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When I moved apartments in Cleveland, I was very excited that I could keep the same phone number. I liked my phone number. It had been all mine since early July of 2001, and it was all mine through at least last December, when my free informational recording ("This number has been changed. The new number is...") was set to expire. I was very proud of my phone number.

I moved to a new place in June, 2003. Shortly thereafter, I began getting messages on my answering machine:

Hi, Mrs. Johnson, this is Dr. So-and-So's office, just calling to confirm your appointment tomorrow at 1:30.

Sometimes the messages went like this:

Hi, Mrs. Johnson, this is Dr. So-and-So's office, just calling to follow up on your appointment from yesterday. We missed you. Please call us back so we can set up a new appointment for you.

No one named Johnson lived in my house. I got tired of this pretty quickly, and I also felt some sense of obligation to help care for Mrs. Johnson, whoever she was. But the doctor's office never left a phone number, and the doctor had a rather unusual last name. So one afternoon I star-69'd the doctor and played the Good, Vaguely HIPAA-Compliant Samaritan:

Receptionist: Hi, Dr. So-and-So's office?
Me: Yes, I keep getting messages on my answering machine for a Mrs. Johnson, and I wanted to let you know that I have no idea who that is and maybe you should ask her again what her phone number is.
Receptionist: Uh, did you just move in?
Me: No, I've had this number for almost four years now.
Receptionist: We've been trying to reach Mrs. Johnson about her--
Me: Hey, I don't know who she is, and I don't want to intrude on her privacy. Just make sure you have the right number for her, in case you actually have to reach her by phone.

And that was the end of that.

Here in California, I have a different problem: people think my cell is the "pharmacy." One afternoon I got extremely bored and used reverse lookup on similar numbers. Oddly, all conceivable misdials were also cell phones owned by Verizon Wireless. I ask you: what pharmacy operates by cell phone?

I, too, am guilty of misdialing on occasion. Once, I thought I was calling Comcast, and instead I got one of those Chat Now with Hot Live Local Singles! lines. I figured I'd called 1-900-COMCAST, instead of 1-800-COMCAST, so to assuage my mortification, I put a 900/976 block on our line.

The other day I got a call at home which was eerily reminiscent of the tale of Mrs. Johnson:

Hi, Christina, this is Dr. Such-and-Such's office. We haven't seen you in a while and are wondering if everything is okay. Maybe you moved, or you got a new number, but please give us a call and let us know how you are doing.

So I called Dr. Such-and-Such's office. I've owned this number for a year and a half, and as far as I know, I'm the first to have it. I was all set to tell Dr. Such-and-Such's receptionist that I didn't know any Christina and that maybe they should double-check their records...

...but who should pick up but an overly enthusiastic recording, encouraging me to Chat Now with Hot Live Local Singles!

Either every unclaimed phone number in this area redirects the caller to Chat Now with Hot Live Local Singles, or I just have extraordinary luck in stumbling across such opportunities.

Trick or treat, dudes.

Obstructions

I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality
The Clash, "Lost in the Supermarket"

The grocery store is one of the eviller places on earth. I don't care which grocery store. Safeway, Tops, Stop & Shop, Genuardi's, Acme (pronounced "Ack-uh-me," of course), Fred Meyer, Piggly Wiggly, Kroger, Albertsons, the Berkeley Bowl... they're all the same. Too many choices, too many fluorescent lights, and too many people, and not enough room for all of it. I get overwhelmed.

But we gotta eat.

Every so often my bargain-hunting genes get the better of me, and I decide to go the Berkeley Grocery Outlet. Their motto is "Bargains Only!" which actually means "You are guaranteed not to find at least one staple on your list!" Sometimes they have yogurt, cream cheese, and canisters of parmesan; other times (like today) they have none of these items. This is highly annoying. But the plus side is that all these overstocks are dirt cheap. For example, today I bought $46 worth of groceries for $21. Not bad. Not bad at all.

The clientele of the Grocery Outlet is, well, fairly bizarre on average. I include myself in this statement, but there are many different types of bizarreness, and I would like to think that mine is a benign sort of bizarreness. Various of today's customers were carrying on cell phone conversations about things which just should not be discussed within earshot of strangers, such as finally getting one's children back from protective custody.

And then there was this woman.

This middle-aged woman was standing in the middle of the aisle, with her cart blocking half the width of the aisle and her body blocking an additional fourth. She was staring rather blankly at the shelves. As I too had a cart, my passage was blocked. So I said, quite politely, "Excuse me." The woman glared at me and spat, "I'm just standing here, about to pass out, and you have a cart too? [mutter mutter mutter mutter]" She moved her cart and let me pass, all the while muttering about who-knows-what.

At the end of the aisle was another cart, this one parallel to the shelves. I wasn't sure whether I could maneuver my cart past it, so I eased my cart up alongside it. I don't like moving other people's carts. Well, I will move a cart if its owner isn't right there. But if its owner is standing there, I will politely say "Excuse me," as above, and I expect the owner to say "Oh, I'm sorry," just as I do when it's my cart in the way. I wasn't sure whether the person near this particular cart was its owner, so I thought I'd try some expert cart maneuvering first.

So there I was, trying to slip my cart past this cart whose owner may or may not have been standing a few feet away, and along came this muttering woman again! She had abandoned whatever she'd been staring at, as well as her own cart, in order to move this other cart out of my way and spit, "Why don't you just move this stupid cart then?"

I smiled sweetly and replied, "I was about to do just that. But thanks for doing it for me! I appreciate the help."

And off she went back toward her own cart, mutter mutter mutter muttering all the way.

We passed each other a few more times before I left the store with my 54% savings. Each time she glared at me, then heaved a disgusted sigh.

I hope she found what she was looking for.

Public transit story #12: Differently abled

Last week I rode the bus next to a gentleman of indeterminate age. His face suggested he was about 35; his hair suggested he was about 50. He had with him a garden-variety cane, the hollow metal kind with the grey rubber handle. We were sitting in one of the supposedly accessible seats at the front of the bus. A lot of people (particularly readers of the Berkeley Daily Planet) are quite pissed about these seats, which are more than a foot off the floor of the bus. Those who are at least 5'7 can slide on and off these seats with little trouble. We shorter folk don't fare so well--even yours truly, who though still young and limber has actually fallen off the seat. Not cool.

But enough of that rant.

This gentleman of indeterminate age spent most of the trip fiddling with his cane, pressing it up against his chin and such. He peered about the bus in a peculiar way. Then, as we neared the Berkeley Bowl (which would be the coolest grocery store ever if it weren't always packed with crazy people who push their carts north while looking south), said gentleman of indeterminate age extended the handle of his cane toward the call button. He pushed at the button with the handle of his cane several times in a most uncoordinated fashion, but the "stop requested" sign did not light up.

As befits one who works with adults with severe mental illness, these days I pretty much automatically observe and mentally catalogue behaviors, especially non-normative ones. I'd watched this guy fidget, look around his environment weirdly, and demonstrate poor hand-eye coordination. He was in a seat reserved for people with disabilities. He had a standard-issue cane. I guessed he had some kind of mobility impairment plus a neurological something-or-other.

"Is your stop next?" I asked. He grunted. That seemed to be a "yes," so I pushed the call button for him and moved out of his way (narrowly missing falling off the accessible seat). Again, he grunted.

And then this gentleman of indeterminate age walked off the bus with perfect grace and danced down the block, twirling and tossing his generic cane as though it were a wooden rifle and he a member of a high-school color guard.

I guess you can't have everything

In my short life, I have resided in the following places:
1. Southeastern PA, 17 years
2. Western Massachusetts, 4 years
3. Northeast Ohio, 4 years
4. Northern California, 17 months and counting

I have spent a lot of time lately musing about the differences between Cleveland and Berkeley (Berkeley wins by a nose); between Western Mass. and Berkeley (Western Mass., dude, no contest!); and between PA and Berkeley (you can take the girl out of the East Coast, but you can't take the East Coast out of the girl).

At this point it should probably go without saying that I'm not a huge fan of California.

One area in which the Bay Area kicks other locales' butts is public transportation. This is a plus for two reasons:
1. Driving around here completely sucks; and
2. Public transit stories! 'Nuff said.

Berkeley also has more noodle houses than you can shake a (chop)stick at, multi-lingual signage, and the interesting yet totally scary Hayward Fault. The Hayward Fault is a "creeping fault," which means it moves constantly but very, very slowly; and after a couple of decades it displaces things like curbs, staircases, and Memorial Stadium. (Seismologists apparently track such movement with a creepmeter, which sounds more like something you'd want to have if you were single.)

But Berkeley lacks a lot of things. Among these:
1. Inclement weather. Forget spring, summer, fall, and winter; the seasons here are Wet and Dry.
2. CVS. Around here, if you say "CVS," people think you are talking about the rape crisis center.
3. Soft (read: completely stale) pretzels delicately scented with car exhaust.
4. Urgent care centers with evening and weekend hours.
5. Stores where you can get your watch batteries replaced.

Let me say a few words about items 4 and 5. People get all het up about the ER being clogged with non-emergent patients. Yes, it is a problem when people have to go to the ER for primary care because they don't have (enough) insurance. But some non-emergent, yet definitely ill, patients wind up in the ER because it's the only place open on evenings and weekends. There are fewer than five urgent care clinics in this general vicinity, but they don't operate on an urgent care schedule. They operate on a primary care schedule. Which means that if you find yourself with a nasty respiratory infection at 3:00 on a Saturday afternoon (as my wife did in August), the only thing to do is wait around for two hours in the ER for a prescription for antibiotics (which we did). It's not just the un- or under-insured who go to the ER for primary care. It's also the sufficiently insured whose illnesses don't know from normal business hours.

About those watch batteries. I have two dead watches at the moment. I know of two sorts of places which replace watch batteries: drugstores and jewelry stores. This end of Berkeley has a severe lack of jewelry stores. So I took my watches to Longs--but this happened to be the only Longs which does not deal in watch batteries. The cashier couldn't suggest a single place in Berkeley where I might have better luck. So I went to another drugstore, Elephant Pharmacy, which stocks health foods, yoga paraphernalia, and DVDs, but not watch batteries. The cashier helpfully recommended the Longs I'd just visited. I asked the ladies at two bead stores for suggestions. All of them said, "Try Longs." I went to a convenience store and asked, "Do you replace watch batteries?" The owner pointed to a display of AA, AAA, and 9-volt Duracells. "No," I said, producing one watch, "watch batteries." "Oh, no," said the owner. "We don't do that. Try Longs."

I do not understand Berkeley.

When animal husbandry attacks

As I scour the classifieds, looking for the perfect job (which, let me tell you, is not to be found in the classifieds of the San Francisco Chronicle), I notice a lot of ads for puppies and kittens. Precision-bred puppies and kittens.

What really gets me about these ads is the number of poodle hybrids they advertise. I wish I could say that poodle hybrids are poodles that don't need to be fed as often as normal poodles, on account of their battery reserves, but no. They are the product of a poodle and some other dog.

This hybridizing thing doesn't just happen with poodles. I once saw a very odd-looking dog around the neighborhood. It had the coloring, snout, and ears of a German shepherd, on the stubby legs and barrel-shaped body of a Welsh corgi. I ask you: who thought this was a good idea? Was this person sober?

(Let me state, for the record, that I know a very sweet dog whose parents were a beagle and a Jack Russell terrier. Perhaps this explains why Chloe is positively brilliant and still eats rocks.)

But dude. Poodle math. Cross a poodle with a Labrador, and you get a Labradoodle. Cross a poodle with a cocker spaniel, and you get a cockapoo. Cross a poodle with a schnauzer, and you get a schnoodle. Cross a poodle with a golden retriever, and you get a goldendoodle. Cross a poodle with a Yorkshire terrier, and you get a Yorkipoo. I am not making these up.

I am, however, making these up:

Poodle + Boxer = Poo-Box!
Poodle + Shih Tzu = Shih-tzu-poo!
Poodle + Airedale = Air Poodle!
Poodle + Newfoundland = Poof!
Poodle + Shar-pei = Poopei!
Poodle + Dalmatian = Poomatian!
Poodle + Mastiff = Poostiff!
Poodle + Basset Hound = Basset Hoodle!
Poodle + Weimeraner = Weimeraneroodle!
Poodle + Chihuahua = Poohuahua!

I'll just take my rescue calico of uncertain parentage, thanks.

Warning

My wife reads the most interesting things for class, such as selections from Dale Martin's (1995) book The Corinthian Body. Actually, I have no idea whether Martin's book is all that interesting. But this sentence definitely is--

But Theophrastus considers other notions farfetched, such as the belief that if one digs peony during the day and is seen by a woodpecker, one will become blind (by having one's eyes pecked out by the bird), and one's anus will fall out. (p. 192)

But lo, careless peony-diggers: Just because Theophrastus says you won't suffer from anal prolapse doesn't mean he's right.

Don't try this in your office

I had one of the worst interviews of my life a week ago. It's taken me a week to recover. This interview was really over after ten minutes, but it lasted an entire hour because I haven't yet learned how to bow out gracefully.

How would I describe this interview, if I had to use but a single word? A few possibilities:

Violating.
Inappropriate.
Power-struggly.
Godawful.

In an attempt to reframe my experience, I decided to come up with a list of the Top Ten Things Not to Do in an Interview. Now, mind you, there already exist a ton of advice sites for interviewees on what not to do during an interview. These are pretty obvious. For example: Don't put your feet up on the interviewer's desk. Don't snap your gum. Don't giggle if you fart.

No, I'm talking about advice for the interviewer. Because it's not just the candidate who has to make a good impression.

Inspired by actual events, I present:

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF INTERVIEWING

1. Thou shalt not ask thy candidate about his or her personal philosophy and then declare that it is wrong.

2. Thou shalt not ask thy candidate vague questions, refuse to provide any additional useful information, and then declare that his or her answer is wrong.

3. Thou shalt not preface thy question with, "I know I am not allowed to ask this," and then proceed to ask thy candidate a disguised version of thy illegal question.

4. Thou shalt not compel thy candidate to elaborate on any matter to which thy candidate referreth as "personal."

5. Thou shalt not interview candidates whom thou hast no intention of hiring in the first place. If thou interviewest candidates whom thou hast no intention of hiring in the first place, thou shalt not convey this information to thy candidate.

6. Thou shalt not belittle thy candidate.

7. Thou shalt not get huffy when thy candidate sayeth that he or she honoreth the Sabbath. For I am a jealous G-d and besides I have already made it quite clear about my feelings toward the Sabbath.

8. Thou shalt not cut thy candidate off by saying, "you really believe that?"

9. Thou shalt not present information which is incorrect or untestable in order to prove thy superiority over thy candidate.

10. Thou shalt not do all of these things which I have commanded thee not to do, and then inform thy candidate that thou really liketh him or her and that thou really wouldst like to hire him or her, but thou canst not do so and is that not a shame.

Pretty obvious too, don't you think?

Apparently not.

Public transit story #11: The answer is in the question

Okay, first off: I feel slightly disingenuous about calling this a Public Transit Story, as it took place on Amtrak, which is not exactly public transit. But now that I've made this disclaimer, I feel a whole lot better.

So, without further ado, I present the following tale:

We went up to Sacramento this weekend for our anniversary. Neither of us had ever stayed in a place that cost $300 per night--at least not on our own dime (or 3000 dimes, as the case may be)--and so our one night in this gorgeous B&B was a little overwhelming. In a nice way, of course, but still.

An important aspect of this trip was taking the train from Berkeley to Sacramento. I love Amtrak. It might be slow and occasionally expensive, but often the tracks run through some really neat areas. I am fascinated by the sorts of things that are built right along railroad tracks--and sometimes I'm more fascinated by the things that are falling apart than the things that are well maintained.

Of course, Amtrak also provides ample opportunity for people-watching.

On our return trip, we were across the aisle from a pair of students. These girls were fairly loud (or was it merely that the rest of the train was fairly quiet?), and their conversation topics included boys, girls, parties, hard classes, easier classes, wanting to go to the gym more, and wanting to eat less junk food. Pretty standard for college students, really. After a lot of loud conversation, they finally agreed to do some homework.

The glorious silence was burst, much too soon, by "Hey, do you know what 'esoteric' means?"

Her friend didn't know.

I bit my lip. It was all I could do to keep from (1) blurting the definition across the aisle or (2) peeing myself with appreciation of sweet, sweet irony.

Gerbil and Goliath

Our move from Cleveland to Berkeley last year was more of a culture shock that I'd expected. I learned very quickly that out here, anything between Chicago and the Atlantic is considered "back East." This includes Ohio, which is not East at all, but Midwest. (To be fair, back East we called California "out West.") More importantly, I learned that "Ohio" is a dirty word. Many have assumed that because I moved here from Ohio, I must have been born in Ohio. When I say that I only lived in Ohio for four years, because that's where grad school was, and really most of my life has been spent either in the Philadelphia area or western Massachusetts--well, people tend to resume eye contact.

Another thing I learned: no one trusts anyone. I grew up in a small town where people mostly trusted each other, although not enough to leave the doors unlocked at night. In western Mass, people also mostly trust each other, although no one really trusts college students (which is entirely reasonable). The same is true of northeast Ohio.

Out here? No trust. This is mostly reasonable, because there are a lot of thieves, scam artists, and perpetrators of random violence. I am naturally a bit paranoid anyway, so this is all fine with me. What I have a problem with is that utility companies don't trust their customers.

When we moved here, I signed us up for phone service with the same company I'd used for four years in Ohio. Our first bill had a due date of not more than seven calendar days after I received it--which was three weeks after it was supposedly printed. I called the company and wanted to know why they sat on our bill for three weeks and then gave us a week to pay up.

"We have to establish your credit," the representative said.

"But I have been a customer for four years, in Ohio! I've never been late with a payment!"

"That's a different branch of the company."

"Well, can't you access my payment history and establish my credit that way?"

"Oh, no, ma'am. We can't do that. Your bill is due in a week."

"Why didn't you send it to me earlier? It was printed three weeks ago, I got it today, and it's due next week!"

"We shorten the payment period for customers who haven't yet established credit. We lengthen the period after a couple months if you get your payment in on time."

"Um, if you intentionally don't send new customers their bills until a week before you need their payment, you are basically ensuring that they will be late and therefore can't establish credit with you."

"This is what all the utility companies do in California, ma'am."

I have never been late with a payment in my life, which is why I'm in charge of almost all the bills and why we have successfully established credit with the phone company. The energy company is a different story. PG&E (yes, that PG&E, of Enron scandal fame) demanded a deposit when we began our service. The deposit was twice the monthly bill for previous tenants, and it was to be returned to us after 13 months--with interest--provided that we had no more than one late payment in that period.

So I sent PG&E a check for $104 in May of 2005. They promised to return it in 13 months, plus some piddling amount of interest (to be compounded monthly). 13 months, they said, would be June of 2006.

I called PG&E this past May to find out if we'd see a credit on the bill or a separate refund check. Quoth PG&E: "A credit for your deposit, plus interest, will appear on your bill in June. Thanks for your terrific payment record!"

June came, and so did the PG&E bill. I called PG&E and asked why they had not applied any credit. Quoth PG&E: "You will receive your credit in July because although you opened your account in May, we didn't turn your power on until June. Thanks for your terrific payment record!" The bit about the power coming on in June was correct--but only because PG&E did not successfully turn on our power as promised in May, and we told them to wait a week until we actually moved in.

July came, but the credit on the bill? Nope. I called PG&E and asked where my deposit was. Quote PG&E: "You will see that on your August bill. July is indeed the 13th month from when we turned on your power, but your interest isn't actually calculated until the 14th month. Thanks for your terrific payment record!"

August arrived, and I was steamed. Somehow we still owed PG&E money! I called them up and demanded to know what was going on. Quoth PG&E: "Your bill was printed on August 2, but we aren't figuring anyone's interest until August 14. Your credit will show up on your September bill. Thanks for your terrific payment record!"

Yesterday I received yet another PG&E bill. As you might have guessed, there was no mention of a credit. I called. I was really really really mad! Quoth PG&E: "Let's see, your account was opened in May... 13 months would have been June... hm..."

I jumped in: "This process has been very frustrating. I was told in May of last year that I would get my deposit back in June of this year. This June I was told I'd get it back in July. In July, I was told August. In August, I was told September. It's September, and I want to know exactly when this matter is going to be resolved."

"Oh," said PG&E. "It looks like we never calculated your return. My supervisor is doing it right now. This will show up on your October bill."

I was livid. "Hold on. At the beginning of August, I was promised this would be taken care of on the 14th of that month. That never happend. How do I know you are actually doing what you've promised?"

"Trust us," said PG&E.

"What if it's not on my bill next month?" I said, running out of patience.

"Call us back and we'll take care of it for November. Thanks for your terrific payment record!"

With interest compounded monthly, it's actually worse for PG&E to hold onto our deposit than for us not to have it back in a timely fashion. And, as my wife points out, our PG&E deposit is currently our highest-yield investment. Maybe I'll let them hold onto our $104+ a little bit longer. By the time we get it back, we might be able to retire on it.

Boyz in the Vatican

Whilst browsing the online classifieds today, I happened upon an announcement from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The CDCR is always hiring, it seems, and the ad I stumbled upon was for Youth Correctional Counselors.

I quickly disabused myself of the notion that I could be a Youth Correctional Counselor. True, I did spend a summer sitting upon bad pre-teen boys in the middle of the woods of New Hampshire, and those bad pre-teen boys were approximately my size or slightly larger... but honestly? CDCR would pee its collective self laughing at me during the physical strength and endurance tests.

But I could not resist reading all the way through the bulletin, just for giggles. And lo, there on the bottom of the third page, I was rewarded:

The POPE includes two written tests and an interview with a psychologist to determine that the candidate is free of any emotional or mental limitations, which could restrict him/her from safely performing the essential functions of the position. The POPE is taken in two sessions: the written tests are taken first and then the interview is scheduled at a later date. An approved POPE is valid for one year and must be current at the time of appointment. Candidates not cleared by the POPE cannot reapply for this position for 12 months from the date of disqualification.

Yes indeedy.

RATZINGER WANTS
YOU
TO JOIN THE CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF
CORRECTIONS AND REHABILITATION

The joke's on you

I have this new favorite joke. It was on Prairie Home Companion over the weekend. But it's very difficult to retell.

See, it's a knock-knock joke, and it goes like this:

Knock knock
Who's there?
Control freak. Now, you say "control freak who?"

People seem to get tripped up and say "control freak who?" And that just ruins the joke.

My wife says it's up there in funniness with the feminist light-bulb joke:

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: That's not funny.

Ah, intellectual humor.

Public transit story #10: I like the way you move

Yesterday we went to Emeryville, home of the big-box retailers. Emeryville boasts (among others) Ikea, Borders, Home Depot, Old Navy, Gap, Office Max, Babies 'R' Us, and Michaels. Emeryville has movie theaters, a California Pizza Kitchen, a P.F. Chang's (don't get me started on how I got food poisoning from my first and only P.F. Chang's meal), a multi-ethnic food court, a Denny's, and of course the Swedish meatball cafeteria at Ikea. Emeryville also has an Amtrak station, some scientific industry, a cafe co-owned by the bass player of Green Day, and a whole lot of condos.

On the way to Emeryville, home of all that is commercial and shiny, we happened upon a lovely gentleman. Although perhaps I should say that as we were standing around at the bus stop, (im)patiently waiting for the #57, this dude blurted, "Hey, are those Doc Martens?"

"Yeah," I said, "the only pair I've ever owned." This is true. I have never been able to afford Docs, and then I saw a pair at Shoe Pavilion for $40 and I just had to have them.

He smiled.

A few minutes later, the guy piped up again: "They're nice."

"Thanks," I said.

The bus came. My wife and I headed to the back of the bus and took two inward-facing seats.

This fellow passed up a few other empty seats in order to sit right across from us. He stared at my shoes. "Those are nice," he said again.

I smiled and looked away.

Then: "I like them, how they move. With the toe part."

I had no idea what he was talking about. My Docs are Mary Janes. The tips move when I move my toes. They're not, like, motorized or anything. Or independently ambulatory. This was all starting to creep me out, so I pretended I couldn't hear him over the noise of the bus.

Then the dude got this big grin on his face and said, "Yeah, that's what I'm talking about! MM-HM!" I looked down and saw that I had been wiggling my toes out of sheer nervousness.

The next stop, thankfully, was ours.

I suppose it could have been worse. Had he also been a frotteur, I would have had to fend off ambush footsies.

Meat salads

Here we are in New Orleans, this year's home of the American Psychological Association's annual convention. The city is hot and steamy, and sadly it's still fairly disheveled. But the convention's fun, and the air conditioning is divine, and hey, it's more or less a vacation.

New Orleans cuisine, however, leaves something to be desired. I realize I am biased, as I'm (a) vegetarian and (b) a picky eater in general. But dude. Everything here has meat, sometimes two or three kinds in a single dish. The red beans and rice has meat. The jambalaya has meat. The gumbo has meat. Even the salads have meat.

I am not making this up. At the convention center they are selling lovely-looking, pre-made green salads topped with meat. And not scoops of tuna salad, either. I'm talking strips of chicken, slices of beef, and some pretty sizable shrimp on otherwise perfectly appetizing beds of lettuce, tomato, and cucumber.

Yes, I know, this is the South, where the bigger and meatier, the better. But meat salads?

It's a shame I can't survive on coffee and beignets alone.

Hot stuff

I have never really thought of myself as a particularly attractive person. Perhaps this is some self-esteem thing. Or perhaps it's from years of being teased for being short and dorky-looking. I don't recall ever thinking that I was ugly, just not pretty. For a long time I thought I was overweight, but I wasn't. Then, for a few years, I was indeed a bit larger than I should have been because my metabolism had been pharmaceutically hijacked. My wife and I disagree as to whether I was "huge" (my opinion) or "curvy" (hers); but at least we agree that I was larger and sleepier than usual.

So now, for the first time in my life, I am... skinny? thin? slender? svelte? (Can short people be svelte?) And sometimes I catch myself thinking, hey, I am kinda cute.

But then some testosteriffic dude in a beat-up red pickup truck wolf-whistles at me and it ruins my moment.

These men do not seem to grasp the concept of keeping their eyes on the road. They actually hang their heads out the window and rubberneck (in my conservative pants and shirt) as they drive, very very slowly, past me. This is so not cool. I am surprised it's not caused an accident yet.

I wish people would pay this much attention to me when I'm trying to cross the street. Crosswalks make me completely invisible.

My wife's theory is that guys notice me because of my hair, which is almost to my tailbone and in severe need of a trim. I think this might cover about 50% of these incidents: People coming toward me can't see my hair until they've passed me, and I get hooted at from all directions.

Why does it bother me, all this hooting? you might ask. If I feel pretty, oh so pretty, then why don't I care for cross-gender interrater reliability? I will admit that, on account of some early experiences, I can get really scared by men who think with their men-parts. I will admit that I actually kinda liked it when I got a "heeeey..." from two women in a Subaru. But I see a big difference between a genuine "you look nice today" and a catcall. Especially when the offending party is operating a car or other dangerous machinery.

But what frightens me the most is that I am routinely mistaken for jailbait, and these dudes all look at least 25 or 30. When I put aside my feminist indignations, I am just plain grossed out. These guys probably think they're ogling a 16-year-old.

So, gentlemen. Keep your eyes on the road. That means off my ass.

Gerbil Jumble #3: I need a job

I love the San Francisco Chronicle. We get the paper seven days a week. This means I could do seven Jumbles a week, if I really wanted to. But usually I just read a few sections, occasionally pen a letter to the editor (I've had, like, four or five published!), and do the crosswords.

In the daily paper, one of the two crosswords is in the Classified section. So is the Jumble. So are the job listings. I need a job, as I've been voted off the proverbial island at the one that pays part of the rent and all of the health insurance. Sadly, there aren't a whole lot of listings in the paper for what I'm looking for. And don't even get me started on why I'm considering (at least temporarily) changing my field.

So pretty much every day I skim the classifieds and come up with nothing. Dejected, I move on to the crossword. If I still have energy, I do the Jumble. I had some extra energy today because my sixth-to-last day at work was, well, indescribable in a negative fasion, so I did this one and made my wife giggle like a schoolgirl:



It's too bad there aren't any jobs out there for people gifted in the incorrect solution of Jumbles.

On choosing sides

In a nutshell: I don't care who's killing whom over what. People should not be killing each other.

Recent events in the Middle East have nudged my normally cheerful wife into a funk. Sometimes she's cranky, too, but she attributes this to my asking her how she's doing before the coffee is even made. I should know better, I suppose. But anyway, even before this latest game of "let's bomb the crap out of each other!" she seemed a lot more supportive of the Palestinians than of the Israelis.

Now, my wife is quite Christian and I'm (at least culturally) Jewish. So, as you might imagine, we have a lot of interesting discussions even when people aren't bombing the crap out of each other. As a (cultural) Jew I feel a great deal of pressure to side with Israel, no matter who the other party happens to be. Do I think Israel ought to remain a country? Sure. Do I think Israel is always right? No. Some might say this makes me a bad Jew. I say it's just awfully arbitrary to decide it's okay for Group A to attack Group B, but not for B to attack A.

I have heard pro-Israel folks describe Palestinians as terrorists, and I have heard pro-Palestinian folks describe Israelis as state-sponsored terrorists. Okay. If you are going to go out and bomb some civilians or their infrastructure just to say "Hey, what's up? We don't like you and hope you all die. Have a nice day!" then what does it matter who sponsors the weapons? It's still bombing the crap out of people. And bombing the crap out of people is not cool.

When I was in the third grade, the district was in the process of moving all the elementary students from the old historic Chancellor Street schoolhouse to the newly renovated (read: bigger, more accessible, uglier) Goodnoe Elementary. That year there were six third-grade classes--four at Goodnoe, and two at Chancellor Street--and we were assigned based on where we lived, rather than the usual luck of the draw. School-age territoriality being what it is, Mrs. Hintenlang's class occupied one half of the Chancellor Street cafeteria, and Mrs. Parent's class took the other. We knew food fights were strictly prohibited, so we tried to intimidate our peers by proclaiming in our outdoor voices, "We're gonna bomb Mrs. Parent's class back to the Stone Age!" None of us really knew what this meant, bombing back to the Stone Age, but it sounded fairly ominous... and besides, we knew that Mrs. Hintenlang's class was inherently superior to Mrs. Parent's class anyway.

Mrs. Hintenlang's classroom and Mrs. Parent's classroom were actually a single huge classroom with an accordion divider down the middle. Mrs. Hintenlang's side was slightly bigger, so we hosted the grade-wide activities, like the ghost stories at Halloween. This one kid in our class, who eventually got sent to military school, used that event to show off his machismo. He positioned himself out of sight of the teachers and passed his finger back and forth through a candle flame, grinning like a madman. We all knew he was completely bonkers and that it was only a matter of time before he was expelled to military school. But he got special dispensation because he was One of Us. If Mrs. Parent's class had a problem with him, any of the rest of us, or our turf, we would just bomb them back to the Stone Age, and don't say we didn't warn you.

All the bombing-the-crap-out-of-people that's going on now in the Middle East reminds me of the (completely arbitrary) Hintenlang-Parent rivalry. Only this time, people are being bombed back to the Stone Age. On both sides. And that, as previously stated, is not cool.

I don't choose sides because I don't think either is less reprehensible than the other. My grandmother doesn't seem to want to choose sides, either, and this makes me feel good because she's been around a lot longer than I have. My grandmother says that people need to realize that they don't get to decide who gets the land and who doesn't, who lives and who dies, who's right and who's wrong. All of this, she says, is up to G-d. And if people succeed in destroying everything, then maybe G-d will just find another planet, plunk down another Adam and Eve, and hope the outcome is better.

In the meantime, though, this madness has got to stop.

Public transit story #9: Ditmus

Yesterday my wife and I helped my best friend move from three miles away from us to almost forty miles away from us. I'm quite sad that she moved, but at least her commute will be a whole lot less hellish.

There's really no good way to get theah from heah except by car, but of course I had injured myself rather stupidly at a Habitat for Humanity project the day before and wasn't entirely capable of operating the stickshift; and my wife was at work that morning, which meant she was halfway there already. Thus, she was not about to come home, get me and the car, and turn around and drive back. So we bumbled our way through friends' cars and transit, and it was all well and good in the end.

Except that just before the end, we encountered this guy on the BART.

This guy settled himself noisily in the seat behind us and placed his elbow perilously close to our heads.

Here's the thing about BART culture--it's totally cool to sit down next to someone you don't know, but it's totally uncool to invade a stranger's personal space, even if it's just the strap of your briefcase against his or her leg. This guy's elbow was not yet touching us, so he was not in violation of noli me tangere, but personal safety trumps BART culture anyway, and everyone knows it.

So my wife turned around and said, "Excuse me, sir, but would you mind moving your elbow? We don't want to get hit in the head."

The guy (who, by the way, was an older white dude with a smattering of tattoos on his wrinkly arms) said, "Well, how about I put it here then?" and moved his elbow back a fraction of an inch.

We looked at him pointedly.

"Our heads are right here," I said, "so would you please move your elbow?"

He moved his elbow away, but he put his head in its place and started muttering things like "you don't like my elbow here? Well, I don't like your asses in that seat! Move your asses! I don't like them there! They're in my way!"

We ignored him.

Unsatisfied with our complete lack of response, he got up and moved to the seat facing us. All the while he muttered away--sometimes saying vaguely menacing things about our apparently inconvenient asses, other times saying largely incoherent things about girls reading books.

We continued to ignore him, but every so often we looked at him out of the corners of our eyes. Just in case.

He started rummaging around in his bookbag. He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper after a while, then a pen, and scribbled something on the paper. He offered it to my wife. She ignored him. "Read this!" he said. "Look!" and he tossed the paper onto her book. She read it.

"Is this your name?" she said. No response. "This is yours," she said, with more sweetness than I could have mustered, and handed it back.

This apparently was not the response he was expecting. He grew visibly pissed, crumpled up the paper, and tossed it onto the seat next to him. More muttering.

When he got off the train several minutes later, he said to us, "I'm sorry I was rude to you girls."

"That's okay," said my wife, ever the minister. "Have a nice evening."

Later, while we were waiting for the bus, she said, "Honey, do you know what 'ditmus' means?"

"Huh?"

"'Ditmus'? D-I-T-M-U-S?"

"What's 'ditmus'?"

"I don't know! That's why I'm asking you. It's what the guy wrote on that piece of paper."

"I have no idea. But there was something not cognitively right about that man, and I was in this dilemma about whether ignoring him would extinguish his behavior or escalate it."

"Eh, I don't think he was dangerous. But I kept an eye on him just the same."

"High, psychotic, or both--that's for sure. Hey! The bus is here!"

I had some down time at work today, so I decided to Google-define "ditmus." Want a laugh? Follow the link for the suggested spelling.

Merry Ditmus, everyone!

Mr. Evolution

Confession: Somehow I managed to spend four years in the Cleveland area without once going to the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.

I went, just once, to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I saw several concerts by the Cleveland Orchestra. I walked through Little Italy all the time. I even shopped once or twice in Tower City. I never went to an Indians, Browns, or Cavs game, but hey, I don't like professional sports, and I got all the Lebron I needed from the local TV news.

But I didn't get to see the zoo until I was back for graduation in May. Did you know that the Cleveland Zoo has the largest collection of primates in North America? I didn't, either. Let me tell you, their monkeys are amazing, man.

We observed the Colobus monkeys having a little lunch break. Lunch that day was, quite literally, ants on a log--or, rather, bugs in sticks. The monkeys leveraged their sticks against the rocks to break them open, then picked out the bugs with their fingers. By and large, it was every monkey for himself/herself; but a few of them had an impromptu (dis)assembly line going. Pretty amazing.

Equally amazing was this one guy watching the Colobus monkeys along with us. My father overheard him ask,

"After seeing this, how can anyone possibly still believe in evolution?"

Ah, Ohio. Where humanlike behavior among non-human primates is evidence against evolution, where "importuning" was never illegal for straight folk, and where the Cuyahoga River isn't actually burning anymore, honest! Long may it reign--far, far away from me.

Ecce homos!

I marched in the San Francisco Pride Parade today. Well, to be precise, I participated in the San Francisco Pride Parade today, but my contingent had a big yellow school bus as its float, and I rode in the bus. And despite years and years of instruction about not sticking body parts out the bus windows, I happily exercised my adult right to stick my head and arms out the window so as to smile cutely and wave at folks on the sidewalk.

I must have been smiling and waving awfully cutely, because there were all kinds of official video and still cameras pointed right at me as I was hanging out the window. There was one video guy who was not very subtle about this. He trained his big ol' camera at me and walked sideways for a bit, matching his pace exactly to the bus. But after about a minute and a half, I got very uncomfortable with this arrangement; and so I pretended to get distracted by something inside the bus. He lost interest in my cuteness immediately.

This year marked my first San Francisco Pride experience, and my second Pride ever. My first Pride was in Cleveland in 2004. Yes, they do have Pride in Cleveland, just on a smaller scale than San Francisco and with far more protesters. I remember there being a whole throng of protesters around E. 9th, just before the end of the parade. Said throng brandished a variety of decidedly un-Christian signs, along the lines of "Jesus hates you... and your little dog too!" I didn't see a single protester along the parade route here in San Francisco. I did, however, see tons of happy heterosexual couples encouraging their toddlers to wave (or outright flapping their little arms for them) at the leather daddies, topless women, and drag divas.

After the parade, my wife, my friend, and I headed toward the Castro, in hot pursuit of food. A slightly disheveled man observed my wife and me holding hands and said, "If this is the future, I don't want to see it!"

My first impulse was to shoot back, "I hope you die young, then!" But I was with my fine church-going wife (who'd just finished marching with her fine church), and I was embarrassed to say something so mean in front of her.

By the time I'd thought of something better--"Go crawl back under your rock until Pride's over!"--he had taken his slight disheveledness somewhere else.

But dude. Not only were we holding hands in the gayest city on Earth; not only were we were holding hands in the gayest section of the gayest city on Earth; but we were holding hands in the gayest section of the gayest city on Earth during the gayest weekend of the year. And he was surprised--nay, horrified--to see two chicks holding hands during his walk? Serves him right!

P.S. My wife had also wanted to express her best wishes for his early demise; but she didn't want to say something so mean in front of me. Great minds self-inhibit alike.

Wordsmithing (or, A semi-serious entry)

I like words.

I like to do silly things with words. One of the first inside jokes my wife and I developed was a strategic mispronunciation of "gnocchi," such that the "g" was no longer silent and the whole thing rhymed with "rocky." Thus we could rap on a door and giggle, "gnocchi-gnocchi!" and it was all very cute and fun.

For a while we signed letters to each other using words that almost rhyme with "love," such as "mauve," "larva," "knave," and "locomotive." This was all very fun and cute, until we ran out of words that almost rhyme with "love." So we moved on to words that almost rhyme with words that almost rhyme with "love," and then it just got plain silly.

I used to be a star on vocabulary tests in high school. I can still spell all the words I learned, but in the decade or so since the era of vocabulary quizzes, I've forgotten what many of them mean. Every so often I will come across one, like "raconteur" or "impecunious" or "refulgent," and I'll have a vague idea of what it means but have to sneak off to the dictionary for a consult anyway.

Yes, indeedy, words are wonderful.

It pains me to realize that there are certain words which are in themselves totally wonderful but have acquired totally un-wonderful connotations. I'm talking about words like "traditional," "family," "values," and "morals." I have grown to despise these words, for they have begun to invoke in me a panic reaction.

Some awful, hideous person out there is probably tittering with delight because these words have begun to strike fear into my heart.

But that awful, hideous person hasn't quite accomplished his/her aim. Oh, verily, the T-word, the V-word, the M-word, and the F-word strike fear into my heart, but not because I see any inherent conflict between any of them and my fabulously gay, fabulously committed life. No, I panic because my first thought upon reading these words is oh, shit, who hates us now?

And here's the thing. Most of the time these words occur in contexts that have nothing to do with sexuality. I am addicted to counted cross-stitch, a traditional yet decidedly unsexy pastime. Safeway often has the best values on basic food items, but sometimes I want to spend a little more for organic products elsewhere. You can't talk about Aesop's fables without mentioning morals. And the next person who tries to insist that a family can only consist of an opposite-sex couple and their descendents really ought to brush up on biological nomenclature.

So here it is, Pride Month and the eve of San Francisco Pride Weekend (I ask you, isn't every weekend Pride Weekend in San Francisco?), and my excitement is tempered by the fact that completely innocuous, positive little words have somehow become weapons of mass destruction.

By the way, and this is pretty disgusting, "Karl Rove" almost rhymes with "love."