started hanging off of my friends and waggling her tongue at them. "Be careful," I said to them. "She's gonna French you!"

To a sixth-grader, "French kissing" is a confusing concept. It's totally cool because it involves dating, but it's totally gross because it involves spit.

This Daisy Scout, however, thought that "Frenching" meant "running around shrieking and trying to lick people's arms." Which was pretty much what she was already doing. But when she started squealing "I'm gonna French you! I'm gonna French you!" I was filled with the horrendous, crushing guilt mastered by eleven-year-old perfectionists. What had I taught this innocent little child? But I stopped feeling horrendous, crushing guilt about this incident within a couple of years.

Fast forward fourteen and a half years, to this afternoon. So I'm on the bus in San Francisco. It's around 2:30, and school's just let out for the day. A horde of eighth- or ninth-grade boys piles on the bus. They're playing cards. And one of them yanks the sweatshirt hood of the boy sitting next to me.

"Dude!" another one says. "He just SM'ed you!"

"He what?" says the boy next to me.

"He SM'ed you!"

"What is this 'SM' of which we are speaking?" says the boy next to me.

"Dude, you don't know what SM is?" say most of the other boys, in syncopated chorus.

"No, what's SM?"

Silence.

"C'mon, dudes, tell me! What's SM?"

"Well, I don't really know exactly," says the first boy, "but it's a way that you, you know, do it."

I'm sitting there biting my tongue. I really want to give these boys at least a cursory definition of sadomasochism. But instead, I try even harder to read my book.

"It's when you chain people up and have sex with them," says another, bolder boy.

Just keep reading, I will myself. But it's getting harder and harder to concentrate on my book. I think I might explode.

"Wait, isn't that BSM?" asks the boy next to me.

"Dude, 'BS' is short for 'bullshit'," says another boy.

"No, BSM," says my seatmate. "I think that's what it's called."

"Isn't the 'B' for 'bondage'?" asks one of his friends.

Oh my G-d, I think my tongue is bleeding.

"Whatever, dude," says the hood-yanker. "Let's play cards."

So I guess I got my second chance. I've atoned for the Frenching Daisy incident of 1991. These boys live in San Francisco. They'll find out about all those letters soon enough.

Party on, dudes!

Over New Year's, a hotel in Orlando hosted a kids' soccer convention and a hypothetical swingers' party. This booking arrangement apparently got some of the parents' panties in a bunch. (Neither the swingers nor their panties were available for comment.) These well-meaning parents were concerned that their young teenagers saw a lot of adult body parts. The adults in charge of these body parts were dancing, although apparently they were not excessively clothed.

One poor dad found himself having to explain "delicately" to his teenagers what exactly swingers are. He and the other concerned parents were mad that the hotel hadn't informed them of the mixed booking.

Um, where do I start?

First off, all kinds of adults have big New Year's parties in hotels. A lot of these parties involve dancing. And alcohol. And clothing that should really only be worn by college students, and in moderation even then. Many perfectly monogamous people go to New Year's parties in scanty outfits, get drunk, dance with the person they came with, and go home (or to bed) with that same person. So how were these parents able to tell that they were sharing a hotel with swingers, rather than run-of-the-mill year-end revelers? I see two possibilities:

1. There was a sign outside the ballroom that said something like "GIANT DEPRAVED SWINGERS PARTY, 9pm-??"
2. They just knew.

I'm guessing it's #2.

Second, why did these parents have to explain what that party was about? Teenagers value being in on stuff. If they think they're out of the loop, they pester and pester and pester until they get in the loop. So, if their parents had to explain the concept of swinging, they'd most likely never heard the term "swinger" before either.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that it was a swingers' ball. I'd bet a lot of chocolate that there was not a sign outside the ballroom that read "GIANT DEPRAVED SWINGERS PARTY." So here is our (mostly hypothetical) situation:

• The teens don't know the word "swinger" or its definition.
• The word "swinger" is not displayed anywhere in the vicinity.
• The parents find themselves explaining swinging to their teenagers.

So how did the teenagers know to ask, "Mom? Dad? What's a swinger?"

Again, two possibilities:

1. The swingers were shouting "CHANGE IS GOOD! SWINGERS IN THE HOOD!" while conga-ing around the ballroom.
2. The parents uttered the word "swinger," either in hushed tones to their perfectly monogamous spouses, or in parental advisory tones to their completely clueless teenagers.

Again, I'm guessing it's #2.

Third, why did the parents think the hotel would have informed them ahead of time, before they even completed their booking? Even assuming an unmarked swingers' ball, this has to be the most ridiculous part of the entire story. Hotels in this country are in business, well, to make money. To make money, you need customers. You can't make money if you turn potential customers away. Hotels can pick and choose their patrons, sure, but if the management really didn't want a swingers' ball under their roof, they wouldn't have allowed the booking. The hotel would lose a lot of business if their reservations desk did something like this:

Employee: Thank you for calling the Crowne-Plaza Hotel Airport in Orlando. May I make a reservation for you?
Soccer Mom: Yes, I'd like to book some rooms for the Happy Castle Valley Youth Soccer League.
Employee: Well, we have some lovely double-occupancy, no-smoking rooms available for $92 per night.
Soccer Mom: Oh, that sounds fantastic.
Employee: But I should let you know that the Panhandle Lovehandled Manhandling Middle-Age Swingers' Legion has reserved a block of rooms here that weekend.
Soccer Mom: Well, I never! I will just have to book these eleven rooms somewhere else.

Riiiiiiight.

So consenting adults want to get it on in a hotel, and parents feel uncomfortable talking to their kids about sex. What else is new?

Gerbil Jumble #1

I like to do the Jumble, that scrambled word game. But it's no fun for me to do it the right way--unscrambling the words, then rearranging the circled letters to find the secret (bad) pun that goes with the little cartoon. So I do it wrong. I pretend the Jumble is a crossword. Usually the circled letters don't spell a damn thing, but the way I see it, the cartoon is just incidental.

We get the daily paper, so I get to plop a Gerbil Jumble in front of my wife every single day. Sometimes she says I've outdone myself. She said that about this one:



So I decided to share.

Happy merry holly jolly joyous whatever

Happy Hanukkah

Merry Christmas

and a Snarky New Year!