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!

Prix fixe? No, prefix.

DISCLAIMER: This entry contains a lot of instances of the word "Catholic." However, this entry actually has nothing of substance to do with Catholicism. And, you know, some of my best friends were once Catholic.

I think the term "lapsed Catholic" is pretty funny. It ranks up there with "spot vulture." Spot vultures, of course, are the people who sit in their cars in the middle of the parking lot aisles, waiting for someone to vacate a parking spot. You know these people. They make sure no one can get around them, and very often they do this even when everyone else is in the store. Then, of course, no one can get their car out anyway, so the vultures honk a lot. But really, if they were true vultures, they would drive around the lot in search of a soon-to-be-departing vehicle. Nor would they honk. Real vultures aren't known for lying in wait, nor are they known for announcing their presence. They dive-bomb, and they do it quietly. Given half a chance, they will dive-bomb your car while you try to change your flat tire, and you won't know until it's too late.

But I was talking about "lapsed Catholics," wasn't I? I could go on a whole thing about how this term is funny because it implies that once Catholic, always Catholic. I mean, if you are raised Catholic and then decide it's not for you, then you become a lapsed Catholic. Which, in essence, makes you a non-practicing Catholic, even though you don't want to practice Catholicism. There's no escape! But I won't go on that whole thing. Really. My whole thing is actually much, much longer.

Some folks who treat substance abuse like to conceptualize "falling off the wagon" as lapse, relapse, and collapse. A lapse isn't necessarily bad. You can have a one lapse during a period of sobriety and still be perfectly fine. But a bunch of lapses can make a relapse. Relapse isn't necessarily bad, either, as long as you are able to commit to getting back on the proverbial wagon. But if you can't get your use back under control, you enter collapse. And collapse is bad.

So what of religious lapses, then? If a lapsed Catholic is someone who has stopped being Catholic, but might start up again, then a relapsed Catholic is someone who has stopped being Catholic, but has started up again. Or is a relapsed Catholic someone who stopped being Catholic, started up again, and then stopped (i.e., re-lapsing)? But perhaps that is an elapsed Catholic.

Then we turn to collapsed Catholics. Do they have bad knees?

And what about prolapsed Catholics? Are they people who support lapsed Catholics, or are they medical conditions?

Eh. Words are dumb.

Public transit story #1: Kids say the darndest things

My mother says that, when I was a wee little thing, I went very quickly from single words to paragraphs. (If you are surprised by this, you should check your pulse, because you might be, um, vitally challenged.) I didn't say too many embarrassing things, but I sure did have an opinion, and often a dissertation, on what was around me.

So I am always amused by, and occasionally protective of, little kids' public soapboxes. Once when we were in Target, we came upon this little boy in the women's underwear department. He looked all of six years old. Right at his eye level was a full-figure bra. He took the bra in his hands and exclaimed, "That is just INAPPROPRIATE!"

Shhh, said the adults with him.

We booked it out of Target, lest we pee ourselves with laughter in the middle of the store.

Last Thursday on my way to work, the train suddenly came to a halt. The driver got on the intercom and announced that there were some switching problems up ahead. She said we'd be sitting on the track for a few minutes, and then we'd turn around and go back to the station we'd just left. Our (formerly northbound) train would then become a southbound train, and another one would be along in a few minutes to take us the rest of the way north. It was still pretty early in the morning and there weren't a lot of people on the train, so there wasn't any collective groaning or anything like that.

There was, however, a small child in the back of the car, maybe five or six years old. After the driver's announcement, she regaled the car with a burning question:

"I know what is an egg, but what is a nog? What is an eggnog?"

Shhh, said the adult with her.

Then the driver made a second announcement: "We just have to sit here a few minutes longer, and then we'll go back to Orinda and the other train will come to get you."

Said the little girl, "We're going to be here A LONG TIME! I will read this book. Once upon a time, blah blah blah, the end, I love you, I'm going to bed."

Shhh, said her adult.

At that point, the train started moving. I was disappointed. I mean, I wanted to go to work and all--I love my job, and it pays by the hour--but I still don't know what a nog is either.

An allegory

Once upon a time there was a little gerbil. This little gerbil tried to do everything right all the time. It kept its cage neat, didn't snack upon its own poop, and never peed up in the Habitrail tunnels. Sometimes people picked up the gerbil and held it upside-down by its tail. It didn't squirm or try to bite the people. It was truly a very well-behaved gerbil.

The gerbil liked to chew on cardboard tubes. It was really into the cardboard tubes. Paper towel tubes, toilet paper tubes, what-have-you. It would only share its cardboard tubes with one of its cagemates. The two gerbils spent a lot of time destroying cardboard tubes together. They were very well-behaved, although sometimes they stayed up very late, chewing on tubes and chattering.

One day, the people got a huge new cage with some more gerbils. They hooked up the new cage to the old cage, and the gerbil and its cagemate got to know the new bunch of gerbils. They chewed some tubes together in the new cage, but soon the gerbil's cagemate got tired of the new cage and went back to the old cage. The gerbil really missed its cagemate.

The new gerbils told the gerbil that it was chewing tubes all wrong. They said that real gerbils all chewed tubes in a very particular way. The gerbil wanted to do everything right and make the new gerbils happy, so it started chewing tubes like a real gerbil.

The gerbil had always thought it was a real gerbil, but it started to have its doubts. Maybe it was a hamster, or a mouse, or a very small guinea pig. It spent a lot of time looking at its tail. Hamsters and guinea pigs don't have tails, so maybe it was a mouse. Maybe it should start calling itself a mouse, or at the very least, a gerbil imposter. It wasn't chewing tubes like a real gerbil, but its cagemate kept saying they were both real gerbils. The gerbil was very, very confused.

After a while, the gerbil grew tired of trying to do things the right way. It wanted to do things its way, because it realized that sometimes other gerbils' right ways were not the right way for it. So it did most of the same gerbilly things, like keeping the cage neat, not eating its own poop, and not peeing in the Habitrail tunnels. It still didn't squirm when people held it upside-down by its tail. But it did go back to chewing tubes its own way.

The other gerbils were very mad. They told the gerbil it would never be taken for a real gerbil unless it chewed tubes like a real gerbil. They told the gerbil it couldn't have any sunflower seeds unless it chewed tubes like a real gerbil. They started pooping in the gerbil's favorite corner of the cage. Once they put some poop in a sunflower seed shell and gave it to the gerbil. The gerbil was so happy to see a sunflower seed shell that it didn't notice the poop inside until it was too late.

Finally the gerbil couldn't take it any more. It went back to its old cage and its favorite cagemate. It chewed tubes the way it wanted to. It tried not to pay attention to the other cage. Every so often it saw the gerbils in the other cage giving it nasty, disapproving looks over their half-chewed tubes. Sometimes the other gerbils tried to throw poop at the gerbil, but they threw like gerbils and the poop landed in their own cage. The gerbil focused on keeping its own cage neat, chewing on tubes with its cagemate, and trying really hard not to care about the other gerbils.

Then one day the gerbil looked over at the other cage and saw that the other gerbils were practically swimming in gerbil poop. They called over to the gerbil and asked for help. The people had been trying to bring home new gerbils, they said, and the new gerbils wouldn't move in on account of the filth. A couple of gerbils had stayed over for a night or two, but none of them would stay longer. The prospective gerbils all complained of the poop and the rules about tube-chewing. No one knew what to do, because the poop-throwing and the chewing rules had always worked just fine.

The gerbil was indignant. How dare they ask for help fixing the very things that prompted it to leave? The gerbil stayed up many nights, chewing on tubes, wondering what to do. It finally knew, in its gerbilly heart, that it was a real gerbil. The other gerbils--maybe they didn't even have gerbilly hearts. Maybe they were all rats. They certainly behaved like vermin.

After a lot of searching of its gerbilly soul, the gerbil said to the other gerbils that it would, indeed, help. It would never benefit directly, it said, because it would never, ever, ever go back to that other cage, never. But it wanted to make life better for future batches of prospective gerbils. The other gerbils were very eager to hear what the gerbil had to say.

The gerbil said it had a single piece of advice.

What is it? What is it? clamored the other gerbils.

The gerbil said it was a really radical idea that the other gerbils might not like.

What is it? What is it? Please tell us! clamored the other gerbils.

The gerbil took a bite of a cardboard tube, stood up on its little haunches, and said through a very full mouth:

"There's no wrong way to eat these pieces."

THE END

I do, but you don't.

I am a freak.

No, really, I am. I find Harry Potter vapid. I have no desire to read The Da Vinci Code, The Bridges of Madison County, or anything by Steven Covey. I have never seen Desperate Housewives, The Sopranos, or Sex in the City, nor do I plan to anytime soon. I idolized Simon and Garfunkel in my youth while my peers drooled over the New Kids on the Block. I find most romantic comedies so formulaic as to be unwatchable. I think Brad Pitt is funny-looking. Okay, fine, I don't like boys, and neither does my wife, really. That's why we got married. In the spirit of equality, I also think Angelina Jolie is funny-looking.

And I find Queer Eye for the Straight Guy completely and utterly tasteless. I have, indeed, seen a few episodes of this one. I thought it was offensive before I watched it, and I still think it's offensive. At its core, the show is based on the following little syllogism:

1. All straight men are slobs.
2. No straight man should be a slob.
3. Therefore, all straight men should be cured of their slobbiness.
4. Slobs can only be cured by non-slobs.
5. Therefore, all straight men must be cured of their slobbiness by non-slobs.
6. No gay man is a slob.
7. Therefore, straight men can only be cured of their slobbiness by gay men.
8. Slobby straight men are always good entertainment.
9. Gay men are always good entertainment.
10. Therefore, gay men curing slobby straight men is even better entertainment.

Besides being illogical, this is just plain dumb. I know plenty of slobby gay men and obsessively non-slobby straight men. In effect, Queer Eye only reinforces the notion that gay people exist only to help straight people be better people.

Now, the logical extension of the above is a huge steaming cesspool of irony: If straight men are inherently slobs and gay men are inherently non-slobs, then straight men can't be non-slobs! In other words, those Straight Guys must become more gay!!!!

Ha! Take THAT, homophobic assimilators!!!!

I do not, however, appreciate the irony of Queer Eye for the Engaged Guy. This, I think, is the epitome of offensive television masquerading as wholesome entertainment. In this great land of opportunity, gay people can't enjoy the full benefits of marriage. Sure, gay Americans can get married in Massachusetts and a handful of foreign countries. I married the most beautiful woman in the world three months ago, but Dubya's Crusaders want to make sure our party is permanently, Constitutionally spoiled.

According to the Queer Eye FAQ, only guys from the New York Tri-State area are eligible for de-slobbing. Neither Connecticut nor New Jersey allows same-sex marriage. New York only recognizes same-sex marriages performed outside of New York. In essence, gay guys get to help straight guys be less straight (see above) in order to get married in places where gay weddings are prohibited.

Indeed, in most corners of the world, same-sex relationships have no legal standing. We get harassed, assaulted, and killed because of who we are and who we love. Some of us may go our entire lives without ever enjoying the benefits of real, honest-to-God marriage, much less those of societal acceptance.

My wife and I planned our own wedding, and it was completely fabulous. We'll help straight people plan theirs, too... as soon as we can declare the proceeds on a joint federal tax return.

A room with a perfectly acceptable view

I have been living in California now for just over six months, and I am still in the throes of culture shock. There's this philosophy that everyone has to be first all the time. Unfortunately, not everyone can be first at the same time. In fact, only one person can be first in any given situation. That's, um, kind of part and parcel of being first.

This is why I hate the highways.

I am, however, getting used to the skylines out here. I like being up in the hills sometimes, where if it's not too hazy and my eyes and brain are getting along with each other, I can see the Golden Gate Bridge. I'm not so sure about the bone-dry hills dotted with scrub. They look like armpits. Giant human armpits. With green hair.

And every so often there is a kerfuffle about something ruining someone's view. In this particular case, some people are concerned about power lines blocking their view of the bay. They're trying to get the lines put underground, a project to be funded by additional property taxes. All those homes are worth a lot of money, you know, and apparently, imperfect views decrease their value. But many of these homes are owned by retirees, who bought them a long time ago for a lot less than their current worth, and who can't afford any more property taxes.

The old-timers don't mind the power lines. It's the newer residents who do, the ones who bought their multimillion-dollar houses for millions of dollars... and who must not be very happy with their houses. Because hy worry about how much you can get for your house, unless you're planning to sell it?

I grew up in a little itty bitty historic town on the other side of the country, whose two claims to fame are 1) it was founded by William Penn and 2) pretty much the entirety of downtown appears in the movie "Signs." My hometown has regulations about what color you can paint your house. (At least in San Francisco, Victorian houses are pink and purple, the way God intended--not colonial red, forest green, and Chesapeake blue.) I like rolling hills that are green in the summer, red in the fall, and spiky with bare branches the rest of the time. I like rivers and creeks. I like snow. Um, I really like snow. A lot. Also thunderstorms. I miss severe weather.

I also miss the view out of my bedroom window. Until a few months ago, the view was of the lumberyard. The main building was on the other side of our next-door neighbors' house. When I was little, we used to jump off the weird 3-foot ledges that stuck out of it. We decorated that white wall with flying rotten walnuts and muddy balls. From my window I could also see some of the other buildings, like the mill and the sketchy storage building.

Then the developers came and knocked it all down. In its place will be a "traditional neighborhood development" that is anything but traditional.

When I went back for Thanksgiving, I could look out my window and see houses two blocks away. I could see cars on other streets. I could see a lot of things I'd never seen from there before, things that had always been there. It was very disturbing. I wanted my old view back--which is to say, I wanted no view at all.

Sure, I was upset when the cell phone tower went up behind the old Acme grocery. It's tall and ugly. But I like being able to use my cell phone when I visit my parents, and they like using their cell phones. And I bet those people who fret about the power lines enjoy using their cell phones, too. How do we get all this lovely cellular reception? By having tall, ugly cell phone towers. Just like we get electricity in our homes by having heavy, ugly wires strung between tall, ugly poles.

So, go ahead. Put those wires underground. Then start thinking about subterranean cell phone towers. Because the more cell phones there are, the more towers we need--and the more likely one will wind up in your backyard.

Oh, and I'll take my lumberyard back now, please.

By any other name

I think it would be most lovely to have the wordsmithing prowess of Donald Rumsfeld. I mean, the man's press conferences are downright poetic. There's a book to prove it. And, apparently, an album of art songs.

Poetry in motion is one thing. What I want to do is rewrite the dictionary. Rumsfeld would like to redefine insurgency. Actually, what he wants to do is to stop using the word "insurgent" because the word is too good for the people he used to describe with it.

Now, Rumsfeld is not the first to come up with this idea. Shakespeare, or possibly Christopher Marlowe pretending to be Shakespeare, put it this way:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Regardless, this is absolutely BRILLIANT.

The possibilities, though Orwellian, are ENDLESS.

This whole who-uncovered-the-CIA-agent mess? Didn't actually happen the way people think it did. See, someone decided that "Valerie Wilson's husband" was a better name for a colonial seamstress than "Betsy Ross." "Couldn't find" was ever so much better than "sewed the first." "Yellowcake" is just so much more descriptive than "American flag." It's very simple, you see. No one was actually talking about weapons of mass destruction they said "Valerie Wilson's husband couldn't find yellowcake." It was just a third-grade history lesson gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Now I need to go see about dinner. I think I will grill a slab of nice, juicy filet mignon for dinner, where

grill a slab of = heat a can of
nice = cheap
juicy = salty
filet = vegetable soup
mignon = from Target.

Harry Plotzer and the Half-Good Rhymes

Now that the Season of Capitalism is upon us, I know I'm going to be bombarded with happy little Christmas carol arrangements every time I leave the house, not to mention also every time I turn on the TV or the radio. Sometimes I just want to POKE MY EYES OUT. Oedipus is so inspiring, fa la la la la, la la la la.

People parody Christmas carols all the time: Jingle bells, Batman smells. Deck the halls with gasoline. Joy to the world, [fill in the blank] is dead. We fish ewe a mare egrets moose. But really, what could be funnier sillier than parodying in English a song that was written in Hebrew?

(Well, okay, perhaps being attacked by vampiric squid wearing polka-dotted lederhosen and Santa hats is sillier. But not by much.)

There are a few full-length parodies of "Hava Nagila" out there, including one about a mystery food and one of many about tequila. During the vaguely sleep-deprived haze that was my Thanksgiving travel, I didn't have the patience for a whole song while. So I just came up with some lines that sound almost like "Hava Nagila." Of course, one must often force the rhyme.

* Have a sarspreelah
* My name's Bob Vila
* Root for the Steelahs!
* Drive a four-wheelah
* Mint or vaneela?
* Charles and Cameela
* Shaquille O'Neal, ah
* Giant goreela
* Hun named Atteela
* Used Pinto deelah
* Crappy tequila
* Kneecap: pateella
* Potato peelah
* Sink their floteella!
* Made of maneela
* Put out some feelahs

From my cage to yours, Happy It's Not Even December Yet and They're Already Selling Live Christmas Trees at the Grocery Store!

Marginalia

I have some pet peeves. I don't have enough to be the peeve equivalent of the crazy cat lady, but I have some. Like when I look in the sink and there are remnants of dinner from two nights ago in the drain, or when people in the airport are looking every which way but the one they are going, or when bank tellers, retail workers, etc. have to compete with customers' cell phone conversations.

But I think my biggest one is People Who Take Notes In Library Books.

Some people apparently think it is their prerogative to decorate text with yellow highlighter pens. Others apparently cannot read without underlining entire paragraphs in pencil, blue ballpoint, or red felt-tip. Then they make notes in the margins that, if legible, often have very little to do with the actual subject of the book. It's like finding "♥♥♥TRISHA AND GERALD FOREVER♥♥♥" in your ninth-grade biology textbook and having no idea when anyone named Trisha (or Gerald) last went through your high school.

My lovely wife and I own hundreds of books. We have more books than we have room for bookshelves. In fact, when we moved into our current home, I had to re-box a lot of my books, and she still has boxes of books left to sort through. So, due to the limits of space (not to mention finances), she gets the books she needs for school from the library. These books are full of underlinings, asterisks, question marks, and footnotes--none of which were set in type. Occasionally she comes across marginalia like

NO MENTION OF BAPTISMAL PRIESTHOOD! EGREGIOUS OMISSION!

and

HOW POST-MODERN!

and underlining marathons like

Today's world is multicultural, and since globalization does not mean exclusively a Westernization of the world, it is correct to say that the total world is being inculturated in and through a multicultural fusion of horizons. Cultural ways of thinking and cultural meaning structures are currently interactive. Thus, to speak of the world as a sacrament may have little meaning for a culture in which the very word "sacrament" is missing. Nor can theologians argue that most cultures have a unique symbol system in and through which the term "sacrament" becomes meaningful. When the word "sacrament" in the framework of these same theological traditions means only two rituals or only seven rituals, or the term "sacrament" refers only to the Roman Catholic Church or only to the Christian Church, or the term is only applied to a Jewish individual, namely Jesus, then "sacrament" has no facile entree into a non-Western culture simply on the basis of a given culture's symbolic framework. The exclusivity inherent in the term "sacrament," when used this way, precludes any meaningful relationship to the symbol system of a non-Christian culture.

The page of which I type is number 56 of Kenan Osborne's Christian Sacraments in a Postmodern World (New York: Paulist, 1999). This Christian stuff is still a mystery to this blogging Jewish chick. However, I have to snicker that someone accused a book about the post-modern era of being post-modern.

People. Library books belong to everyone. In fact, sharing knowledge is why we have libraries. For personal reflection, we have spiral notebooks, steno pads, composition books, lined journals... If underlining paragraphs and scrawling in the margins are necessary for your reading process, may I introduce you to amazon.com. If you'd still like to deface public property, get a can of paint and find a wall. Don't let everyone else's tax dollars, tuition payments, or endowments enable your resistance to learning the academic social graces.

Obsessions change, man.

When I was ten years old, I decided I wanted to be a clinical psychologist when I grew up. I made this decision initially because I wanted to be Deanna Troi and it was just so cool that her job was not, in and of itself, science fiction. By the time I was about 13 I had read about 80% of the psychology collection at Bucks County Community College, and it still seemed like a good idea.

When The Next Generation ended, I got into The X-Files. Scully rocked my world so much that I considered changing course. I didn't want to be a forensic pathologist--dissecting a fetal pig in ninth-grade biology was kinda gross--but I thought being a federal agent would be awesome. Mulder was pretty cool, too, and he was a psychologist. (The writers had apparently forgotten this by the third or fourth season, but whatever.) Forensic psychology was neat, in a creepy sort of way.

(Um, when Star Wars was re-released, I had some half-serious intentions of becoming a Jedi knight. But we won't talk about that one.)

Now the only show I watch is Law and Order: SVU. I am nearly done with my psychology degree, so it's a good thing I'm not yearning now to be a detective, a forensic psychiatrist, or a district attorney. Okay, maybe I do want to go to law school, but one degree at a time. But anyway, Detective Benson is hot. My wife and I enjoy Detective Benson immensely. For a while we thought maybe this character was gay. We really hoped she was. I mean we really hoped she was. When we finally finished watching the first season DVDs this summer, we were crestfallen.

About a year ago I'd written an ode to Detective Benson's sexual ambiguity. I used Bree Sharp's very clever song "David Duchovny" as its basis. Bree, my apologies; but you know, "David Duchovny" came out around the time I was thinking about coming out myself. But this is my song, here.

It's Tuesday night
And it's fast approaching ten
My eyes are bright
Time for SVU again
I know I always think too much
But I can't help thinking it'd be such
A pleasure to know the object
Of that hot detective's touch

And I can't wait any more to know her intentions
I've always wondered about Olivia Benson
Olivia Benson, are you a lesbian?

My friends all tell me,
"Girl, you know that she's made up"
But deep within my heart
I harbor feelings for this cop
Watching her words for a sign
I've learned to read between the lines
I'm waiting for the script that
Just confirms what I opine

In the form of Olivia Benson's sexual tension
Not for Eliot Stabler, but here's what I'm sensing:
Olivia Benson lets down her defense and is
Getting it on with some dyke bar denizen
Olivia Benson, what's your intention?

She runs really fast and
She's learned to kick ass
And I know this is crass
But I know I'll just pout
If she dances about
I'll scream and I'll shout but
I don't understand why she's not out

My bags are packed
I am ready to appear
Down at the station
And find out if she's really queer
I'm just envisioning her chest
As she makes her next arrest
Reading me my rights
Please don't say that I'm obsessed

And I would say, "Olivia Benson, why won't you mention
If you're attracted to women
Or attracted to men, hon?
Olivia Benson, who gets your attention?
Olivia Benson, I hope you're a lesbian
I've got apprehension this'll end in rejection, but
Olivia Benson, I'm good at prevention
My love is immense and
I'm moving to Brooklyn
Olivia Benson, I hope you're a lesbian..."

I admit that at the grocery store the other day, I bought the December issue of Redbook for its (lamentably short) interview with Mariska Hargitay.

Ich bin ein East Coaster

The Governator is in China, spreading the good news about California.

Among the good news: "Come to California. Maybe Maria's going to cook some wienerschnitzel when you come!"

I may still be a cynical Philly girl at heart, but I swear I am not making this up.