No Middle Initial

cerealtarian

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:57:00 +0000

At work the break area is stocked with small boxes and tiny tubs of breakfast cereal.

All types of breakfast cereal: vitamin-enriched flakes; extruded puffs; faux granola. Cereal with dried berries. Cereal with little marshmallows. Cereal with nuts and raisins. Stacks and stacks of cereal containers. A cereal-lover's paradise.

During summer, the pickings are slim: the interns forage and eat all of the good stuff. They're young and are voracious eaters. Perhaps some of them are still growing; they're that young. I go to the cereal cabinet, and all that's left is a stray package or two of the gross stuff. Lucky Charms or Golden Grahams.

Yuck.

But even those will be hoovered up before the Cereal Guy restocks the shelves.

As the interns return in great droves to their academic institutions, the place grows quiet. We miss their enthusiasm and energy. They're smart and they know it; any place would be lucky to have them. And so they migrate back to school to spread a little luck around.

Secretly, we're all glad that the cereal cabinet won't go empty so quickly now. That there'll be something there when those of us who work late succumb to the dinner-time hunger pangs.

Today Renato and I were contemplating stacks and stacks of the small containers.

"I like Special K," he told me, canvassing the frontmost stacks in the deep cabinet.

"There's some Product 19," I said. "Is that like Special K?"

"No. Not really. It's not like it at all. I wonder why they call it that?"

"Maybe it's the 19th product that they developed at the cereal research lab," I said.

"Maybe it has 19 nutritious ingredients." Renato turned the box sideways so he could read the list.

"I doubt it. I don't know that they would want to draw your attention to the ingredients."

"It has 12 vitamins and minerals," he said. He put the box back on the shelf and pulled down another one.

"Cocoa Puffs," he said.

"Ooooh! I like those!"

"Here." Renato handed me the package.

"I'm not really hungry. Maybe I'll just stash it in my office."

"What's this?" He examined a small box of Kellogg's Granola.

"It's really dense. If you eat that, you'll know you've had cereal." It's not like I'm an authority on all these types of cereal, but I've checked out the granola. It tastes like overcooked oatmeal cookies, and I've been willing to eat that in a pinch. I wouldn't touch the Frooty Loops or the Cinnamon Toast Crunchy Bits even if I were very very hungry. Ditto the Smacky Sugar Shapes.

They make my teeth hurt.

I put the container in my office, along with one of the cartons of Cheerios. I like those too and had to climb up on a chair to find them among the stacks at the back of the cereal cabinet.

I hope it doesn't look greedy to passers-by that I have a growing pile of boxes of my favorite cereals on the corner of my desk. I decide to conceal them behind the useless phone, the one that runs Windows and won't let me login properly. There! I hope I remember that they're there before they get all soggy and disgusting.

The thing is, I'm a cerealtarian.

I used to cook every once in a while, to make Thai curries or lentil soup. I'd even go to some trouble and chop stuff up, slivering jicama and carrot matchsticks for some homestyle Chinese dish. Or I'd make a big salad with thinly sliced oranges and roast chicken on top.

That was before I discovered just how adequate cereal was for dinner, particularly if you layer it into a parfait. A layer of Shredded Wheat, crushed into strands. A layer of Wheat Chex. A layer of Cheerios.

Cheerios are tricky because they float. If you put too much milk in the bowl, the buoyant Cheerios float over the rim and roll away. Messy.

"What do you want to have for dinner?" I ask Mark.

"Cereal," he answers as if it were a novel idea, as if we haven't had cereal for dinner in months. Or as if we'd had anything other than cereal in months.

"Cereal?" I say. "Sound fine to me. Let's have cereal."

We each grab a bowl from the cupboard.

"Are you sure you don't mind?" I ask. Of course, I have no intention of cooking anything, but the question is part of the ritual.

"No. In fact, I was just thinking how good some cereal would taste." Mark says.

So we have become cerealtarians.

It gets embarrassing when I go to Safeway after midnight and buy 11 assorted types of cereal in the large boxes. What's worse is that although we do have preferences, I tilt toward the varieties that have a Club Card discount. $3 off on the Almond Morning with Cranberries (from which I'll harvest all the cranberries and almond slivers before Mark can have at the cloying flakes); $2.51 savings on the off-brand Organic Oat Bran Flakes sweetened with recycled Skittles. $1.63 x 2 boxes = $2.26 aggregate discount on Safeway Wheat-n-Cardboard Rectangles.

By the time I'm done, I've saved more than most people even spend on breakfast cereal. I'm pleased too, not just embarrassed.

And the 'tard who does the bagging late at night is pleased as well: it's fun to wedge the rectangular boxes into the recycle/reuse green grocery bags that I've carefully remembered to lug with me to the store. He's a nice-looking boy if you don�??t look too close and notice that there's something goofy in his facial expression or listen too long and notice the tell-tale lilt of his voice.

"You don't put the watermelon on top of the bread," he tells the checker.

She sighs. "I know that," she tells him. You can tell that she usually has to work with him and that she's mostly a good sport about it. Sometimes though you can see that she's tired of humoring him, tired of working nights, and tired of pulling box after box of discounted cereal over the scanner. Cereal. More cereal. 50 or so cans of Fancy Feast. A gallon of milk. A watermelon. A loaf of bread. A large jar of peanut butter.

Beep. Scan. Beep. Scan. No beep. Rescan. No beep. Rescan. Beep. Scan. Beep.

"You don't put the watermelon on top of the bread," the 'tard repeats, in a firm sing-song, as he puts the watermelon on top of the box of Cheerios. The Cheerios will be oaty-dust by the time I get them home.

He turns to me and says, "I can eat as many Red Vines as I want. Y'know why?"

I really hadn't wanted to have a conversation with this guy. I try to avoid it, but he's always on bagging detail on the late shift. It's likely he can't be trusted to drive the forklift and restock the shelves. So he's bagging. A specialist. He tries to put the milk on top of the cans of cat food in one of my green shopping bags, but the bag flops closed.

"I can eat as many Red Vines as I want. You wanna know why?" He is unperturbed by the recalcitrant grocery bag and not to be deterred by my initial non-response.

"Aren't they bad for your teeth?" I finally say.

"I CAN EAT AS MANY RED VINES AS I WANT BECAUSE. I. HAVE. DENTURES!" The 'tard's voice rings out.

The checker rolls her eyes. She's put up with about as much as she can; she's not a young woman and I can tell she's got some sort of sad story of her own that she's not going to be telling me. A grandchild she's been coerced into raising. A meth-head son that she's constantly bailing out of jail. And god knows, it's expensive to live in San Francisco if just for the meds.

The man behind me in line who doesn't seem to have any groceries in hand decides to leave. Perhaps he was going to try to hold up the store, but there's a limit to what he can take. Tards with dentures are apparently over that limit. He squeezes between me and the neighboring checkstand and walks out into the swirling fog. According to one of the guys who's normally on restocking detail at this time of night, the Safeway has been held up twice this week already. But incompetently. He tells me not to even joke about it; there are sensitivities.

The 'tard is probably better security for Safeway than the security guy who's loitering by the entrance, bored and tired of being on his feet. I wouldn't want to try to hold up the 'tard: he's just the kind of energetic guy who'd take a flying leap at a robber and sink his store-bought choppers into the poor guy's upper arm�??and take him down, gun and all.

The woman next in line after him is out of luck; she'd been counting on us to spend more time chit-chatting and up-holding. She's been shopping one item at a time and dropping them off in one of those small baskets that she's set on the conveyor belt to secure her place in line while she scampers all over the store, picking up this and that. Now she's midway up the potato-chip aisle way on the other side of the store, and it's her basket's turn to check out and pay up.

"Is this anyone's?" The checker picks up the basket. It has accumulated quite an assortment of things by now: a vacuum-packed bag of Millstone coffee, ground, breakfast blend. One of those bricks of Marie Callender frozen meat lasagna. A six pack of Bud Lime. A Colgate toothbrush. Radishes. Two 16 ounce cans of Rosarita Refried Beans. A block of preternaturally orange cheddar cheese. A 32 ounce bottle of Mr. & Mrs. T Bloody Mary Mix.

A rainbow of products from all over the store.

"Yours?" The checker asks the man who is next in line after the absent shopper.

"Not mine," he says firmly.

"Why don't you put these things back," she tells the 'tard, temporarily pleased that so many things have come together and worked out well on her behalf for a change.

I have signed my credit card slip and am ready to escape.

She glances at the slip. "Need any help out tonight, Mrs. Glenn?" Mrs. Glenn, the astronaut's wife. Oh! I forgot the Tang! And what about the Space Food Sticks?

I refrain from saying any of these clever things out loud. "Nope. Don't need any help tonight. Thanks!" I muscle the cart, which is bound and determined to go in tight circles of its own making, into something of a straight line and out the automatic door.

Mark is asleep when I get home. Who can blame him? It's almost one AM.

He gets up to help me put away the groceries.

"Is there anything left down in the car?" he asks.

"Nope. This is it."

"You did good," he says, and lines up 11 new boxes of cereal on top of the refrigerator, next to the 4 that are still there from last time. It's a good thing that we have a wide refrigerator. A good thing. It's a lot of cereal. And a lot of cat food. It's a good thing too that Lumpy doesn't like cereal and we don't like cat food.

I feel secure. There is nothing that makes a cerealtarian more secure than a line-up of fresh unopened boxes, ready to squelch stomach rumblings and vague longings. It's at least two weeks' worth of food, maybe three.

But the trouble with being a cerealtarian is you can't really bring a box or two with you to dinner parties where the host tells you, "Bring something! A salad. A dessert. Wine. You know."

No, I don't know. I have a feeling the host would be dissatisfied with my chosen contribution.

How about Special K with Red Berries? That's good and the red berries make it a little more special. Hey, it's Special K to start with, right? Special. Renato assures me that it's good. And if I bring an unopened box, I won't have eaten all the red berries beforehand.

I don't do it on purpose. Eat the red berries, I mean. They settle on the top of the cereal, not the bottom.

Once when we were visiting Nephew Dave and Loan Anh, I poured myself a regular bowl of Special K with Red Berries, and tucked right into it. It was good! Lots of red berries! Lots and lots!

It turns out that I had eaten all the red berries in the box. No wonder the bowl of cereal was so good.

"Hey!" Nephew Dave looked at his unadorned Special K. "Who ate all the red berries?"

Nephew Dave was committed to the berryless cereal, because he is a member of the milk-first school of cereal consumption: he pours himself a bowl of milk, then adds cereal to the milk until he's got the right consistency.

I didn't say anything. No point in it now.

But if I brought Special K with Red Berries to a dinner party, I'd be sure to bring an unopened box so all the Red Berries would be intact. And whole milk�??I'd bring whole milk, not 2% or skim or Cremora or (god forbid) Silk Soy Milk. Surely there must be other cerealtarians among the foodies with their heirloom tomatoes and fresh mozerella or the sophisticates with their French Bordelaise and pâté with toast points. Or the decadents with their Valrhona chocolate and triple-cream Brie.

But really, it all comes back to ingredients. Ingredients. Ingredients. Ingredients. And Cocoa Puffs are:
Whole grain corn
sugar
corn syrup
modified corn starch
cocoa processed with alkali
canola and/or rice bran oil
color added
salt
fructose
tricalcium phosphate
corn starch
natural and artificial flavor
trisodium phosphate
wheat flour
vitamin E and BHT added to preserve freshness.

And that's before we even get to the vitamins and minerals that General Mills uses to fortify the stuff: What's not to like? I mean, I see all of these restaurant reviews that absolutely fawn over chefs who dabble in molecular gastronomy, chefs who foam carrots and puree green apples with celery root. Surely some extensive food chemistry has taken place to form this cereal into spherical extrusions.

Just look at those ingredients. We could call it corn four ways (which I am distressed to learn is an actual dish among a segment of food-eaters). There's whole grain corn, corn syrup, modified corn starch, and unmodified corn starch. Shoot. Duck Three Ways (Hudson Valley Foie Gras, Crispy Duck Breast and Confit Crêpe with Huckleberry Maple Syrup) would make the grade.

Or was that Duck and Cover?

And what about the tricalcium phosphate AND trisodium phosphate? Not only do they aid in the flow through extruder; they also ensure that there's enough calcium and phosphorus in the product. Calcium's healthy, isn't it? Aren't we all supposed to be trying our best to get these core nutrients without doing anything flaky like eating match heads or serving a Deviled Eggs and Tums amuse bouche?

Yet I can't picture going to a dinner party and bringing my box of Shredded Wheat (even if it's real Nabisco Shredded Wheat, and not Mom's Best Frumpy Ersatz Wheat Pillows or something like that).

Sometimes our non-cerealtarian friends go out with us without really understanding the depth of our commitment. We shuffle into Delfina or Limon and do our best to find something to order off the menu. We poke at the house-cured anchovies and fennel seed flatbread. We feign enthusiasm. We take our spoons and dip into the buttermilk panna cotta and creme fraiche gelato.

"It's pretty rich," Mark says.

"The blackberries are really good," I say, thinking all the while of the dried Red Berries that are in so many kinds of cereal these days.

After our dinner companions take off and we hike up the hill, our bellies full and wallets empty, Mark says, "I feel nauseous. I wish I had cereal for dinner."

"Me too," I say. "Me too."

And later, after the food has worn off to a great extent, we each pour ourselves a small bowl of cereal, topped with Clover-Stornetta 2% Milk (with Clo the Cow on the side of the carton).

"That's really good, isn't it?" I say, crunching avidly on a big biscuit.

"Yeah," Mark says. "Much better than dinner."

Face it: we're Cerealtarians. What can you do?

Blogfading

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 00:56:00 +0000

I once asked Cliff Lynch why he didn�??t blog and he told me that it was too much of a commitment�??that once you start, there�??s so much pressure to keep going.

He�??s right, of course. Cliff Lynch is always right. But I never regarded the commitment as being particularly dangerous: there�??s almost always something to say, isn�??t there?

I never picture myself being at a loss for words.

Not long ago, Lumpy and I spent a bachelor week together. Mark was off on a motorcycle ride to visit Reid and Kristina in Taos, so it was just the two of us. My Oscar Madison to his Felix Unger.

�??This�??d be a great time to write something,�?? I told Lumpy. �??I haven�??t blogged in over a month.�??

�??Nah,�?? he said, �??it�??d be a great time to open all of those cans of Fancy Feast in the pantry and pretend we�??re at Old Country Buffet. Or maybe we could finish shredding the sofa arm�??I could use your help for a change. Oh. Wait. I know: let�??s pour a whole bag of catnip on the floor and roll in it until we get the hiccups and barf.�??

The cat was ecstatic with possibilities, in tune with what to do when you�??re left at home without adult supervision.

Didn�??t I ever watch Ferris Bueller?

Apparently not. In fact, I don�??t watch anything. I�??ve had the same three Netflix movies for more than a year and a half now, and I�??ve shown no signs that I�??m ever going to watch them. I could�??ve bought them by now.

Heck, I could�??ve made the three movies by now. (I�??m informed that this is the conceit of another recent film, Be Kind Rewind.)

See, the problem is that when you set up a Netflix queue, you think to yourself, �??Which movies got good reviews in the New Yorker? I should rent those.�??

But when it comes time to watch them, you think: �??Boring. Boring. Boring. All I�??ve got is these three boring movies.�?? And you switch on The Colbert Report. Or flip to an obscure cable channel and play �??Hi, Bob,�?? the drinking game where you take a slug every time a character in the Bob Newhart Show says �??Hi, Bob.�??

That�??s much more appealing than watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (DVD arrived 02/22/07; stored on top of the turntable thereafter) or Capote (DVD arrived 04/10/07; stored on top of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) or even Seraphim Falls, which features a cameo appearance by Reid Hayashi, an appearance in which he was bitch-slapped by Pierce Brosnan (DVD arrived 05/19/08; promptly stored on top of Capote).

I�??m lying. I�??m lying about Lumpy and Ferris Bueller.

Initially Lumpy was not ecstatic about our bachelor life together. Not at all. Instead he was alarmed.

�??Shit,�?? he thought. �??She won�??t be able to provide for us. We�??ll starve here without Mark. Does she even know how to open the cat door? I don�??t think so. She�??s kind of a retard, really. Have you ever watched her hunt? We will starve. WE WILL STARVE!�??

There�??s not much you can do when you get a vote of no-confidence from your cat. Not much at all.

Yet he stuck to me like Velcro.

I finally left the house to fetch some Dim Sum (shrimp dumplings for him; pot stickers for me) at our favorite cheap Chinese restaurant on Castro Street�??an excursion that takes all of 20 minutes, door-to-door�??while my little angel-cat snoozed on the sofa. But by the time I returned, I realized that Lumpy must�??ve been out getting lunch too: a large mouse was cowering behind the potted rubber tree.

Was the victim really a large mouse? Let�??s be clear: this was a rat. Lumpy crouched, hind end twitching, fixated on the ratty mouse when I walked in the dining room. The rat didn�??t look damaged yet, but he did seem to be traumatized by whatever had transpired so far.

We stood there in the dining room in a frozen tableau. Me. The cat. The rodent.

I broke the silence. �??Lumpy! I told you! NO MORE MOUSIES! No more catch-and-release indoors!�??

Distracted momentarily, he glared over his shoulder at me. I could tell that he was thinking something along the lines of: Didn�??t I tell you she was a retard? There she goes, making noise during the crucial part of the hunt.

During this interlude, the rodent summoned his courage, made a dash for the sofa, and disappeared underneath.

Lumpy spent the rest of the afternoon on edge, alert, ready, with his nose poked under the couch. He paused briefly to inhale most of a can of Fancy Feast Chunky Turkey, all except for one tablespoon. He customarily leaves a tablespoonful in his food bowl, perhaps for Elijah, perhaps anticipating 3am hunger pangs. Perhaps he just does it because it gives me the ass: why won�??t he ever finish off the damn can. Why?

Or perhaps the tablespoon of rapidly-decaying cat food was bait to lure the rat out from under the sofa.

The rat was apparently smart enough to stay under the sofa. Lumpy eventually backed off, first to the middle of the living room floor, then later to his spot beside me on an overturned couch cushion. He did not relax his vigilance though; he kept a close watch on his invisible prisoner. I was mesmerized too in my misery. I hate watching him�??or worse, listening to him�??kill smaller animals. I knew from past experience that I probably wouldn�??t be able to catch the rat on my own and that it was likely I�??d prolong its squeaking misery if I fought Lumpy for custody.

There was still a slight�??SLIGHT�??chance I could shoo the rodent outside before Lumpy chewed his head off. A lottery-odds chance I think you would say.

So there we were, Lumpy and I, sitting on the other couch, torturing this poor creature, the guards over our own Rodent Guantanamo. Sometimes I thought I heard vague rustlings. But mostly it was quiet.

Around 10:30pm, Lumpy looked over at me and said, �??You�??re the one who fucked this up. If I�??d have had my way, we�??d have had a nice fresh dinner by now.�?? Then he muttered under his breath, �??you �??tard. Mark never should have left us here alone. We�??re going to starve, I tell you, STARVE.�?? Then he returned his attention to his prey.

Finally at about midnight, the rat decided he would make a break for it.

I couldn�??t watch. I slunk downstairs and downloaded Dr. Horrible�??s Sing-Along Blog while Lumpy went about his own horrible business. In the killing fields of our dining room.

I hate this.

I�??m going to wind up being a vegetarian again. And it�??ll be Lumpy�??s fault.

I watched all three episodes of Dr. Horrible back-to-back. Who�??d have thought young Doogie Howser, M.D. would end up like this? Toward the end of the segment where Captain Hammer is singing �??Everyone�??s a Hero (in their own not very heroic way),�?? Lumpy strode in and gave a short, assertive �??Bed time. Now.�?? meow.

�??C�??mon. Wait a minute.�?? I told him. �??I gotta watch Dr. Horrible use his death ray on Captain Hammer.�??

I�??m aware of the minor contradiction here: I can watch Captain Hammer be zapped but I can�??t watch my cat have it out with the rat. But I can�??t help it. I need to find out how it ends. This is what happens when writers go on strike. They double-down on the meds and write YouTube musicals, MMORPG soap operas, and genre-defying variety shows.

Lumpy will tolerate this not at all: �??Did you not hear me? I�??m only going to say it once more. Get upstairs!�??

And he means it. He�??s attacked my feet before when I�??ve stalled. Bedtime means bedtime.

�??Just one more minute, okay Lump?�??

I had no desire to go back upstairs and see what he�??d done with the rat. I need anesthesia before I look; or perhaps I can clean it up after I take out my contact lenses. That way I won�??t be able to really focus on the carnage. I get queasy even thinking about it.

When I went upstairs, I cast a sidelong glance into the dining room, saw that the damage had been done, and decided I wouldn�??t deal with it until morning. Too gross for right before bed; it�??d make me have nightmares. That rat wasn�??t going anywhere.

I was a vegetarian for three or four years when I was in my early twenties. My vegetarianism had no source I can point to. Maybe it�??s just harder to poison yourself when you�??re living on rice, seaweed, and Red Vines. Nothing really spoils.

I finally stopped out of boredom. I hated explaining why I was a vegetarian.

There�??s no way of being a vegetarian without seeming just a little holier-than-thou. But now I�??m a wimp, and there are plenty of incidents that make me contemplate going back to it.

Just a few weeks ago I was out on Cape Cod, at Woods Hole, in fact, confronted with a large (cooked) lobster.

It was supposed to be a treat.

My colleagues were tucking into their own crustaceans, lobster bibs askew in the evening ocean breeze, cracking, slurping, crunching, dunking, blissed-out by the traditional New England dinner. No lobster-part was going to waste. They were ripping off the little insect-like legs and digging at the soft thoraxes.

�??Are you supposed to eat the green stuff?�?? one of my colleagues asked.

�??I did.�?? another answered. �??It was great!�??

I had contemplated politely turning down the lobster when it was offered to me. But how would that look? I�??d seem unappreciative. Like a prig. Like a dope. No-one else in the group was keeping kosher; no-one else had begged off as a vegan. And I�??d already eaten meat several times in front of these people.

And I used to like eating lobster. What�??s wrong with me these days?

I felt like shouting NO PRAWNS. NO PRAWNS! as a distraction. But I just poked meekly at beast, unable and unwilling to break through the carapace.

You can�??t spread a lobster around your plate and pretend you�??ve eaten some of it. The damned thing glared at me, intact, alone on my plate, because once I�??d claimed my lobster, I started feeling ill enough that I didn�??t want an ear of corn or any side dishes. It was only that evening ocean breeze that was keeping me from getting sick.

�??It�??s you or me, buddy.�?? I silently communed with my lobster. �??It�??s you or me.�??

Of course they�??d supplied us with all the implements that we would�??ve needed to consume a several-pound lobster, the nutcrackers, picks, and forks: you�??re really supposed to tear into the thing with some vigor, dismember it, dig at all the soft parts. A bathtub-sized dish of drawn butter sat beside my plate, waiting for me to address my lobster.

Gentlemen, address your lobsters.

I took a big gulp of wine. You can�??t slip a lobster to the dog either. There is nothing you can do about a goddamned lobster. Nothing.

In the end, I made it through the meal without incident. But it was another close brush with vegetarianism.

And now the rat. The dead rat. At least I don�??t have to pretend to Lumpy that I�??m eating and enjoying it. He�??s not even interested in the thing now that it�??s dead. It�??s about the thrill of the chase.

�??Oh, I would�??ve eaten it if you knew how to prepare them properly,�?? Lumpy told me. �??Cooking them is an art�??they can end up tough and stringy if you screw up. And you�??ve got to season them right too. You know how many chefs can cook a fresh mouse in this country? I mean, one worth eating. Have you ever had mouse cheek ravioli? Delicious!�??

I still didn�??t feel like facing the stiff carcass the next morning, but it didn�??t seem to be going anywhere on its own. I pulled on latex medical examination gloves. Not enough. Over those I put on my leather gardening gloves. Still not enough, but I had a feeling that I wouldn�??t be able to pick anything up if I put on another pair over those.

So I halfway closed my eyes and bent over to pick up the rat by the tail, trying to ignore how gross it was to be picking up a dead rat in my own dining room in the severe light of morning. The head stuck to the floor just a little bit when I tugged at the tail. Was this thing going fall apart where it was most deeply perforated? Ick. Ick. Ick. I put the small body in a plastic grocery bag and tried to tie it shut; this is actually hard to do wearing two pairs of gloves. I shuddered.

Did I mention that I have a weak stomach?

If you put a dead rat in your own garbage bin on Saturday, it�??s pretty much guaranteed that it�??ll stink by trash pickup on Thursday morning. So I walked the plastic bag down to the public trash can on the corner, the can in front of the comic book store. I�??m sure that the trash can already has so much disgusting refuse in it�??medical waste, used condoms, dog shit, two-week old burritos�??that one dead rat more or less isn�??t going to make much of a difference.

I was still wearing the two pairs of gloves, but people wear all kinds of things on Castro Street, so I doubt anybody paid much attention to me.

In fact, Lumpy watched the whole process with only casual interest.

�??Hrmph,�?? he said, thumbing through his Zagat�??s, browsing for a dinner venue, �??I didn�??t think you had the chops to cook up one of those. This one�??s obviously no good now anyway. And I bet it�??s too late to get reservations at a decent restaurant. No French Laundry for us. We�??ll be eating Fancy Feast again tonight, thanks to you.�??

I glared at him. �??No more mousies, Lump. No more! You don�??t have to do that again, okay?�??

We were a whole day into our fabulous wild bachelor week. But we still didn�??t seem to be having much fun. I wasn�??t writing. I wasn�??t even painting.

Oh! I didn�??t mention that, did I? That I�??d planned to finish painting the back of the house while Mark was away.

Perhaps I forgot to mention that we were painting the house. Inside and out. Ourselves. In many different shades of white and off-white�??ecru, eggshell, Swiss cream�??plus a few medium grays for the outdoor bits. We started some weeks ago, more or less co-incident with when I stopped blogging.

I remember reading a magazine piece about porn stars in the San Fernando Valley. The writer went on and on about how their suburban houses, purchased with their fresh direct-to-video earnings, were always white-on-white affairs. The walls were eggshell; the shag carpeting was alpine snow; the drapes were ecru; the couches were beige; the small dog was white. Even the accent pillows were cream-colored.

The writer opined that all this whiteness stemmed from some sort of spiritual void, a lack of imagination and interior life.

I wondered whether I should take that personally.

Oh, I wish I were like my neighbor Evert. He painted his house an odd mud-color, the color you get when you mix lots of other interesting colors together. A color you don�??t see very often. His own color. Then he painted red accents on the trim. And changed his mind and redid them a vibrant racing yellow. And painted over that twice when the yellow didn�??t cover.

I�??m lying again: Evert didn�??t paint his house: he picked up his usual day laborer on Cesar Chavez and had him do the painting. Juan painted slowly and none too steadily�??he apparently had a killer hangover�??but he was fearless and patient. He was willing, for a price, to clamber up the 24 foot ladder and to paint everything once, twice, three times, more.

He painted until Evert said he could go.

Evert is assertive that way.

If you ask me why we�??re painting the house ourselves, I�??d tell you that the stucco in the light well was the last straw. It was done and redone. And it still looks crappy according to Mark. Unlike Evert, we could not keep the stucco guy on the roof until the stucco was just right. We meekly stepped aside when he switched off the classic rock station on his portable radio, and said it was fine.

But it wasn�??t fine; it was crappy.

And Mark confirms this verdict with every visitor we have.

�??Look there at the roof line. Look. Isn�??t that a crappy stucco job? Can you believe that was done by a professional?�??

If the visitor feigns ignorance, Mark explains it to them. He gives them pointers about what stucco should look like.

�??Now look!�?? He tells our newly wised-up visitor. �??See? It looks so cobby!�??

The visitor peers skeptically through our kitchen window at the roof line.

�??It looks like shit.�?? Mark tells them just to reaffirm their heightened judgment. �??Really bad. I could do better myself.�??

And this is why we decided that we�??d paint the house�??inside and out�??by ourselves. We�??d gone through the trauma of the windows; we�??d gone through the trauma of the roof. If you�??ll recall (and we do), the French doors in the back were a full two inches shy of the wall. And�??while the new roof looks to be snug and tarry�??there�??s still the issue of the stucco. The stucco we examine and re-examine every day.

If we painted the house ourselves, Mark�??d be sure the job was done correctly. Mark even has experience: he worked as a house painter for a couple of summers when he was in college.
He didn�??t have an intern job; he didn�??t spend his summers baffled by a series of ill-specified programming assignments supervised by mid-divorce bosses like some of us. No. Instead Mark did something useful. He learned a skill. He learned how to paint.

Foreman Mark and his trusty paint-spattered assistant Ecru Cathy.

Think of the money we�??ll save! Think of the control we�??ll have! Think of how nice the house will look! Think of a big job done just right!

There�??s only one thing wrong with this formulation.

Me.

Not only am I lousy at catching mice; I�??m also very poor at home repairs and improvements. And I did not paint during the summer when I was in college. Not for pay, anyway. I did help paint a number of rooms in Dabney House while I was at Caltech. I used gloss enamel. I was inventive with the color schemes back then too. Sunshine Yellow for the radiator? That�??d be cheerful. Jungle Green (one of Gesine�??s favorites)? Bring it on.

The problem with using gloss enamel indoors in lieu of flat paint is that you can�??t really paint over a mistake. Gloss enamel is a commitment, just like blogging. I suspect Larry West still isn�??t speaking to me because of my ill-conceived attempt at a Southwestern scene on his wall. It was butt-ugly. Why did the sketch look so good on a notecard, and so bad on a wall?

Yeah. You just can�??t paint over gloss enamel. Not easily. Oh well. I�??m sure someone installed shag carpeting on the walls after Larry moved on. The good thing about being in college is that there�??s always someone whose taste is even more hideous than one�??s own.

No wonder I haven�??t painted since. No wonder I picked out Antique White, Swiss Creme, and Frost. No wonder Mark�??s the foreman and I�??m the assistant. No wonder I�??m about to be fired.

�??Are you still working on that?�?? Mark is incredulous. �??You�??re still doing that?�??

�??I�??m slow.�?? I�??m doing the prep work. There are gooey white streamers and piles of DAP Latex Caulk adhering to places that should be neither gooey nor white. I�??m concentrating. The top�??s off the tub of spackle, which is hardening far faster than I can apply it. Divots from pictures and shelves inexpertly hung have been replaced by three dimensional outcroppings of white DAP and beige spackle.

�??I�??m sorry.�?? I say. Mark, apoplectic, pries the caulk gun from my gooey fingers.

�??Let me do this,�?? he says. �??You get ready to roller the walls.�??

And that�??s why we weren�??t finished before Mark left for New Mexico to see Reid and Kristina.

I planned to surprise Mark by painting the back exterior wall while he was gone. The whole thing, including the garage door.

How hard could it be? You just wipe off 11 years of accumulated cobwebs, spider cocoons and dust drifts, scrape a few blistered places, and slap on a coat of Kelly Moore paint, Keystone Gray. You hardly even need a ladder to paint the back of our house. And house paint has gotten so good that the whole job is a snap.

Which is why I don�??t have a very good excuse for neither painting nor blogging while Mark was on the road: the paint is thick and lustrous, and I�??m never out of things to say. I could probably blog while I painted.

It must�??ve been the rat. I don�??t know what else it could�??ve been.

The week passed in a sleep-deprived blur.

You see, when you�??re on Lumpy�??s staff, you might find yourself short on sleep. What happens is that around 4am, he gets restless. If you had any foresight, you probably put the extra heap of cat food in his bowl before you went to sleep. But that�??s only good until about 5am. By 5:30, after several interludes of feline conversation, he�??s got you convinced that the only thing you can do is to open his cat door so he can prowl outside just as day is breaking.

It�??s the optimal time to prowl, Lumpy tells me. Cops know that dawn is when the donuts are the freshest. And cats know that�??s when it�??s best to make your rounds. After I�??ve stumbled downstairs in the near-dark and slid open his cat door, I lay back down in bed, unable to get back to sleep.

I can hear the first noises of the world awakening. The small dog up the hill in back of us yaps as Lumpy saunters through his yard. Evert starts up his Jeep and leaves for the gym. The San Francisco Chronicle delivery guy slaps papers on my neighbors�?? back doorsteps. The 24 Muni bus labors up the Castro hill, sparking as it gets to the top.

And as I finally drift back to sleep, a small furry body that smells of morning, rosemary, and cat food organizes himself so that he�??s curled up against my face. And goes to sleep himself.

I can sleep for an hour and a half more that way, inhaling fresh kitty dander.

I�??m fit for neither writing nor painting when I arise. I am only fit for feeding the cat. And that�??s just fine with him. I don�??t have to tell you that it went on pretty much just like that until Mark came back from his motorcycle odyssey.

If I were Stephen Colbert, I could sum it up with Today�??s Word:

Blogfading.

wherein I meet Ben Katchor and Jacob Kornbluth

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Thu, 22 May 2008 00:41:00 +0000

By some quirk of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, Bus Line 24, I arrived a full 20 minutes early to see Josh Kornbluth interview Ben Katchor at the Jewish Community Center.

Ben Katchor live and off the page! Josh Kornbluth live and on purpose! All this, and dessert too. It's no quirk that I arrived early.

Since I was alone, I was able to secure a plum seat in the middle of the 4th row. I�??m not sure why it�??s important to sit close to the stage; it�??s not like you�??ll get a hand up to dance with Bruce Springsteen or Oprah will toss you the keys to a BRAND NEW CAR. Nope. Not going to happen. Still, there�??s something exciting about being in the 4th row.

The auditorium was almost empty when I took my seat; being so early made me feel over-eager and squirrelly. I busied myself by filling out the survey the usher had handed me when I wandered in. How did you find out about this show? Ah. That�??s easy. They didn�??t keep it much of a secret. That�??s how I found out about it. I filled in the bubble next to �??Postcard�?? with the miniature golf pencil the usher gave me. I was buzzing in anticipation of the show; it was all I could do to color inside the lines.

Ben Katchor live. How cool is that?

C110 seemed like a really good seat, a seat with a clear view of the two big chairs set up for the interviewer and the interviewee. I concentrated on the survey. How many events have you attended during the last 12 months? After some reflection, I lied. It�??s embarrassing to admit how seldom I leave the house. Unless you count my trips to the market. But isn�??t going to the market an event of sorts? For me it is. I exed out my original answer of less than 6 and colored in the greater than 24 bubble.

Why does my survey look so messy?

The audience began to file in. So where was that really tall guy going to sit? Keep going. Keep going. Keep going: I willed him to keep going. He sat down directly in front of me. I knew it! Not a chance that I�??d be sitting behind one of the countless short wide Jewish ladies who smelled of Nivea and secured used Kleenexes up the sleeves of their cardigans. Nope. The Bill Gaines look-alike�??a compact fire plug of a man�??took a seat three to the left. The neurotically thin Yoga ladies who were season ticket holders? They weren�??t sitting in front of me.

No, I was sitting behind the tallest man in the room, and next to a young blond spiky-haired guy who awkwardly held a skateboard to his chest. You could tell he was thinking, �??What are all these old Jewish people doing here? This is about comix.�?? He sat nervously, as if the whole audience was going to turn around and yell at him not to skate on their sidewalk and to pick up the trash.

It was exactly the audience that he�??and I�??should have expected.

Then the two men, Ben Katchor and Josh Kornbluth, walked out. The audience, which was surprisingly quiet for hard-of-hearing older Jewish people, became even quieter. The man in front of me sat up even straighter. He was probably 7 or 8 feet tall and had unspeakably good posture. I shifted in my seat, trying to look around him.

I�??ve seen Ben Katchor before; it was when he was touring in the wake of his MacArthur Foundation genius award (which, incidentally, is taxable). That time he was reminiscing about the golden age of museum cafeterias. It�??s true: museum cafeterias have become too good. I often go to the Berkeley Art Museum�??s Café Muse just to eat the sustainably grown Raw Vietnamese Mushroom Salad with Cilantro, Scallions, & Almond Vinaigrette. I don�??t even look at the museum�??s exhibits. I eat lunch and leave. Someday I hope to be satisfied by just reading the menu.

Ben Katchor was right.

I squirmed in my seat again, trying to get a good look at the setup on the stage. The skateboarder made his best effort to shift left and get further away from me.

I�??d forgotten how much Ben Katchor looks like Mark Bernstein. He looks a lot like Mark Bernstein. Surprisingly so.

Josh Kornbluth looked even less like Ben Franklin than I�??d remembered. Perhaps it was the red socks that were bunched up at his ankles; I never picture Ben Franklin wearing red socks. (I still think Josh Kornbluth looks like Jay Sherman, who might well wear red socks with failing elastic).

Using a Sharpie, I wrote on my Muni pass: perhaps JK is a BK character. That would work. Josh Kornbluth looks drawn, as if he�??s jumped off of the page of one of the Weekly Strips. The one about the chiropodist, perhaps.

His experience as a talk show host has served him well: Josh Kornbluth is a fine interviewer. He asks good questions and mostly gets out of the way and lets Ben Katchor talk.

I could listen to Ben Katchor talk as long as he felt like talking. That�??s how good he is.

The first piece he reads is about modern apartments, about a man who moves every year so he can live in ever more up-to-date surroundings. The same mythical Eastern European movers transport his furniture year after year. One of the movers has a hernia, but nonetheless is able to horse the man�??s grandfather�??s delicate antique armoire out of the back of the van into the next of the series of more improbably-modern apartments.

Until�?�

The man finally goes digital and no longer has belongings to move. In the final frame of the story, the irrelevant armoire is hefted into a dumpster. Done and done. Gone digital.

My feet are dangling. If the springs in a theater seat are sufficiently strong, the seat begins to fold up on me, so that I�??m folded in half, as if caught mid-crunch. My mini-backpack forms an uncomfortable lump between my top half and my bottom half.

It is then�??after a particularly restive series of shifts and folds, peering around the 8-feet-tall guy and fighting against the theater seat spring�??that I begin hearing voices. Well, not really hearing voices like a schizophrenic person but rather, hearing voices like someone has their radio on. Yes, there is a muted voice of a radio commentator. How rude!

Who on earth is listening to the radio? Is it feedback from someone�??s hearing aid?.

At some extreme point in my contortions, my ear is in close proximity to my mini-backpack. Aha! That�??s the noise: it�??s my own MP3 player. I must�??ve pressed the �??on�?? button by accident. Those tiny tinny voices are from the Slate Political Gabfest. With great discretion, I put my hand inside my backpack and turn off the player. Ben Katchor must not discover that I�??ve disrupted his reading with my $39 earPod. Shoot.

The second piece is even more arresting than the first. It is about condiment packets and how they are replacing the more human-scale shared service containers that preceded them. The sociable metal creamers have given way to personal handfuls of Mini-Moos; the mustard jar has been superseded by mustard packets with an unimaginably small amount of condiment within.

Not only are the packets an unrealistic size (how many for the average hot dog? 10?); they�??re also uniformly difficult to open. One wrong move and a Mini-Moo will give you a creamy facial�??a Mini-Moo money shot, if you�??re in the mood for an obscene tongue twister. The ever-inventive Mr. Katchor suggests that young men will rent out their packet-opening services�??they�??ll accompany you into a restaurant, and will open all of the necessary condiments for you.

With such help on call, you can go wild. Five tubs of syrup cascade down your short stack! A lavish squiggle of catsup ornaments your fries!

Such a good idea. Condiments are certainly a topic I can warm to; I think about them a lot. In fact, there�??s not much in our refrigerator except a wealth of condiments: Uncle Chen�??s chili garlic sauce; Aztexan Habanero Supreme hot sauce; Hoisin sauce; Tiparos fish sauce; Heinz Catsup in the ultra-large bottle with the customized label; Safeway Spicy Brown Mustard; and other bottles and jars too numerous to list (although I�??m very tempted to alphabetize them).

The condiment shelves are packed. Packed! A comic about condiments is very nearly perfect.

But really, I can�??t object to the packets on any but aesthetic grounds: I was recently saved from impending starvation by a stray peanut butter packet that I�??d stashed in my suitcase. I was in a hotel room, late at night, in a strange city, and I came upon this miracle cache of peanut butter. I scrabbled around in my briefcase until I found airplane pretzels. Pretzels and peanut butter: Is that not a complete meal? It is. Most food groups are adequately represented. It was kind of like the original Hanukah, except with peanut butter and pretzels instead of oil.

But I digress. Being in the Jewish Community Center with all these little old Jewish people (and the 9 foot tall man sitting in front of me) is clearly having an effect.

The Crumb Trap is the title of Ben Katchor�??s third story. It is about the New York Department that goes from apartment to apartment (an entire building in an hour!), emptying toaster crumb traps. After a sufficient portion of the city�??s small appliances had been emptied�??saving residents from potential toaster-fires and cockroach invasions�??the crumbs are sorted and used for different functions. Some are fine abrasives; others are Thanksgiving filler; still other crumbs are fed to the city�??s songbirds.

Really his ideas are quite practical. I greatly admire them.

I wish I had ideas like that. I could�??ve listened to lots more stories.

But the �??in-conversation�?? format has one unfortunate characteristic. The part where the author speaks is always too short, and the part where the audience asks questions is always too long. I�??m not sure why they let the audience ask questions at all. Josh Kornbluth already asked questions, and he did fine. The audience will not do fine; they are bound and determined to ask stupid questions.

Some of the questions are like Jeopardy questions: they�??re the answer in the form of a question and they�??ve only been asked because the asker wants to demonstrate that he�??s actually met the celebrity before. Or that the question-asker is a minor celebrity in his- or her own mind. Yuck.

Did I hear someone ask, �??Where do you get your ideas?�?? Someone must�??ve. It�??s as if you could subscribe to ideas like you would the Harry & David Fruit-of-the-Month Club. In January, you get 12 Royal Riviera Pears and a half-dozen good ideas about, say, small appliances.

All too soon, it is over, and we must shuffle from the auditorium as a bovine group. Shuffle. Shuffle.

On the second floor, there is a reception and the author will be signing books. It is a Jewish Community Center. I know that a proper reception cannot be conducted on an empty stomach. And I am right. There are crudités and macaroons. Brie and celery sticks (nature�??s dental floss!). Petits Fours and cheese balls. People are milling around, eating compulsively and talking volubly.

And Stacey�??s has set up a table. Forgot to bring a book for the author to sign? You can buy one from the nice lady.

I find myself buying a book: Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District. And edging my way through throngs of older Jewish men and women eating reception food (�??oooh. Did you try the macaroons? I wonder where they bought the macaroons? So moist!�??) until I got to Room 209. There were only a few faithful fans in line when I got there, real comix-lovers. Odd looking men and women with bulging backpacks and stacks of books. Not just one or two books that they�??d purchased at the Stacey�??s table, but big hulking stacks of books. As if they�??d brought half their home libraries for Ben Katchor to sign. Anthologies that already have other signatures in them. Everything they could think of.

Book signings are horribly awkward. It�??s like making small talk at a party if you�??re not out to get laid, but just trying to make benign conversation with strangers. Just words to fill the dead air and demonstrate you�??re a teeny bit smarter than the neon tetras in the aquarium you�??re standing next to and a teeny bit more appealing than the decrepit old family dog that has wandered into the room. At best, you leave without the need for an apology.

When I reach the front of the line, I start out poorly, haltingly. I allude to something he�??d admitted about his books, about how they were almost too much to be taken in all at once. It seems like a stupid opening line when you�??re asking someone you admire to sign a just-purchased copy of their book. He frowns.

Quick! Must say something else. Must redeem the conversation. Because I do read his comics on the web, I ask him about his web site. He is momentarily pleased and says he put it together himself�??and that it�??s nothing. That he used to be a typesetter.

Ben Katchor is gracious; he draws me a small cartoon guy in spite of the non-conversation we are having. I console myself: this is a transient blip in his day, and even though he�??s really smart, there�??s no way he�??ll remember his brief encounter with me.

Up close, he still looks like Mark Bernstein. In some hard-to-quantify way.

Does he know Mark Bernstein? He might know Mark Bernstein. Yeah. He could know Mark Bernstein. Mark Bernstein gets around.

I stop myself before I ask him. Phew. That was close. It is something my mother and I do, this looking for momentary cosmic alignments�??shared friends, shared schools, shared towns�??but many people are less crazy about that kind of coincidence.

And just like that, my turn is over. My chance to make a positive impression has evaporated. Ben Katchor has drawn a little cartoon guy for me to puzzle over; I have thanked him; and now I shuffle out of the room, back toward the food tables. The signing line has grown long while the first few of us have had our turns. I am still flustered.

Maybe it is because I am flustered that a guy with a hand held video camera, a nice one, approaches me. Now I will say something stupid and it will be immortalized. Bits that�??ll come back to bite me. A sudden panic grips me; I am beyond flustered. Yet I�??m drawn to the camera.

We all want to be celebrities. We can�??t help ourselves.

�??Hi,�?? he says. �??I�??m Jacob Kornbluth, Josh Kornbluth's brother. Is it okay if I ask you a few questions? I�??m making a little documentary about Ben Katchor for Josh�??s TV show.�??

If I were smart, I�??d realize that this is the guy who co-directed and co-wrote Haiku Tunnel. This is a professional and he�??s not making a home movie. But I�??m not smart. And not only have I already missed a critical cue; my mind is rapidly going blank. The microphone in my face is making it worse.

Jacob Kornbluth doesn�??t look at all like Josh Kornbluth. For one thing, he�??s got a disarming smile; Josh Kornbluth seems to have gotten all of the frowny angst and Jacob Kornbluth has that easy-going charm. He�??s cute. For some reason, the way he introduces himself makes me think he doesn�??t really do this for a living, that he�??s just come along because he hasn�??t got anything better to do on a Monday night in May. That he�??s doing this as a favor for his brother.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Walk away! Walk away! Run! Dive under the macaroon table! Hide among the crudités! Camouflage yourself as a wheel of Brie! Act inert!

Jacob Kornbluth starts asking me questions about comics, and I am immediately sucked into a mammoth mental vacuum. Any problems I have remembering names when I�??m on the spot are exacerbated and I give him absurd answers, answers that he won�??t even have to take out of context to make me look foolish. For some reason, the only artist I can remember is R. Crumb; I can�??t even remember Aline�??s name, even though they draw comics together in The New Yorker, comics I read again and again. I can�??t remember that Mary Fleener went to PV High and surfed at the same beaches I knew. And what about Julie Douchet? And Daniel Clowes? Why can�??t I remember a single name of the artists I like? Why can't I come up with any details about their ouvre?

I can�??t even come up with Art Spiegelman�??s name. I once started a whole project because of a piece Art Spielgelman did about the New York Public Library�??s picture collection.

The wall outside my college dorm room had an S. Clay Wilson panel that Adam Melch meticulously copied from a Zap Comix. Surely I could�??ve come up with ONE two sentence anecdote about comics.

Jacob Kornbluth is asking me easy questions but I can�??t answer them. Good god! Do I really have no favorites in the comics world? Do I really have no favorite Ben Katchor comic? I listen to words coming out of my mouth that even I don�??t believe.

At the last minute, I remember the Ben Katchor story I like about the chiropodist, although I say �??podiatrist�??, which makes it less funny and makes me seem like less of a fan. It�??s not my favorite either, but at least it�??s something.

I flinch even now, embarrassed to recollect my performance in front of the camera.

I am so NOT ready for my closeup.

Now I wish I�??d even said, �??I can�??t remember a darned thing. My blood sugar must be low.�??

Instead I grab one of the moist macaroons and shove it in my mouth. I have clearly seen too many Twix commercials, but it works. Jacob begins chatting with the lady standing next to me and I flee.

In retrospect, I think all he was looking for a fan. Someone who would say that they were a fan. I don�??t even think he was looking for a �??good�?? fan, one of the fans who memorizes whole stories and can quote ad nauseam. He was just looking for someone who�??d say something admiring, something interesting and not too stupid.

I did none of the above, even though I admire Ben Katchor�??s work a great deal.

I�??m hoping I�??ll end up on the cutting room floor.

I walk out of the San Francisco Jewish Community Center into the May night. The reading has newly sensitized me to the odd window displays and neon signs on California Street. Pregnant mannequins look less like pregnant mannequins and more like a small army of Nicole Richies shoplifting basketballs. Ben Katchor has changed what I see, just as any artist worth his or her salt should.

I get on the Number 24 Muni bus and head back across town.

flying slugs and sloppy stucco

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Sat, 10 May 2008 20:31:00 +0000

I shouldn�??t still be thinking about our new roof.

The roofers finished replacing our old roof more than three weeks ago, not long after we wound up our fraught dealings with Wooden Window.

You'd have thought we'd have had enough homeowner trauma for the time being, that we'd be content to stare out of our new windows at the San Francisco skyline, that we could continue to ignore the paint slowly peeling off the wall in big sheets where the roof leaks during the rainy season.

It's not apt to rain again until November; why bother replacing the roof? Didn't we learn anything from our experience with the windows?

But no. We're slow learners. We ran right out and found a roofing company that would replace the roof right away. This wouldn't be nearly so disruptive as the window work; all we had to do was move a dozen or so potted plants off the lightwell (which is technically part of the roof) and that'd be it.

"Will they be coming in to use the bathroom," I asked the roofer after we'd received the final bid and were signing the contract.

"Oh, no," he said. "They're like camels."

I decided to pursue the question no further.

For a week, we lived in a drum, with camel-like roofers clattering over our heads and the acrid smell of tar in the air. Friday afternoon rolled around and they were done; they offered to help me move the potted plants back into the lightwell, but I demurred. They were anxious to leave and I was anxious to have the house back.

I was pleased with the new roof for an interval of about 4 hours. For four hours, I lived with the blissful thought that we were done with the roof. Done. Checked off the list.

�?? Windows.

�?? Roof.

Four hours was the length of time between the departure of roofers Carlos and Orlando and the arrival of Mark. It was an exceptionally brief bout of euphoria.

It was dark when Mark got home. He peered out the kitchen window into the lightwell.

�??Did they tell you they were done?�?? Mark asked me.

�??Yeah. They left around 4:30.�??

�??Oh, really. And they definitely said they were done?�??

I knew trouble was brewing. I told him that�??yes�??they were definitely done, and that in fact they stayed longer than they thought they would have to, and were bummed to be joining Friday afternoon Bay Bridge traffic.

�??They were bummed,�?? Mark echoed. �??They. Who�??s they? Who worked on the stucco?�??

I told him that I didn�??t know, because in truth I avoided looking out the window at the workmen, even when I was in the kitchen a few feet away from where they were spading globs of wet stucco onto the metal netting. It�??s too weird watching someone through a window at that distance; it�??s like you�??re looking into a goldfish bowl. And the goldfish are REALLY BIG. And they�??re eating sunflower seeds. And talking and laughing.

But I knew where the �??who�??s they�?? line of questioning was going, and it wasn�??t good.

�??I can�??t believe you were standing in the kitchen and you don�??t know who did the stucco.�?? Mark said.

I don�??t want to say that he said this accusingly. But he did. He said it accusingly. And I felt appropriately chastised: guilty as charged. Even though I wasn�??t sure who worked on the stucco, I was reasonably sure that the roofing guys did the stucco themselves, that the special super-duper stucco specialist had not been called in to complete the job. We had been promised the super-duper stucco guy, and like Lady Elaine Fairchild, the stucco-man had turned out to be part of the Land of Make Believe.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I knew in my heart of hearts that Carlos and Orlando did the stucco. And that �??Carlos and Orlando�?? was not the right answer to Mark�??s stucco question.

�??And you don�??t see anything wrong with it?�??

�??The stucco, you mean?�??

�??Yes! The stucco. What do you think I�??m talking about?�??

Stucco, as it turns out, is not so simple to do. Lots of people think they know how to stucco a house, to smooth it and create a texture so it blends with the rest of the wall. So that it sticks to places where it�??s supposed to and doesn�??t sag at the bottom or stick out at the edges.

I think it�??s safe to say that stucco is an art.

It�??s about as difficult to do an aesthetic stucco job as it is to get 6-pack abs.

Our stucco, unfortunately, looked flabby, out-of-shape. And its complexion didn�??t look so hot either. The edges were ragged and messy. It looked bad, and although I didn�??t say anything, I also knew that the only way to fix it was to knock it all out and do it again. All over again.

Stucco is an art AND a science. And as nice and careful and competent as Carlos and Orlando were, they were not stucco guys.

Indeed, when I told my colleague Michael this story, he said, �??you should listen to Danette go on about stucco. She is certain that it is stucco destroying America (�?�), not gay marriage or flag burning...�??

So Mark is not the only one; he has company. I have enormous respect for Danette. She works for NASA; I think she might even be an astronaut. And if she says that bad stucco is destroying America, I will take her at her word.

That was three weeks ago.

I think I�??ve mentioned my other houseplants before. I�??m sure I have. What�??d I put the count at, 37? Something like that. There may even be more; I try not to maintain an accurate count.

Since the lightwell is the view out the kitchen window�??and since I stare out the kitchen window while I�??m doing the dishes�??before we had the roof done, the lightwell was home to even more houseplants. I thought it�??d be nice to stare out at the hardier of my houseplants when I looked out the window.

Those hardy houseplants were not counted as part of the 37.

Carlos and Orlando moved some of them, the giant pots of mint and horsetails and the giant fern, out to the back of the house.

I hesitate to tell you what I did with the others, the 5 pots of succulents, the 2 cymbidiums, the large, top-heavy cactus, the date palm, the sago palm, a Lyman fern, a small pot of horsetails, and a smallish pot of great spiral rushes (aka �??curly grass�??). They all looked pretty healthy and happy (except the ragged spots where something had evidently tried to eat them).

So�?� I brought them into the house. Thirteen more houseplants. Mark covered the guest room floor downstairs with a big sheet of plastic that the window guys had left behind.

Although I didn�??t really have any place to put them, thirteen more houseplants didn�??t exactly seem problematic. Ah, what�??s a dozen or so more houseplants anyway?

I�??m not sure how those slugs got up onto the roof.

How would a slug get onto the roof?

How could a slug get onto the roof? Are these special flying slugs?

There are flying squirrels. There are flying fish. There are flying cockroaches, even. Mammals, fish, hard-shelled invertebrates (inverts, as someone I know used to call them. Inverts). You see where I�??m going with this. These are special, super-duper flying slugs.

I didn�??t know there were slugs living in the pots until I watered them. Around a week after I brought the plants inside, they commenced to look dry. Mighty dry. If we were going to wait until the stucco was redone�??and I could tell we were�??there was absolutely no sense in moving the plants back out onto the lightwell. And they weren�??t going to stay alive unless I watered them before I put them back out there.

So I poured a cupful of water on each of the succulents and on the palms and ferns and on the cymbidiums and on the pot of curly grass. �??Drink up, guys,�?? I said. I convinced myself that they looked pleased and well-nourished. Beads of water sparkled where the succulents�?? leaves converged into little cups. Water drained into the plastic catch-pans underneath the plants. �??Lookin�?? good,�?? I told the roomful of plants and gave them the thumbs-up as I left.

The next time I went downstairs, I realized to my horror that there was a good reason why the cactus had scars and the cymbidium flowers looked so tattered. A REALLY GOOD REASON.

�??Ewwwww!�?? I said, perhaps louder than was necessary. �??Ewwwww!�?? But was involuntary.

I realize that slugs don�??t bite, don�??t sting, and they�??re a great deal smaller than I am. They�??re not that menacing. I was in no particular danger. But�??ewwwww�??they�??re gross. Snails at least have the great good sense to wear some kind of outer garments.

Should I have bought the slugs some kind of Ghillie suits? You know, just for aesthetic reasons. Kind of like the stucco�??they might look better. For those of you unfamiliar with this type of outdoor wear, a Ghillie suit is an outer garment that Jon Foote alerted me to not long ago�??it�??s kind of like wearing bad shag carpeting or rolling in pond scum. It�??s something that hunters wear to amuse their prey to death. No kidding. The forest animals literally laugh themselves to death.

If I put little Ghillie suits on the slugs, they�??d at least be cuddly. They�??d still be a nuisance, but they�??d be more like squirrels, and less like slimy inverts.

Little furry flying slugs.

It�??s an idea.

I couldn�??t bear to just squish them. I�??ve never been very good at squashing insects. Even when our apartment in Pasadena was overrun by giant cockroaches, I couldn�??t squish �??em. The best I could manage was to dissolve one using Dow Bathroom Cleaner with Scrubbing Bubbles. If you spray that napalm-like cleaning product on a cockroach, it turns the bug into a brown puddle, which can then be swept down the drain with a blast of water.

I know it might be inadvertently interpreted as Buddhist, but I just can�??t spray chemicals on bugs any more.

So what should I do with the infestation of slugs?

Believe it or not, we�??ve had an indoor slug infestation before. When we lived in Mountain View, in an apartment we lovingly referred to as �??the cave�??, slugs�??big ones�??would come in under the dishwasher during the night. You�??d turn on the kitchen light, and instead of cockroaches scattering, a giant slick and slimy (fat and sassy) slug would continue its steady march across the kitchen, undeterred by the startling flood of fluorescent light (�??Does this light make my complexion look bad?�?? I thought I heard one ask).

In the morning, we�??d find fresh slug trails sparkling across the brown shag carpeting and up the back of the couch. Thank god we hid the TV remote.

That time, I dealt with the slugs with a determined course of benign neglect. That�??s right: I just ignored them. Occasionally, I�??d find a desiccated slug nestled in the carpeting, a victim of a bad sense of direction. But usually, they made it back out to wherever they were actually going without further notice.

This time, benign neglect made less sense.

And besides, our housecleaner just gave me a new cymbidium; its flowers were pristine and beautiful. I owed it to him to try to protect the cymbidium flowers from the mucusoid invaders.

There were a lot of slugs. Not just two or three. A lot. Every time I saw some and donned a rubber glove to bring them outside, when I came back, there�??d be a few more waiting for me.

Technically, I don�??t think they were actually waiting for me. They were just sliming across the giant sheet of plastic, doing important slug things. Things I really wouldn�??t understand. They were on the march. Going somewhere with a great sense of purpose, slug-antennae outstretched. Were they going to the movies? Trying to find a wireless connection? Looking for 4 bars of connectivity on their slug cell phones? Doing slug aerobics?

Who knows why slugs do the things they do.

All I knew is that I didn�??t want them to do those things indoors. I wanted them to fly back to the roof.

Be gone, slugs! Fly away, fly away home! Get on the Google bus and join your slug counterparts in our old apartment in Mountain View! Just forgodssakes don�??t stay here.

Ick.

13+37=50. Thirteen lightwell plants plus 37 indoor plants. That�??d be 50 plants. 50!

Fifty plants are enough that I thought nothing of adopting Margaret�??s plants last week so I could take care of them on this side of the bay while she was out-of-town. Houseplants are kind of like kittens. If you have enough of them, they�??ll entertain each other; you can let your Netflix subscription lapse and they won�??t even mind.

So I went to Berkeley last Sunday night and picked up about a dozen more houseplants. A miniature ficus tree. A Christmas cactus. A cluster of epiphytes, several in bloom. More cymbidiums. A philodendron-ish plant. And several rather large and healthy-looking cacti.

Note to self: Why do you wear gloves to pick up slugs and not to pick up cacti? Why?

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

I drove across the Bay Bridge late Sunday night, the back of my car full of plants, and the back of my hand full of tiny, painful cactus spines. Cacti with big fierce spines are almost safer than those innocent furry-looking cacti that leave you with a carpet of pain when you brush up against them. At least my mouth wasn�??t full of the taboo frisson of raw pork, as it was during another recent drive across the bridge.

While I don�??t have 70 houseplants yet, I�??m close. What I�??m thinking is I should teach them�??or the slugs, or perhaps even the cat�??how to stucco. I know it�??s hard, but it seems like a skill that�??s worthwhile cultivating. Local expertise.

Because frankly, I feel guilty about fussing to the roofer about the stucco, even though I know that we�??re perfectly within our rights to do so.

The other day, our roofer�??a soft-spoken guy named David�??came out to talk about the job.

�??So tell me exactly what you think is wrong with the stucco,�?? he says to me. �??I can�??t see it.�??

Can he really not see it? I start feeling silly.

�??You know, it�??s where it blends with the stucco on the house. See. It sticks up.�??

�??Sticks up?�?? David says. �??What do you mean?�??

Is this a trick, or is he really not seeing that the new stucco is as lumpy as oatmeal where it meets the old stucco? After all, I didn�??t notice the problem myself for those four pleasant hours between the workmen�??s departure and Mark�??s scrutiny, although I was trying not to look.

�??Um. You know. It doesn�??t blend. We�??re afraid that when we paint it, it will look even worse.�?? I am bluffing, but I do now see how the edge is wrong. We had other stucco work done recently, and I know what it should look like. Besides, over the last few weeks, the stucco has cracked in several places, and has begun to look like the Wilkins ice shelf under the effects of global warming. And I have had a chance to get a good close look at the job; it is at least inelegant if not wholly unacceptable.

I�??ve come around to Mark�??s dissatisfaction, although not his anger.

Still I feel sheepish. I tell David, �??Let�??s go out there and look, okay?�?? I don�??t know why I�??ve suggested this�??if it�??s something you can only see up close, it certainly doesn�??t argue for a re-do. I can see what there is to see from where we are standing, at the kitchen window.

Yet we crawl out the kitchen window onto the lightwell, both of us. I run my hands over the edge of the offending stucco. �??See?�?? I ask David.

�??I�??m afraid I don�??t,�?? he tells me.

I try to rationalize this. Perhaps roofers are so used to working outside of aesthetic concerns that they don�??t notice anomalies in the stucco work: after all, who goes poking around up on their roof to see if it all looks nice? What you�??re supposed to care about is function: does the roof keep the wet stuff (rain and flying slugs) out and dry stuff (the furniture and Toto) in? And I saw the lightwell before they re-stuccoed. It looked like a giant tar bathtub, which is just how you�??d want it to look.

Does he really not see it? I think he doesn�??t.

But he humors me: �??I�??ll have my stucco guy come out and take a look. He�??ll be able to tell us for sure.�??

The magic stucco guy! I�??m completely mollified, although Mark is still too angry to participate.

�??He doesn�??t see it?�?? Mark rages. �??He doesn�??t see it? How can he not see it?�?? And he goes on to tell me that he thinks David might be putting me on, that he must see it. That he�??s just trying to manipulate me into accepting the substandard job.

I�??m convinced he doesn�??t see it, Pollyanna that I am. And I�??m convinced that slugs fly and that somewhere in America, people go hunting dressed up like giant moss bogs.

The stucco guy is tactful, but I can see that he�??s with Danette and Mark on this one. He says to David, �??No offense to your guys, but I think we�??re going to have to do this over.�??

David grimaces, but maintains professional cool. I almost wish Mark were out there with us; I�??m sure he would applaud. But he is still hiding in the guest room, amid the jungle of houseplants, native and temporary, with the few slugs who have been successful in taking cover. Even after a several-week cooling off period, he is afraid his anger will erupt in an unseemly outburst.

I sigh in relief. Even though it means another day of noise, Mark will be happy and I will be through with these awkward explanations.

And sometime, in the far distant future, the lightwell will be re-stuccoed and repainted and I will be able to put a dozen stray houseplants out there, leftover slugs and all.

Thank god roofs last for 20 years.

arts and crafts

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 01:05:00 +0000

I�??ve never been the crafts-y type.

In fact, now that Martha Stewart has paid her debt to society, there�??s no need for any of the rest of us to dip our own beeswax candles, milk our own Belted Galloway cows, or ice our own cupcakes. No need. Martha�??s back in town, filling in America�??s crafts gap. Only the institutionalized and socially marginal have reason to weave baskets or make their own potpourri.

The hipper side of the crafts world, MAKE magazine, has never managed to seduce me either. Do I really need to build a kayak rack? Do I want to make my own chocolate sushi? Am I up to the challenge of constructing a butter-pen? Can I imagine knitting a cozy for the TV remote controller?

The answer is always no. For me, tying my own shoes qualifies as a craft. My kayaks can be shoved under the bed with my mukluks, unracked. And a butter-pen is much too much of a commitment: I prefer to use a butter-pencil to keep my cholesterol level competitively high.

Okay. I might've lied about crafts a couple of paragraphs ago. I admit that I did flirt with macramé�??but only briefly�??when I was in high school.

My string of choice was rough green jute, which stained my hands and shed bits of green fiber onto the carpeting in front of the TV, where I most often worked. Square knots. Double half-hitches. Tying knots for hours on end felt therapeutic and it offered an absorbing substitute for a normal social life. Besides, going to school with green hands made me feel artistic.

I avoided the smaller, less ambitious macramé projects�??the belts and handbags�??and went straight for the enormous rustic wall-hangings, decorated with bits of driftwood, beads, and stones with holes in them that I gathered on the beach.

My output was prodigious and ugly. So I offered the wall hangings to relatives, who hung them in closets and bathrooms. Garages provided lots of prime wall space too.

For about a year I alternately macramé-d long thin wall hangings and short squat wall hangings. It would�??ve been a challenge to find any dimensions I didn�??t create a macramé objet d�??art to fill.

Although my high school macramé projects were frumpy, they were relatively successful. Certainly there were worse projects. Much worse. Take the Elizabethan Crumster, for example, a crafts project that was a thoroughgoing disaster. The fact that I remember it at all, that it stands out from the general horrors of sixth grade, should tell you something.

In the Crumster, I see an element of prescience.

An Elizabethan Crumster is a ship, a merchant ship. Bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a galleon. You know: Not a sexy yacht or a fearsome gunboat, a sturdy little Crumster.

I�??ve never been particularly interested in boats. Nor was I interested in history in the sixth grade, when I fabricated my Crumster out of nothing more than a stack of shirt cardboards and spaghetti. Yes, spaghetti. You can imagine what it looked like.

I can�??t remember how I chose such an unlikely crafts project for school, although I can guess why I chose the materials that I did.

The problem was, the other kids built pyramids. They somehow convinced their feckless parents to drive to Vons and buy them multiple boxes of expensive C&H sugar cubes. Glue �??em together and�??ta-da!�??a pyramid. Two pyramids. Pyramids on a sand-sprinkled plywood board. Pyramids to go. Pyramids a-go-go. The Great Pyramids at Giza. The Mayan Pyramids of Chichen-Itza.

I was so jealous. These kids had nothing to be embarrassed about and it was even easy for them. Probably fun too.

No way that I was going to convince any adult member of my household to pony up for boxes of those expensive sugar cubes. No way! And what of the ants? Surely that many sugar cubes would become an open invitation to the ants.

Yo, ants! House party!

My father worked in the aerospace industry, LA�??s second economy. He wore a white shirt and tie to work every day. Once a week, a cleaner would come around in his panel van and pick up 5 identical dirty white shirts and drop off 5 clean white shirts. Each clean shirt was folded flat around a cardboard rectangle. Shirt cardboards. Free building material. Impossible to work with, but free.

On the first go-round, the Crumster I constructed from shirt cardboard looked horrid, unrecognizable as a boat. If it weren�??t so lopsided, it might�??ve passed for an Elizabethan chamber pot. Even a brisk application of brown Magic Marker did not help it pass as a ship. Now it was a brown Elizabethan chamber pot rather than a gray cardboard-colored Elizabethan chamber pot.

Drat! I rummaged around, looking for something I could use as rigging, something I could just take without getting into too much trouble. Rigging would surely transform the shapeless cardboard thing into a serviceable galleon-like object.

How can you make rigging without rope? String wasn�??t stiff enough to pass muster as rigging. As I sat at the kitchen table, miserable, pondering whether a cardboard chamber pot would float me to C level, I munched on a stalk of raw spaghetti. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

Aha! There was my answer: raw spaghetti. Excellent solution! It never crossed my mind how dorky the raw spaghetti would look. I just saw a simple way to finish the stupid homework assignment, a way to make a chamber pot into an ocean-going vessel.

I glued together port and starboard lattices of raw spaghetti�??and two more to match fore and aft�??and finished my Crumster; I then stuffed it into a brown grocery bag so that I could transport it to school without answering any questions about what it was. My hope was that I could hide it in plain sight among the numerous pyramids and papier-mâché globes and escape detection. Was a C too much to ask?

How did I think I would get away with such a peculiar-looking artifact?

How on earth did one of my classmates construct a Rand-McNally-quality globe out of papier-mâché? Another classmate�??s pyramid looked like he�??d marshaled teams of teeny-tiny Egyptian slaves to hoist sugar bricks one on top of the other. Was that really a miniature camel? Did I detect the intervening hand of a competent adult?

No fair! No fair!

There are only three things you can do when you�??re the most eccentric and least socially adept sixth grader in the class: (1) throw your shirt-cardboard-and-raw-spaghetti Elizabethan Crumster in the dumpster behind the cafeteria on your way to class and claim that you forgot to do your homework; (2) turn in your shirt-cardboard-and-raw-spaghetti Elizabethan Crumster, but squash it in advance and claim that it used to look a lot better, A LOT BETTER, before some mean seventh grade girl stole it from you on the bus and wrecked it; or (3) brazen it out and act like you deliberately built a crappy-assed shirt-cardboard-and-raw-spaghetti Elizabethan Crumster to make fun of Mrs. Thiess and her crappy-assed crafts projects.

Naturally I chose option (3). After all, I�??d spent several hours on the thing and I wanted credit for my labor and creative use of materials. And the word �??Crumster�?? was good. Perfect, even. It seemed to lend itself to classroom buffoonery. In retrospect, option (2) would�??ve been a whole lot smarter grade-wise, and option (1) would�??ve left me with a shred of self-respect, but (3) presented an attractive element of risk.

D�??oh. Another black mark in my permanent record. Even today, I see the results. �??Oh, you expected stock options this year? Well maybe you shouldn�??t have used an Elizabethan Crumster to make fun of your 6th grade teacher. Ever consider that?�??

Some things take more than 50 years of therapy to work out. It�??s pretty clear that I have good reason to steer clear of crafts though.

So, knowing what I know, why was I unable to resist a glue gun at Cliff�??s Variety? It�??s not like I�??m a closet scrapbooker or something. Why didn�??t I ditch the glue gun and all of the glue sticks before I got to the checkstand? I could�??ve just bought the Schultz�??s Plant Food and the shower grout that I came for and been on my way. Merrily.

Why�??d I do it?

I�??ve had the glue gun for months now�??months!�??and I�??ve been dying to try it.

�??What can I glue? What can I glue?�?? I ask myself.

�??What can I glue?�?? I ask Mark.

Mark has no easy answer, but he just picks up the glue gun (ah, such a pleasing heft) and starts gluing stuff together. Stuff. Anything. Whatever�??s at hand on the dining room table. He glues a popsicle stick to another popsicle stick and glues those to some toothpicks and a post-it. Cat hair gets mixed in.

Things stick out at odd angles. The gluey object grows.

Done! Mark has satisfied man�??s primal urge to glue. He is left with a wholly disposable assemblage of dining room table detritus. Done and done! He places the sculpture on the dining room table where it sits for several months.

I am left holding a hot glue gun with nothing left to glue, and in fact, nothing that actually needs gluing.

Damn! What can I glue?

What finally catches my attention are the magazines, the magazines I�??ve been fretting about ever since I moved everything to the center of the rooms in preparation for the new windows. That was when I came to the stunning realization that our possessions consist of:
65% books and magazines
15% houseplants
10% knick-knacks
4% take-out menus, refrigerator magnets, and Alicia Tam notepads
3% post-its, pens, and other office supplies
2% old autoteller receipts and
1% EVERYTHING ELSE.

It�??s a distressing state of affairs.

We have a lot of old magazines. New Yorkers, mostly. It seems so wasteful to just toss �??em. Besides, there�??s always an article or two that I haven�??t read yet. And if I keep them for more than a year or two, I completely forget the content of the articles that I did read, and can safely read the whole magazine anew.

I�??d originally planned to donate all these magazines to someplace they�??d be appreciated. But then I happened upon an article (in a magazine, of course) that said, people who know better�??the street vendors who set up shop on the sidewalks of Lower Manhattan�??hate, hate old New Yorkers, that you can�??t even give them away, that the street vendors accept them only out of pity for the clueless donors. I flinch with guilt and self-recognition.

The thing about these magazines is that I love the pictures�??the graphics and photos and lavish illustrations. Love �??em! Even magazines that were black-and-white a decade ago are now just full of interesting pictures. Cool pictures. Pictures you might like to clip out and�?�

Tell me, am I too old to collage?

Scratch that question. On second thought, I decide to consult no-one about the wisdom of this project. I think I know the answer. And it�??s not the one I want to hear.

All I know is that I�??ve got glossy magazine pictures, a glue gun, and a lifetime�??s worth of small cardboard boxes that I�??ve kept �??just in case.�?? In case of what? In case I decide to return a fetid 10 year old pair of Pumas? In case I want to remember a Valentine�??s Day gift of gooey chocolate-covered cherries? In case I suddenly start an eBay business? Why oh why do I have all of these boxes?

Yes. I am having a vision, a brainstorm so dangerous that I dare not tell anyone. The answer to all of my problems is right in front of me. Well, not all of my problems. My problems are manifest and cannot all be addressed by adhesives. But most of my problems.

If hot glue were to solve all of my problems, I�??d be applying hot glue to Evert�??s friends who have been engaging in excessively noisy sex at 5am every morning and WAKING ME UP. I�??m an insomniac; I need whatever sleep I can round up. The walls are thick, but these people are really LOUD. It�??s not thumping sex or moaning sex or wailing sex; it�??s complicated sex with lots of shouted instructions and noises that are ambiguously situated between pleasure and pain.

Hot glue is not the answer to that problem. I bet applying hot glue would just make the noise louder.

They�??d probably LIKE hot glue. It might elicit further shrieks and shouted commands.

So what was that safe word?

If hot glue is not the solution to all of my problems, at first blush it does seem to be the answer to many of them.

Unfortunately, the first thing that I learn, right away, is that glue guns aren�??t so swell for gluing paper. The glue I�??ve applied is messy and bumpy. Glue guns are apparently for other crafts. Perhaps crafts involving shirt cardboards and raw spaghetti.

Crap. The first few glue gun efforts reveal that I am building yet another Elizabethan Crumster. I can tell. Shit. I am not 10 years old. Why did I start a crafts project? Why? Don�??t I have any common sense?

Mrs. Thiess is smirking from her grave. SMIRKING.

I might�??ve learned something over the years though. I hustle myself down the hill to Walgreens and�??contrary to my usual impulse toward cheap-i-tude�??I eschew the Wal-hesive, Wal-goo, and Wal-stick-um and head straight for the archival quality 3M scrapbooking glue.

Scrapbooking. Did you know that Scrapbooking was a multi-BILLION dollar industry? Either did I. Multi-BILLION. Who�??d have thought? Scrapbooking. Jesus.

But this is the best glue I�??ve ever used (not counting the kind you huff from paper bags). This glue is great. This glue is all-powerful and forgiving. You can�??t go wrong.

You can even leave the cap off of this glue and the applicator will keep on working.

I can�??t say enough nice things about this glue. It�??s life-changing.

I spend hours pondering my clippings as if they were an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. I stare at them, trim them, rearrange them, glue them, Mod-Podge them.

And�??just as you�??d expect�??they proliferate. First there�??s 1 box. Then 2 boxes. Then 4.

Perhaps it�??s a good thing that Valentine�??s Day comes only once a year. There are but so many heart-shaped boxes that I�??ve stashed away. And I haven�??t even started on the shoeboxes yet.

You do have a lot of empty wall space, don�??t you? I know what you�??re going to get for Xmas.

If you�??ve been really nice to me, I won�??t give you two.

a windows upgrade

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 18:37:00 +0000

I have the soul of a renter.

When the windows get too dirty, I have to fight an overwhelming urge to pack up and move on. Or maybe not even to pack up, just to move on and leave behind all of the detritus we�??ve accumulated over the last 9 years: 21 American Express and Capitol One refrigerator magnets (and one featuring the lovely Alicia Tam, Realtor). 41 houseplants. A decrepit brown corduroy-covered futon couch. An entire library of Chinese take-out menus. 100 pounds of pennies. A cupboard full of jelly jars that we use as drinking glasses.

Have we lived here for 9 years? Holy Moses! How did that happen? That�??d explain all this shit

When we moved in, a friend said, "Don�??t do anything to the house for at least 2 years. Just live in it as if you were renting the place. Then you�??ll know what you want to remodel."

He needn�??t have warned us this way. We�??ve had no problem doing nothing. No problem at all. Everything�??s fine.

I�??m still using a stack of Xerox boxes as a bureau; there�??s still the shadow of Josephine�??s now-absent crucifix above the mantel, even though Josephine�??s been dead for over a decade. Everything�??s exactly where it was when we moved in

9 years. That�??s a long time. I could�??ve relived the worst part of elementary school and junior high in that much time and removed the blemishes from my Permanent Record.

And I could�??ve just kept going for another 10 years. Really I could�??ve. There�??s nothing wrong with the house. Oh sure, maybe the paint is peeling where rain leaked in from the light well. Maybe there�??s some moss growing on the roof. And maybe the stack of appliances and clothes to bring to the Salvation Army is becoming truly formidable (this is partly because the Salvation Army in San Francisco accepts only Sub Zero or Kitchen Aid appliances and couture clothing in excellent condition, but that�??s a story best left for another blog post).

But apart from a few signs of wear and tear, there�??s nothing at all wrong with our house. Nothing I couldn�??t ignore for another decade or so.

Somehow a startling decision was made when I wasn�??t paying attention. Maybe I was watching The Colbert Report. Maybe I was doing a late-in-the-week New York Times crossword puzzle. Whatever it was, I must�??ve been distracted from matters at hand: apparently we decided that we�??d replace the aluminum windows with real wooden windows, the kind the Sears salesman convinced Josephine to ditch in the heady burst of modernization and streamlining so characteristic of the early 1970s.

Once there was some momentum, it was easy to get behind this course of action; several of the old windows didn�??t close any more and others didn�??t open. I feared locking myself out on the light well (I normally crawl through the kitchen window to get there) or on front balcony while I was waving to tourists, pretending to be the Pope.

Face it. The house would look much better with nice wooden windows. Much better.

Or, as I�??ve learned. Windows: You should upgrade.

You�??re still running Windows 1970? You should be running Windows 2008! Don�??t you know how buggy Windows 1970 is?

It�??s true. Often on summer nights, whole swarms of tiny bugs breach the living room windows to fry themselves on the lamp (purchased at Lamps �??R�?? Us, circa 1988).

Once you decide to do something like that, put in new original-looking windows, the next part is easy. It seems that every other house in San Francisco has been through an extensive remodel during the fat years of subprime second mortgages. Every other house has been gutted and redone. So it�??s not hard to get a recommendation for a contractor to address something as simple and ubiquitous as windows.

Windows? Just click here to install.

At first, it seemed like a relatively straightforward proposition. The window guys came out and measured. We chatted briefly. This side needs to open; that window needs to be laminated. The window guys eyed the American Express refrigerator magnets, houseplants, decrepit brown futon, stack of Chinese take-out menus, and collection of jelly jars skeptically. We wrote a big check.

Then they left and all was quiet. I felt good: we�??d fixed up the windows.

Of course, we still had the old aluminum windows, but we�??d demonstrated our intentions to upgrade. To make the place look a little less like it was inhabited by a nest of particularly messy urban scavengers, squirrels in graduate school or crows on holiday.

Everything was fine.

Every once in a while, I thought about the new windows, especially when I struggled to open or close one of the old windows or when the light hit the nose prints on the living room window just so.

�??It�??s really a good view�?? I�??d explain to a visitor. �??If the windows weren�??t so dirty, you could see stuff like City Hall, SFMOMA, the skyline, Candlestick Park. It�??s AMAZING.�??

�??Awesome,�?? the visitor would agree skeptically, examining the city lights dimly visible through the patina of nose grease. �??It�??s an awesome view.�??

Finally there was no need to feel guilty about not washing these windows. They�??d be gone soon.

That was the best part of our Windows Upgrade: the part after we�??d paid the first big lump sum and before the workmen showed up to begin installing the first window, that period when anything was possible and you knew it would just get better. It was a great excuse for sloth and indecision.

�??Go through that pile of stuff on my desk? No. I�??ll just wait �??til the new windows are in.�??

�??Get rid of those ugly metal venetian blinds? No point until they�??re done with the windows.�??

�??Wash the dishes. Nah. They�??ll just mess things up when they�??re doing the windows.�??

But then the honeymoon was over. The window guys scheduled a week in early March to come out and install our new windows.

�??It probably won�??t take all week.�?? That�??s what Dawn said when we settled on a date for the work to begin.

Yep. Less than a week. Just backup the files, click on setup, and give it a couple of hours. And voila! New Windows.

It turns out that it�??s not like that for real windows. Not like that at all.

I didn�??t understand how disruptive installing windows would be, really. I mean, windows are more or less on the edge of a room, in the walls. That shouldn�??t have anything to do with the middle of the room, right?

How naïve I am! Mark knew that was not the case. Not at all. So the night before the workmen were due to arrive, I found myself packing stuff into boxes and moving it away from the wall.

It�??s surprising how much junk is in the periphery of our house. The houseplants, for example, seemed to be near the windows. What little furniture we have was clustered under windows. And we didn�??t just have to move the furniture. I�??d forgotten that all that furniture offered untold horizontal real-estate upon which to pile things. Magazines. Credit card receipts. Old laptops. Paper clips and rubber bands. Reminders of hobbies gone bad. Shredder oil. Shoe laces.

You know: stuff. The million quotidian things we accumulate in the name of everyday life.

Darn that furniture! Darn it!

How many magazines could possibly have been published between 1999 and now?

The trouble with going through old magazines is that it�??s almost impossible to not start reading them. And if they�??re old enough, I guarantee you that the articles will be just as good as they were when they were fresh, especially if you�??re like me and avoid news magazines. New Yorker cartoons? No matter how funny they were then, it�??s likely you won�??t remember them and will be able to enjoy them afresh. I can�??t throw away old magazines without taking a second look at them. And after I take a second look, I�??m sucked in for hours.

Just how disruptive could it be to move everything into the middle of each room, away from the windows?

Oh, it doesn�??t sound bad, but figure it out. Let�??s say we pack everything up that�??s five feet or less from the windows. If a window is 6 feet wide, we lose the 30 square feet in front of the window, plus the 5 foot penumbra radiating out to the side; let�??s say that�??s 2 quarter circles with a 5 foot radius, or 3.14*5*5*2/4. Which is another 39.25 square feet per room (although, of course, some of that falls outside of the wall, but I�??m going to ignore that nicety; that�??d make the numbers much less dramatic).

That�??s 69.25 square feet per room. And there are 7 windows that are going to be replaced. 7.

Are you following me? That�??s 484.75 square feet of crap that needs to be packed up and dragged into the center of the room, a zone that�??s not exactly empty to start with.

484.75 square feet.

484.75 square feet of dreck to be dealt with.

Now the house looks as you�??d expect. The interior walls are piled high with stuff and there�??s nothing anywhere near the windows.

�??It�??s just for a week,�?? I reminded myself as I banged the shit out of my shins trying to get into bed that first Sunday night. �??It�??s just a week,�?? I said, stubbing my toe as I rushed to be ready for the workmen�??s early arrival on Monday morning. �??Just a week.�??

Then we confronted the oldest dilemma in homeowner-ing: when the workmen are there, do you stay or do you go? I think songs have been written about it.

�??Should I stay or should I go�?��??

If you stay, you�??re kind of in the way. No�??scratch that. You�??re very much in the way. You�??re underfoot. You�??re a nuisance in your own house. You�??re a first-class pain in the ass. But if you go, you can�??t answer questions �??this latch or that? Does the house get locked up while everyone goes to fetch lunch? Does this minor glitch need to be fixed or not? And, of course, does some drugstore cowboy get into your stash?

You know what we did: we stayed. Of course we stayed. We stayed and were in the way. We stayed and watched the unfolding drama. We stayed and tried to ignore the pounding and scraping and whirring and grinding and the smelly dump one of the workmen took after lunch.

One afternoon during that first week, Lumpy and I were napping on the futon downstairs while the workmen finished up the day�??s work upstairs. Lumpy�??s a cat who knows how to nap. He�??s the king of naps, a napper of supreme confidence, competence, grace, and style. I don�??t usually nap, but I�??m an insomniac and accommodating the window installers�?? harsh early-morning schedule made me sleep-deprived and nap-hungry right from the start. So there we were, Lump and me, snoozing away on the futon, ignoring the noise upstairs.

The largest and most senior of the window installers, Murph, rapped on the door by way of warning and came in to tell me that the crew was knocking off for the day.

Lumpy sprang into action.

He arched his back and roared like a lion. Like a large, ferocious lion. You�??d never have known that seconds earlier he was curled in a compact half-circle, snoring softly, doing a pretty convincing impression of a housecat napping in a sunny spot.

I�??ve never seen a housecat so delusionally fierce.

Murph said, �??He�??s trying to protect you.�??

Protect me? Protect me from what? Maybe Lumpy knew something I didn�??t. Perhaps he was protecting me from the rather obvious observation that the workmen weren�??t done and wouldn�??t be when Friday afternoon rolled around.

That the job would drag on and on. The way people had warned me that remodeling tasks do.

By Friday, I�??d grown weary of being in the way and had gone to work. But Mark was still home. And after his one outburst, Lumpy was at home too, safely hidden under the futon. Way under the futon, in a place so dusty that he�??d emerge in the evening with little bits of cobweb and dust bunny clinging to his luxuriant whiskers and eyebrows. Hardly the guy who�??d roared so convincingly earlier in the week.

Around 4:30 Mark called me in my office. �??I lost it,�?? he said. �??I lost it at the workmen.�??

�??What do you mean, you lost it?�?? I asked him. �??Did they finish?�??

�??No.�??

�??Well, what�??s left for them to do? Are they close?�??

�??You�??ll see.�?? He said this in a tone so ominous that I decided it might be a good day to work extra-late.

I�??d wondered about the measurements the two men had made a few months ago, before they had built the windows; they seemed so, well, CASUAL. Sure, they used a tape measure. But they didn�??t do what I would�??ve done, checking and re-checking. Saying �??Here. You try it and tell me what you get.�?? It was almost as if they could eyeball these distances, make wild-ass guesses, and the numbers would come out just right.

That�??s why they�??re experienced professionals, I reassured myself. They can really estimate distances well. They�??re like surgeons: you wouldn�??t want them to be pulling out copies of Gray�??s Anatomy when they�??re making the cuts, right? Of course you�??re anesthetized at that point. Perhaps surgeons do pull out copies of Gray�??s Anatomy. That�??s why they give you anesthetic early on: so you won�??t see them consulting the textbook.

Maybe these guys needed to give us some anesthetic. That way they could�??ve been more careful without us knowing.

But by the time I�??d worked through that, the two men had finished their measurements, talked to us about latches and hinges and that sort of stuff, gotten in their white panel van with the company�??s name on the side, and left.

That was three months ago.

When I got home, I saw why Mark had lost it: The new French doors in the back bedroom ended considerably before the wall began again. It wasn�??t the workmen�??s fault either; they weren�??t the ones who�??d done the measuring. Their boss had measured. Their boss had measured, and now they were stuck at the job site with a psychotic homeowner and French doors that ended considerably before the wall started back up again. There was no denying it: The French doors were almost two inches too short. They took some photos of the problem and slunk back to their workshop in the East Bay, another perfectly good Friday afternoon shot to shit.

It�??s just like installing Windows �?�. It is. Better wipe that C: drive and start again.

Me, I�??m sulking because my cymbidium was about to flower and the flower stalk has been knocked off in the process of installing the new kitchen window. My fault, really, since it wasn�??t moved out of the way. But still I�??ll sulk. The orchid hasn�??t bloomed in the two-and-a-half years I�??ve had it and I was looking forward to the flowers. I try to focus on the two inch gap at the top of the French doors and a few other window infelicities instead; I know that this is the time�??the interregnum between the putative end of the major installation work and the writing of the final check�??to mention gaps, latches, and divots in the wooden frames.

I�??m not a very good homeowner; I just wish it was over. Although, after a week, I have grown accustomed to living in the center of all the rooms, well away from the walls.

I�??m not yet quite used to living in a fishbowl; we cannot put up new shades or curtains until they�??re finished with the work. I tell myself that there aren�??t very many vantage points from which you can actually see into the house; yet I know this to be patently false. That to all our neighbors up the hill�??including the man who looks suspiciously like Mr. Roper on Three�??s Company�??we�??re a reality show. A reality show that�??s too dull to go on into the next season, but a reality show nonetheless.

The next week the boss is out to mollify us. He seems used to all this and it occurs to me that he must go through this disgruntled customer routine all of the time. He�??s good. Very good. He even seems to be enjoying himself. He jokes. We�??re sheepish. Lists are drawn up. The sales guy, Matt, who has come out to make the rounds with the boss is defensive, but the boss is self-assured. Before it�??s over, I half expect us to admit it�??s our fault and to volunteer to do the work ourselves.
We show him that the balcony door doesn�??t open all of the way.

Matt can�??t hide his irritation, �??I remember what you said. I have it written down. You said, �??if someone can�??t fit through a 21 inch door, the balcony can�??t hold him anyway.�??�??

I tell him that I remember what I said too, and that he should think about it more carefully: that 21 inches refers to the opening, and that we were discussing whether it should be wider (and thus admit a bigger person), not narrower. That if anything, at the time I was trying to convince him of the wisdom of making the door narrower so that it would open all of the way. Now it does not open all of the way. They did not calculate the width taken up by the hinge�??s geometrical offset.

I can see Matt getting hot. He�??d like to shout at me, smack me with his clipboard.

I�??d rather the door opened all the way, but I�??m not going to get into a real lather over this. I already know they can�??t fix it without making a new window, and that they have no intention of doing that.

The boss is smooth though, and seems to know I�??ll give way on this issue. He smiles and we move on to the next window, which does have a fixable problem. Promises are made and the two men leave.

I�??m anticipating that the workmen will be back soon. But they aren�??t. We wake up early several mornings expecting a crew, but there�??s no-one at the door. I�??m getting black rings around my eyes and starting to feel progressively more sleep-deprived.

They finally show up one morning, two workmen we haven�??t seen before. Soon the senior one abandons the junior one, who is Hispanic and shy and nice, to do most of the touch up work alone. He tells him that he�??ll pick him up at the end of the day.

I watch him pounding on the new window. It is supposed to go back to the shop because one of the edges has been knocked off during the installation process. They did not mention this to us, but Mark caught the gaffe. It is the window we inspected with the boss immediately after the one that doesn�??t open all of the way; this one we have been more adamant about after giving way on the other one.

The young workman pounds and pounds. �??This will be noisy,�?? he tells me after he�??s been pounding for a while.

�??I can tell.�??

He takes a different tack and asks me what kind of motorcycle I think he should buy. He has seen all of the bikes in the garage and doesn�??t realize that the only one that is mine is the tiny Honda dirt bike, that I don�??t ride the big street bikes.

�??Have you ridden much?�?? I ask him.

�??No. Not so much. Just a dirt bike when I was a kid.�??

�??Get a small bike then, a 250 or something. It�??ll make you a better rider.�?? I�??m watching him horse the window out of the frame and hope he�??s not going to drop the thing. It makes me nervous to picture him on a motorcycle.

Installing windows is loud business. Although to-date our policy has been to be here with the workmen, I�??m guessing this young guy�??d be a lot happier if I disappeared and went off to work.

At about 3pm, Mark calls me in my office, wondering about my lack of judgment leaving the young workman alone in the house. And he�??s right. When I come back, Lumpy is locked in downstairs and is yowling pitifully at my approach. There�??s evidence that something�??s gone wrong�??a clump of wet paper towels, some weather stripping on the floor, a hunk of broken glass (which looks to be part of one of the jelly jars)�??but it�??s nothing important. And there is no narrative that I can invent out of these elements to weave together a story of what has happened, but the window the workman had been pounding on is gone, replaced by a hunk of pressed board and not much else has happened.

THE GAP is still there, looming as large as ever. But now it has tape over it.

There is a subsequent visit by two of the senior crew members. They have been sent to do something about THE GAP. Although they do something�??and it looks credible�??they don�??t have time to finish and they leave a huge sheet of flapping plastic covering the outside of the French doors.

As if to give us a consolation prize, this time they leave behind an industrial vacuum cleaner, which sits in the corner of the dining room like a watchful space alien.

At least we know they�??ll be back. Eventually.

Next Friday, Dawn says when she talks to our answering machine. Next Friday they�??ll come back and finish.

I�??m looking at the giant sheet of plastic covering the French doors in the back bedroom and the board filling in the dining room window. I�??m looking at the missing stops and weather stripping yet to be installed. There�??s a lot of work left to do. And I�??m reminded of every remodeling story I�??ve ever heard.

�??It shouldn�??t even be a whole day�??s work,�?? Dawn tells us on the phone. For some reason, we still harbor fresh credulity.

�??Next Friday,�?? we echo. �??At 7:30. We�??ll be ready.�??

I�??ll be happy when I can plug in my shredder again. When I can reclaim the 484.75 square feet at the edges of our house. When I can sleep �??til 8am.

Seeing out the windows? Honestly, that�??ll be a bonus.

Info for a friend

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 01:01:00 +0000

It all started innocently enough.

Early last week, I got a message from one Nicole B. I almost didn�??t open it�??the subject line said, �??help�??, an inauspicious tag line when the message is from a stranger. Usually when a message starts with �??help�??, it purports to be from a voluptuous 22-year-old Russian beauty who is looking for a date, a date with your credit card number. But the tone is so desperate and her intentions seem so honorable.

How could I say no?

This Nicole B. was not looking for a date; this Nicole B. was looking for what she termed info. Nicole B. was looking for info on the Web. Imagine that! My friend, you�??ve come to the right place. Info, info, info. Nothing but info. A veritable sea of info: you could drown in all that info.

This info was not for herself either. Rather it was for a friend. And not just any friend. It was for her best friend:

My best friend is doing a report on Catherine Marshall and I was hoping you could help me find info for her. She�??s really scared about this whole project for school, it�??s a huge part of our entire semester grade, and if she fails this she fails the class. It�??s very difficult to find info on Catherine Marshall. Your help is most appreciated.

Okay. I confess: I almost bit. It seemed so compelling: a scared best friend; a long-dead author of Christian romances; a big assignment; unspecified difficult-to-find info. I toyed briefly with actually becoming that Catherine Marshall, the real Catherine Marshall. She�??s been dead for 25 years; I�??m sure she wouldn�??t mind. I could even type in ALL CAPS LIKE MY AUNT FRANCES to make it seem more realistic.

It�??d be a challenge, but I just know I could pass for a 93 year-old writer of faith-based fiction.

But I couldn�??t do it; I had the distinct feeling that Nicole B. wouldn�??t buy it anyway. I don�??t know why I suspected cynicism and suspicion. Maybe it was the apostrophes in her email, correctly and casually deployed. Maybe it was the way she was interceding for her poor BFF�??she�??s really scared�??that put me on edge. Why did she write me? Nicole B. just didn�??t seem like the sort of girl who would be unable to dredge up her own info.

When I wrote back to her, I pictured an Amy Winehouse, a tough girl, perhaps with a heart of gold, but perhaps not. Perhaps she was a mean girl who would make fun of a small furry geek girl without any tattoos.

It seemed like a big, fat trap.

I wondered: does she actually think that it�??d be normal for a person with a common name to have the inside scoop on her doppelgangers? And why was her friend so fearful? Didn�??t her friend have the wherewithal to type Catherine Marshall into some search engine?

Perhaps I was wrong in assuming it was for a high school project. Maybe (just maybe) she was helping her friend with her PhD dissertation. It�??d be some post-modern feminist treatise about hegemony in the narrative interstices of the Christian romance novel and her friend, a budding Catherine Marshall scholar, was freaking out. Her therapist was on vacation. Her credit cards were maxed out. Her freezer contained nary an ice cube; the antidepressant bottle in her medicine cabinet, empty. Here she was, on the verge of being the number one Catherine Marshall scholar in the MLA, and she was just freaking out. It was then that her Amy Winehouse-like friend jumped in to the rescue, looking for more primary sources.

Probably not though. We do know that it�??s a huge part of her grade, but it doesn't sound like a graduate program. It�??s a book report, isn�??t it? That�??s the genre our Nicole B. is implying. Maybe a 9th grade reading assignment. I envision 4 pages cribbed from the Web equivalent to Cliff�??s Notes.

Wait a minute! The Web equivalent to Cliff�??s Notes�??Isn�??t the Wikipedia entry for Catherine Marshall the 4th item that Google returns? There�??s something fishy going on here. I should be wary.

But I couldn�??t resist. Once again I wrote back to Nicole B.

I played it cool: I just asked her what she�??d found so far. And signed it Catherine Marshall. I�??m not sure why I did that. I don�??t even turn around if someone yells, �??Hey, Catherine!�?? (with the exception of my mother, of course). And I never, ever sign informal email with my last name. Never.

Nicole B. wrote right back�??almost too quickly. She�??s clearly a girl who expects answers. She said:

A question: I don�??t know a lot about Catherine Marshall, but is this really her? I love Christy. I own the book and the movies. =D

Is this really her? I�??m such a big fan. The custom smiley. =D

C�??mon. She knows I�??m not really that Catherine Marshall. How could she have missed all of the bios that reported that this author of �??affirmations of faith�?? bought the farm in 1983? Not a single biography that I saw neglected to mention that she died in 1983. And there are plenty of biographies. Plenty.

Even the People-style website Who�??s Dated Who reports that she married Rev. Peter Marshall in 1936 (although it did not warn the casual reader that Rev. Peter Marshall never emceed The Hollywood Squares, which would�??ve been my first thought).

Then I clicked on the wrong link.

I don�??t know if you�??ve seen the repurposed Olan Mills photos yet�??someone must�??ve grabbed them off the Olan Mills web site, from their portfolio of past work. They're photos like the one on the left, with inventive captions like, Bobbi isn�??t the first waitress to fall for her manager, but she and Dale both got fired from Shoney�??s.

What, you must be thinking, does Olan Mills have to do with Catherine Marshall?

Here�??s what: when I followed a biography link for Catherine Marshall on the HarperCollins website, I found yet another Olan Mills photo, one I hadn�??t seen before. This one seems to have been altered with a ball point pen: the eyeballs have been intensified into smoldering black coals and a sinister mustache and soul patch have been penned in.

I don�??t think that�??s the real Catherine Marshall. I bet someone would�??ve mentioned the soul patch by now: �??Catherine Marshall: The only best-selling Christian romance writer with satanic facial hair.�??

They would�??ve said something. Certainly they wouldn�??t have kept quiet.

When I saw this, I began to wonder about Nicole B. and her BFF. Was I being had? Am I getting picked on by the mean girls again?

But mean girls and Catherine Marshall doesn�??t add up.

I�??ll write back to her one last time, I decided. One last time. A short message to dispel the notion that I might be foolish enough�??and gullible enough�??to fall for that old line about �??my best friend�??s homework�??. Honestly!

Yes, indeed, my refrigerator is running. And I have Prince Albert in a can.

There�??s nothing worse than feeling like you�??re the butt of a stranger�??s joke. I picture Amy Winehouse laughing so hard that her mascara runs. I picture Amy Winehouse laughing as hard as I did when I got the Olan Mills photo set. Ah, but that was different. Those photos are of anonymous strangers; Nicole B. knows my name.

If your friends put something over on you, you feel okay. You can be the good sport. Everyone gets to laugh at you and it�??s just fine. You feel loved. You don�??t feel that way if someone you don�??t know is laughing at you.

But here�??s what Nicole B. said at the end of her next message:

Hey, I�??m getting a book published. I�??m excited.

And then she added, almost as an afterthought:

So who exactly are you?

This response makes me even more confused. Why is she telling me about her book? Should I be jealous? Will it be published by HarperCollins? Confessions of an Internet Prankster by Nicole B. How old is she anyhow?

And, as she so succinctly puts it, who exactly am I? Exactly. She�??s seen my home page�??that�??s where she no doubt found my email address�??and she�??s unconvinced that this is exactly who I am. Whoever I am, I am not well represented by my home page.

I think about writing back to her again�??just one last message to settle the score�??and suffer what I�??m sure is a minor Woody Allen-style identity crisis: Who exactly am I? It�??s the exactness that has me worried. If I were allowed some wiggle-room, I might be able to squirm out of this, but as it is there�??s not a lot I can do. I�??ve been forced into a corner and exhorted to be precise.

What should I tell her? Who exactly am I? I�??ve got it: I�??m the type of person who�??ll follow a mystery�??no matter how dumb and improbable�??to the ends of the earth. That�??s who I am. Someone who seizes upon ambiguity and absurdity and chews and chews, a goat loose in the garden.

I write back, but make no mention of my own identity. It�??s not important. What�??s important is who she is. After all, she�??s piqued my curiosity, and once my curiosity is piqued, very little will still it. What kind of book is she publishing? What�??s the genre? Who�??s the publisher? What�??s the imprint? A million dollar advance? A round-the-world book tour? Readings in airport bookstores? Autographed first editions going for $3,000 on eBay?

Sold! Sold to the goat with the vivid imagination!

In our next exchange, Nicole B. confesses to being 16. Her message was sent at 3:51am, which does not suggest a healthy lifestyle for a 16 year old. Unless, of course, this is a time zone issue and she�??s on Eastern Standard Time. In that case, 6:51am is early, early for a budding author who should be cultivating dissolute habits. Shouldn�??t she be smoking a cigarette? Shouldn�??t she be pouring bourbon on her Wheaties? At the close of her message, she tells me that she is setting off for school: this does not sound very writerly.

I�??ve read Jim Carroll; I know what 16 year-old writers should be doing.

It is not until her next message that she reveals that she has a literary agent. Oh, right. No unagented fiction. All of the decent publishers say that. Smart move to get an agent. Smart move. And she tells me that she�??s designing the cover with the help of �??a professional IT guy�??. Oh, that�??s a good idea too. That�??ll keep the publisher from digging out that standard bodice-ripper artwork, the one with the guy who�??s a ringer for Fabio, with an open shirt and hairless chest. Who�??d want something like that on the cover of their first novel?

No-one. You�??d certainly want to design your own cover.

It�??s just so implausible that she has me hooked. I�??ve stopped seizing upon that image of Amy Winehouse. Now I�??m envisioning Joyce Maynard or Kaavya Viswanathan: a young woman posed for her debut media coverage looking dreamily out of a dormer window. Ah, soon she�??ll fall madly, deeply in love with a middle-aged reclusive literary figure whose greatest work is behind him.

Naturally I tell Mark what�??s going on as Nicole B. and I continue to exchange messages. The deeply ambiguous nature of this conversation�??one of us is clearly the dupe here�??has me wound up. It�??s like the cat chasing the beam of the laser pointer: we all know this is nothing, a bright shiny nothing, but I feel compelled to chase it. Compelled.

Mark tells me: "It�??s probably a fat old man like me, and not a 10th grade girl at all."

I try very hard to visualize a fat old man, sitting at his keyboard in a SRO bathroom-down-the-hall place in the seedy part of town and I just fail. Nicole B. is not a fat old guy sitting around in ratty underwear. She helps me along too. She bades me farewell, telling me she�??s off to frolic about in the snow.

Frolic about in the snow: Is that the locution of a fat old man? I ask you: Is it?

She�??s wowing me with details. Her novel, which takes place in 1857 is being published overseas, in Germany, being translated by her agent. But they will publish it in English eventually; they�??ve acquired the rights to do so. The cover�??she describes the cover to me�??the cover has columns and a long patio. It sounds very romantic. I embellish it with vines and creepers, a Truman Capote-esque profusion of vegetation in a humid climate.

Even if I bought the agent who doubles as a translator, I could not go for the self-selected cover. For I have never known an author who wasn�??t shocked by the publisher�??s choice of cover matter. Every writer I know has begged for a change of cover. Implored. Either it�??s got a picture of the writer (usually as a younger person, a photo the writer hates) or it�??s got appalling graphics that have nothing to do with the story or both.

Why is it that once someone starts making up the details, they have a hard time staying the course?

Once Nicole B. tells me enough, she fades away, back into the Web�??s dim recesses. She disappears just when I am beginning to enjoy the story.I wonder if I have become part of her friend�??s book report. I wonder if I am now the real Catherine Marshall.

mystery by the front gate

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 00:03:00 +0000

How long has it been here?

What I mean by it is a cash drawer, in pieces, scattered in among my neighbor�??s terraced foliage. In among the half-dead ferns, bamboo, sawgrass, and calla lilies. Plainly visible as you walk down the stairs.

Could it have been there the day I first found the two key rings right inside our gate? Each of the rings held a bounty of keys. I pictured a whole room full of filing cabinets. The first key ring I spotted had a yellow plastic kangaroo hooked to it. It made the keys seem unimportant.

A yellow plastic kangaroo. A toy.

That was perhaps a month ago. The keys were buried under the last leaves of fall, wet and clumpy behind the gate leading out to the sidewalk. I just barely noticed the first key ring when Jon and I were leaving on our walk to Twin Peaks. I found the second key ring when we came back home.

I looked for lost or missing keys on Craiglist for a couple of days right before Christmas. Looked and looked. Every day I did a search and dutifully went through the listings. People do lose their keys in some pretty unlikely places, but usually they�??re car keys or house keys, not two rings full of keys that look like they open file cabinets.

How much escapes our notice when we pass by, just inches away?

The pennies were the next thing that caught my eye. They�??ve been there for a couple of weeks. Just pennies. Fewer than ten of them, but more than five.

I feel silly picking up pennies, even though deep down I believe them to be lucky. My grandfather would always pick up coins like that. Always. He�??d press them into my palm when I was a little kid and say, �??Hang onto these. They�??re lucky.�??

We�??d spot them in the parking lot, crossing the street, in the courtyard of the apartment building where my grandparents lived in Torrance. On the courtyard's tiny putting green, marking where a golf ball had been lifted off the close-cropped grass.

I didn�??t pick up any of the pennies on my stairs, but I noticed them every time I walked by them, day after day. I hoped I wasn�??t accumulating bad luck by NOT picking them up.

�??Pennies.�?? I�??d explain if someone was with me. �??Pennies. See! Someone somewhere still uses cash. See! See!�??

I thought someone had flung the pennies out of their pocket in a kind of adolescent display of bravado. I remember boys doing that to impress girls: they�??d get change for our tab at a restaurant. Then, when we were walking out the door, they�??d fling the coins onto the hot pavement. Pennies and nickels would hit the ground with small metallic chings and go rolling away.

Not exactly a grand gesture.

But I could imagine someone walking by our front steps and doing just that�??hurling the change over the wall and onto the stairs. It wouldn�??t be that satisfying though. Any noise the coins made would�??ve been muffled by the wet leaves.

I didn�??t notice the cash drawer until today. Mark and I were walking down the stairs and I spotted a metal case in the plants.

�??People are soooo fucking rude!�?? I said to Mark, mistaking the change drawer�??s metal case for a PC chassis. �??I can�??t believe they dumped this here.�??

Who�??d have thought that computers would become such everyday commodities that people�??d chuck them out of their cars into someone�??s front yard? Who knew? Who knew I�??d end up taking them as a personal affront?

I started to flip the thing over to see whether there were any insides to it when I noticed the telltale lock. Most computers don�??t have locks. Oh, maybe sometimes they do, but not the computers that people dispose of on the sidewalks of our neighborhood.

The sidewalk in front of our house is, in fact, a dumping ground for all sorts of things that nobody wants: old stained futons (eewww), small appliances (I�??m not the only one who gets frustrated with Signature Gourmet coffee makers), hole-y socks (holy socks, Batman!), and countless other items. Items too large to stuff in the brown Sunset Scavenger toters and too useless to give away on Craigslist. People bring this shit to our sidewalk and walk away from it, possibly under cover of the night.

�??Oh. That refrigerator? Never seen it before in my life.�??

There�??s real dog shit too, but that�??s another story. I suspect the dogs actually crap there: no-one just brings dog shit to our front yard. At least if they do, it�??s still inside the dog at the time.

More investigation reveals that not only is there the shell of the cash drawer in the plants; there�??s also the telltale black tray, the one that used to be full of fresh crisp twenties, tens, fives, ones, and coins.

And pennies. Did I say pennies? Lucky pennies.

I didn�??t notice anyone running a lemonade stand on the sidewalk in front of our house: Lemonade! Free wireless! Spankings! You�??d need a cash register for that, to run a thriving sidewalk business.

The pennies are still there. They've been there for at least two weeks. The two key rings are gone from where I put them on the wall after I didn�??t find any ads for them in Craigslist. I feel vaguely clueless.

Has that cash drawer been there for a whole month?

Or has someone been running some kind of crime syndicate from our front stairs? It makes me feel weird to think that this spot�??not visible from our windows and hidden from the street�??is just the sort of shelter someone would use to disassemble the bits of cash register, to parcel out the loot from a robbery.

There aren�??t many businesses on the part of the street where we live. Just a comic book store and Bill�??s, the corner store where you can buy milk, newspapers, Anchor Steam, small frozen pizzas, and all the other ordinary things that a corner store carries, only older. Bill is actually Nabil, a large Egyptian man, very nice, very free with information, who I�??m certain would have told us if he�??d been robbed.

It's a mystery, this discarded cash drawer, a bona fide mystery.

Creepy. I walk up and down these stairs at night, in the dark. With my groceries and without my ladylike handgun.

Yet it�??s annoying and banal too. It�??s people�??once again�??throwing stuff they don�??t want into Evert�??s garden. It�??s bad enough that the recent cold spell has eviscerated all of the Gunnera and the winds have toppled his stand of Papyrus.

Are pennies still good luck if they�??re stolen?

ask me how

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:38:00 +0000

I've always thought that putting a bumper sticker on your car is a little like wearing your heart on your sleeve: it's just too revealing.

Most of the people staring at your bumper hate you anyway. They're behind you on 101 and they just want you to get the hell out of their way, even if you're right smack dab on top of the guy in front of you and they're busy juggling multiple cell phone calls. You know how that is. Better not make these aggressive Silicon Valley achievers any angrier than they are in the first place.

They're busy guys who are easily provoked. No need to goad them further.

My old friend Lennox Sweeney would have disagreed. He was a great fan of bumper stickers. It got so that I'd recognize his faded yellow Reliant from the numerous sentiments plastered all over the back: FREE TIBET. Bill and Bob make me want to Ralph! Food Not Bombs.

When he was a younger man, Len was discreet about his politics�??and his politics were of the live-and-let-live neither conservative nor liberal sort. But for the last decade of his life, he was an activist. A real activist, one who followed his slogans into battle. He was the kind of guy you'd want to take up your cause.

Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker that would've pleased Lennox. It was on a yellow Hummer parked on Castro Street in front of Cliff's Variety. A Hummer in San Francisco: It's halfway between an over-the-top fashion statement and a vehicular Fuck You. Who would want to drive a Hummer in San Francisco? Even my Honda Civic seems like a whale when I'm negotiating the double-parked obstacle course that's the Mission.

Actually there were two bumper stickers on the Hummer, one on each side of its broad yellow behind. And they weren't literally on the bumper; rather they were affixed to that hard-as-a-beetle yellow paint job. I'm sure the Hummer's owner was none too pleased to see one bumper sticker that said:

I'M CHANGING THE CLIMATE! ask me how

and another that said: I SHOULD KNOW BETTER.

Research informs me that these bumper stickers have been around for awhile (long enough so that the original web site that sold them has gone missing). Unfortunately I think they'll eventually be dated. Either the most dire of the predictions will be shown to be correct and we'll all be doing the backstroke to Greenland. And you know that if the predictions are off, another cause célèbre will take global warming's place. Sad, that. The fashion of activism.

Nobody will invite Al Gore to their parties any more.

"Al? Oh, he's such a bore. Don't invite him! Last time he brought those... what were they? Oh! Those charts. Invite someone fun. Vladdie Putin or someone like that."

One of my favorite bumper stickers was the brainchild of another old friend Jim Cser. He made them up around the time that everybody was �?�ing (heart-ing) something.

I �?� my Labradoodle. I �?� my Hummer. I �?� Bees.

You remember.

Jim's bumper sticker said: I �?� my baby seal. (That's a club for all of you who have something up with your system unicode fonts.) I still have my Jim Cser baby seal bumper sticker. The adhesive did something odd to the message so that it's all blotchy and discolored.

I have days that I'm all blotchy and discolored too.

No matter how much I once admired it, "I �?� my baby seal" seems oddly dated too. From a different time and place.

But I'M CHANGING THE CLIMATE! ask me how worked for me yesterday on Castro Street. I stood in street behind the Hummer, admiring some stranger's handiwork.

"Let's not stand here too long," Mark suggested. "Someone'll think we did it."

Don't I wish.

a paean to year's end

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 05:18:00 +0000

I�??ve thrown away 3 prospective year-end blog posts.

Three of them! That�??s enough words to fill up the phone book of a small town in the Upper Midwest. At least it would be if the people in that town had names like Celexa Campanile, Farallon Velveeta, or Tinsel Bidet. It�??s a lot of discarded words: enough words to feed a family of five. It scares me to just toss them out like so many reverse-fit jeans.

As Mark would say, �??What IS your problem?�??

I don�??t know. What IS my problem?

Why can�??t I get the sentences to stop jostling one another off the page? Surely there must be something to say about 2007, a year that at the very least left me with a scar that ruined my modeling career. In 2007, I had many new experiences: I ate raw pork; I had several chance encounters with Josh Kornbluth; and I participated in my first meme. It was the year that an inexplicably angry former manager of mine came clean about his (now her) struggle with Gender Identity Disorder. It was a landmark year in another way too: 2007 was the year that I abandoned my LA roots and did not spend Xmas vacation at the Sea Sprite Motel.

Surely there must be something punchy to say at year�??s end. It was one heck of a year, Brownie, one heck of a year.

Could my year-end writer�??s block be a symptom of Seasonal Affective Disorder? You know, Seasonal Affective Disorder. SAD. The condition that Parade Magazine popularized during the 1990s: it�??s winter; there�??s not enough light; and you feel like heaving your Signature Gourmet coffee maker off the balcony five stories down onto Castro Street.

That is, if only you could summon the energy to get out of bed.

Seasonal Affective Disorder is even less sexy than ordinary year-around depression; depression will at least get you sympathy and a prescription for something anti-depressive. Seasonal Affective Disorder is like insomnia; it�??ll just get you the obvious advice.

I�??ve noticed that anything that�??s called seasonal is uglier than its year-around counterpart and invariably in worse taste. Consider if you will: seasonal recipes, seasonal headwear, and seasonal allergies. The fact that this disorder is seasonal is a bad sign. A Seasonal Disorder probably has reindeer appliqués on it or is made with Campbell�??s Cream of Mushroom Soup.

Nobody will even get upset about it on your behalf, since it�??s destined to go away of its own accord once the so-called Season is over. There�??ll be no telethons, no call-in donations, no SAD walks.

In other words, if you put your mind to it, you could probably cure yourself by taking that clip-on LED book light that some misguided friend got you (�??oh, I know you love to read in bed!�??) and applying it directly to your forehead. Or you could drink Aqua-Velva�??a seasonal sale item at Rite-Aid�??to banish the seasonal heaviness from your heart.

You know how I know that SAD is an undesirable neurosis? If you look up SAD in Wikipedia, you�??ll learn that your fellow SAD-sufferers are singer Natalie Imbruglia and science fiction-fantasy author Barbara Hambly.

That�??s all anyone could come up with: Natalie Imbruglia and Barbara Hambly. Now, I have nothing against either one of them. No doubt they�??re fine and talented people. But they are not full-fledged celebrities. No paparazzi lurk outside their villas, waiting to snap photos of the cellulite on their upper thighs.

You aren�??t going to brag, "You know who else has Seasonal Affective Disorder? BARBARA HAMBLY. That�??s who."

If, say, Angelina Jolie turns up with SAD�??or even adopts an orphan with SAD�??then you might be able to suffer with pride. But as it is, it�??s just not a desirable condition.

I have no intention of attributing my perfectly good writer�??s block to Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Okay. If SAD isn�??t good enough, how about the long-running writers�?? strike? Many people have stopped writing in sympathy with that.

The problem is, the writers�?? strike has been going on for so long that I�??ve forgotten about the Colbert Report (just try to find any new Stephen material!). News of the strike no longer appears in my morning Crickler. There�??s no writing to remind me that the writers' strike exists.

And while I�??m entirely sympathetic with the writers who have walked out, you can�??t blame a scapegoat that you�??ve completely forgotten.

So, in the end, I�??m tempted to lay the blame on San Francisco itself.

San Francisco is desolate this time of year. The tourists who throng to San Francisco in the summer�??when the weather is arguably colder and nastier than it is right now�??don�??t come around here in the winter. Their numbers are few and they come from far afield. These are half-hearted tourists, the ones who took advantage of a special seasonal discount. These are the tourists who had to knit their own airplane seats and pack their own lunches.

Meanwhile the people who live here have all left. They�??re gone. It�??s almost like a college dorm: the inhabitants pack up and go to the place that they think of as their real home. Columbus, Ohio. Omaha, Nebraska. Decatur, Georgia.

Maybe they even all charter a plane together and go to the same place in the Midwest, the small town with the phone book I was talking about earlier. Or perhaps they skip the Midwest part of the story and go directly to Manhattan to ice skate in Central Park and stroll down Fifth Avenue, their arms laden with packages from FAO Schwarz.

For sure they don�??t stay here.

My brother and I walked up to Twin Peaks just before Christmas. We stood up there, looking out to sea: at the Farallons, at the afternoon sun glinting off the water, at the tankers passing through the Golden Gate. It was beautiful and clear. The ocean was quiet and almost blue. For once it wasn�??t windy and it most certainly wasn�??t crowded.

Some tourists, a mom, dad, and almost grown-up daughter appeared at the top of the hill where we were standing and, after conferring briefly among themselves in Chinese, asked my brother to take their picture together.

My brother motioned them to move so the San Francisco skyline would be their backdrop.

He knelt and pointed their digital camera at them. The three of them didn�??t all fit in the picture. My brother motioned to them again, this time signaling them to move closer together. They shuffled toward one another, a little awkward and stiff together like they weren�??t used to these Disneyland-style photo ops.

"Say cheese," my brother said and clicked the shot. They all said cheese and smiled. The father had bad teeth; it looked like half of one of his front teeth was missing entirely.

Then my brother walked over to them and handed them back their camera.

My brother does not let the city�??s Christmas stillness nor the cold get to him. He can muster enthusiasm for scenes like this; out of thin air, he can tell awkward strangers to "say cheese!" and mean it. And they did say cheese like they meant it. I hope the photo came out well.

A few minutes later, two gay guys, obviously a couple, one man black and the other man Asian, had him take a shot of them. He framed them with the Golden Gate Bridge as a backdrop. He was about to snap the picture when the black guy said "Wait!" and took off his sunglasses and knit cap so you'd be able to see his whole face and his eyes in the photo.

Their smiles were dazzling.

Then a larger Asian family asked him if he would mind�??he did not�??and a few minutes later a European couple on a motorcycle, looking sophisticated and tousled, had him snap them by the 50-cents per view telescopes.

The small groups of tourists materialized, had their photo taken, and left, happy. It was as if they were checking off San Francisco things to do from a Lonely Planet list.

I don�??t think very many people come to San Francisco to celebrate the holidays. San Francisco isn�??t the right place for Christmas. They come here for Halloween. They come for Pride Weekend. Perhaps they surface for the Folsom Street Fair. Out of habit, they come here in the summer. And they cruise around Chinatown, North Beach, and Fisherman�??s Wharf. They don�??t drive out to Twin Peaks, have their photo taken by a stranger, and then drive off. And most of all, they don�??t come to San Francisco for Christmas.

We tried to spot landmarks in the far distance. Jon picked out Fairfield first.

"How do you know that's Fairfield?" I asked him.

"That's just probably where Fairfield would be."

"I mean, do you see any landmarks or anything?"

"No. But see�??there�??s Emeryville, and there's Berkeley. There's the Campanile. You can just see what's what," he told me.

"I guess so." But I wasn't sure where one East Bay city left off and another one began. He was taking Fairfield on faith.

In the near distance, I could pick out 22nd Street, General Hospital, our redwood tree, and the hairpin turn where Collingwood meets 22nd.

San Francisco looked completely uninhabited.

I fished two quarters out of my pocket as if to put them in the telescope. But really, my brother is right, and I do know what's where. Who actually uses the telescopes mounted at the edge of the Twin Peaks observation area? There's Market Street. There's Rincon Tower. There's the Transamerica Pyramid. You�??d probably use the telescopes to look in peoples�?? windows. I put the quarters back in my pocket.

We walked down the hill toward a Market Street overpass we'd spotted from the top of the observation area. We�??d walked up on the north overpass and we were walking back on the south one. We saw two friendly black-and-white cats on 23rd Street on the way home.

I felt like a neutron bomb had gone off in San Francisco and these were the two cats that had been spared.

Where were all the people?

They probably went to LA, where it�??s warm. They went to LA, where by tradition Santa wears a wetsuit rather than that tacky red-and-white Santa suit. Santa not only wears a wetsuit; Santa surfs. They went to LA, where we used to go every Christmas. They probably all stay at the Sea Sprite�??�??Stay on the beach, play on the beach�??�??despite all warnings to the contrary (including my own).

Look out for that pier, Santa. Look out!

Look out for the Sea Sprite, homies. Look out! Rumor has it that they charge you for cleaning up the vomit.

In spite of myself and all of my vows to have no regrets, I think momentarily of the dolphins playing in the waves and the mild days that remind me of why I never lasted beyond February in a climate where there�??s ice and snow.

It only takes one visit in December for me to remind myself that Ocean Beach is nothing like Hermosa Beach.

If I�??d gone to LA, I�??d have something to write about.

I thought about that as Jeff (not his real name) and I watched X take the stage at Slim�??s last Saturday. Wouldn�??t you know it? They played Los Angeles. They played Johnny Hit and Run Pauline. They played We�??re Desperate (Get Used to It). Was that two encores? We were far enough away from the stage that the band looked just like they did in 1979. In Los Angeles. Except now they have 26411 friends.

This isn�??t Seasonal Affective Disorder; I�??m just blue and nostalgic for something that doesn�??t exist anymore. It happens every year.

The only thing that can dispel glumness and writers�?? blocks is time. As I write this, the local airports are crowded with people returning. Repopulating San Francisco.

Traitors. I know I�??ll regret hating the quiet the minute they�??re back.

But I also know from past years�?? experience that even the most elaborate Christmas decorations�??say, the tableau worthy of Martha Stewart on Castro Street around 14th Street�??will disappear by next week and things will be back to normal. There�??ll be a few Christmas trees shedding tinsel on the curbs, waiting for the Sunset Scavenger post-holiday pick-up.

Can I convince all the rest of you that this Christmas thing is a bad idea?

People tell me that this is a holiday for kids. Not for me. But even as a kid, it seemed like a bad idea.

Here�??s what I remember: �??You want to come over and look at our tree?�?? Cheryl would ask on a slow day between Christmas and New Year. �??I�??ll plug in the lights for you. You want to see my presents?�??

She wanted to give me the frisson of Christmas joy via proximity to her loot.

It wouldn�??t work and I didn�??t much care about the highly flammable dead trees in peoples�?? living rooms anyway. Not unless you gave me a match.

It�??s still early in January, but in a few weeks everything will be okay again.

All of the seasonal effects and affects, disorders and maladaptations, sweaters and mufflers, and decorations and fruitcakes will sublimate, not to be reconstituted until after Thanksgiving, 2008. The days will get longer. I will forget my New Year�??s resolutions (to write shorter and more frequent blog posts; to floss regularly; to exfoliate; and not to let Lumpy and Mark boss me around so much).

But now I�??ve got to go get some black-eyed peas lest I pass up an easy opportunity for good luck.

If 2008 is anything like 2007, I�??m going to need it.

office space

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 18:27:00 +0000

Up until last month, it had been a long time since I had an office of my own.

I�??d tell you that I lost my office gradually, except that doesn�??t make any sense. How can you lose an office gradually? For one thing, no matter how big that hole in your pocket is, or how careless you are about where you leave things, you aren�??t going to be able to lose a whole office.

You might lose an office key; they�??re rarely affixed to big pieces of metal like that all-important key to the service station restroom. And with any luck, your office is much nicer�??cleaner, sweeter-smelling, more hygienic�??than a service station restroom. Nothing leaks on the floor and no-one pees on your chair. I hope.

But even if you lose the key to your lovely hygienic office, you still have the space itself. You�??re just stuck admiring it from the outside.

So how do you lose an office gradually? It�??s not like an office can go flat like a tire.

But that�??s what happened at The Soft. At first I had an office across the hall from my pal Revi. We used this strategic positioning to irritate an over-earnest co-worker, one of those guys who spends entire afternoons fretting over his PowerPoint deck for the Management Review.

You know the type: the guy who shoots himself in the foot with his own technical bullets.

It was a bland interior office�??and I�??m not the sort to decorate my office as if it were a dorm room�??but Revi and Lyssa took care of that: One day, I arrived and it was rife with things that are pink. Pink flamingos. Pink crepe paper. Pink pillows. Pink wind chimes. Pink. Pink. Pink. You could even say it was festooned.

That was a rosier time. A more sanguine time.

Revi moved on and I moved to an even less desirable interior office, this time with an invisible office mate. In time, he was replaced by a more visible office mate who commuted from Arizona. Then I had two office mates. Then, through some kind of corporate mitosis, I had multiple indistinguishable German-speaking office mates who glared at me whenever I'd show up to claim my bit of desk and share of the electrical outlets.

Then we all moved�??lock, stock, and barrel, Germans, Arizonians, invisible people�??into a large storage closet.

That was when I worked for The Walrus, and it was The Walrus�??s stuff there in our shared office.

Well, calling it an office is something of an exaggeration, isn�??t it? I became just another element of the collected detritus.

It wasn�??t so bad: If I�??d wanted to throw a party, there was a punch bowl and a giant Coleman cooler.

I helped myself to the candy and the zip ties.

There was a cardboard box that represented The Walrus�??s library; he�??d gone paperless in a moment of excess, and all he had in his large office (an office with a view of an expanse of perfect green lawn and fir trees) besides furniture was a functional-looking gas mask. It was around the time of the World Trade Center attacks and the anthrax scares and you couldn�??t be too careful.

He'd thoughtfully left the his �??n�?? hers Uzis at home with the missus.

Like me, The Walrus made only occasional appearances, and then only to direct his three admins in restaurant reservations-making, lunch-ordering, breakfast expense-reporting, and generally doing the sort of things you can do using a Zagat�??s as your main source of inspiration.

I�??d sit in the storeroom, rifling through the container of extra-long zip ties and eating box after box of stale Nerds candy, listening to what was going on next door, where the Walrus�??s admin sat.

It was the perfect location for innocent eavesdropping. You didn�??t even have to be nosy: you just had to not cover your ears, and you could eavesdrop.

�??NO PRAWNS IN THAT DISH! NO PRAWNS!�?? he roared as his admin ordered an extensive buffet of Chinese dishes for lunch. �??NO PRAWNS!�??

Apparently they�??d included prawns last time. That was my guess.

She covered the phone delicately with one hand. �??How much rice should I get?�?? She asked him. By this time, the bellowing had piqued my interest; I�??d emerged from the storage closet and was peering around the corner into her office, a spectator to the lunch order. If she was ordering food for a meeting, well, I�??m not proud. I�??d scavenge the leftovers even if a few of those nasty larvet-like prawns had nestled in among the dry-fried long beans.

The Walrus was leaning over her desk. She really ought to have handed him the phone.

He looked at her as if the rice question were nonsense.

�??One order. One order of rice.�??

Oh. It was his lunch. Not for a meeting. His lunch.

I slunk back into the storeroom and sulked amid the corporate schwag, the free briefcases and XBox t-shirts, and the odd assortment of toys and fake sushi.

I didn�??t really mind sitting in the storeroom. It�??s like real estate. Location, location, location.

Or, as Amex would have it, knowing what The Walrus is having for dinner: priceless.

How often have you overheard a conversation about sorrel sauce in the corporate hallways? That's what I thought. Location.

�??Did you know he had three admins?�?? one of my colleagues asked me breathlessly after he�??d parted ways with the Soft.

�??Think about it: there�??s breakfast, lunch, AND dinner.�?? I told him.

By that time, I was completely nomadic. I�??d roam the halls looking for an empty office to set up my laptop in. My briefcase had turned into a great, hulking, lumpy ballistic nylon sack of office supplies, computer cords, and battery chargers (and the occasional snack).

I carried my own Swingline stapler.

Empty offices are very poorly equipped at The Soft. I�??d try to find one with a table and chair, but Facilities would invariably take out the phone and turn off the room's Internet connectivity. Interns would try to chase me out, convinced that once I moved in, I�??d appropriate the space for good.

�??Go away, kid. You bother me,�?? I�??d tell some perky young thing.

Because, really, poaching offices like this is humiliating. Humiliating. Carrying your own stapler: humiliating. Sitting on the floor because there�??s no furniture: humiliating.

I started working at home full time.

You know the story. Howard Hughes made us all too aware of what happens to the recluse who works from home. It�??s a short step from realizing that you haven�??t changed out of your sweatpants yet at 6pm to wearing cardboard tissue boxes on your feet and aluminum foil on your head and peeing in jars.

A short step.

You enter into a nether world. Your day-to-day schedule decays. Your wardrobe declines. Your hygiene goes to hell in a handbasket. You no longer own any hard soled shoes.

Not only that. You also run out of bookshelves.

An office isn�??t just a place to sit; it�??s a place to store stuff. Journals and books just don't look that great when you put them on home bookshelves. The same stacks of paper that make you look productive at the office make you look like a slob at home.

I�??d given up though. I�??d completely given up on the whole idea of an office. Never again would I have an office mate like Matt or be the victim of pink flamingo pranks. I�??d passed the apex of my life as an office worker. No more quad pads, no more swivel-y chairs, no more donuts, no more fancy phone with lots of buttons, no more eavesdropping. None of that.

I was becoming maudlin, nostalgic for the series of anonymous corporate settings I could call my own.

About six months ago, all this changed. My great good luck had returned me to an interior office and an incredibly nice office mate. And it was swell. I still had no phone and no storage, but it was the thought that counted. I felt revived. Revitalized. Like a human again.

Last month something even more surprising happened: I got my own office back. A real office with an Aeron chair and a window through which trees were clearly visible. An office with some bookshelves and a phone. An office with my very own black wastebasket and blue recycling bin.

Let me explain about the wastebasket. When I have an office mate, I�??m shy about what I throw in the wastebasket. For example, a banana peel is inappropriate for in-office disposal. You have to go to someone else�??s office or a break room to discreetly dispose of a banana peel. Because if it starts to smell banana-y mid-afternoon, you can�??t help but think that your office mate will start to resent you, to associate you with vaguely off-putting smells. Especially if fruit flies begin to congregate around your wastebasket because you�??ve been throwing banana peels in there.

Even things that just look icky shouldn�??t go into a shared wastebasket.

Here�??s a short list of items that you�??d have to slink into the break room to dispose of:

a banana peel

orange or grapefruit rinds

prawns

any other lunch detritus, especially if it involves salad dressing in any way

band-aids

paper towels saturated with cleaning fluid, especially if you�??ve been huffing the cleaning fluid

anything else you�??ve been huffing

roaches, either kind

used dental floss

fingernail clippings (which make me nervous anyway�??don�??t people use these for voodoo purposes?)

I think you�??ve got the idea. You can�??t dispose of personal stuff in your office if you�??ve got an office mate. You just can�??t. It�??s unseemly.

So now I have my own wastebasket again. I never thought it would happen.

I can stand at the window and watch the guys who work at the small manufacturing facility in the building behind us play basketball and huddle in the back of their building, smoking cigarettes in the cool dank air that rolls in from the bay wetlands.

I can know the exact moment when twilight turns to night.

I can stand at the window, looking out at my dirty white Honda, and eat a portion of a leftover donut that someone�??s left in the break area. And I can dispose of the remains in my very own trash can! It's not unseemly!

And I can make phone calls on my office phone.

At least in theory I can make phone calls on my office phone. If I could only get it to recognize my fingerprint again.

My new phone has a biometric login; to use the phone, you �??Swipe the finger currently used to unlock the phone downward across the fingerprint scanner.�??

No kidding. That�??s what it says.

Swipe the finger. Swipe the finger. It doesn�??t sound like it�??s your finger. Swipe a finger from someone else. The current finger. The finger of a passer-by. Swipe the current finger of a passer-by. He will howl in pain as you swipe his finger.

And unlock the phone downward. They say �??unlock the phone downward�?? because by the time you�??ve swiped a finger a few times with no success, you�??re ready to throw the phone downward toward the floor. Hard. And unlock the phone that way, with all due force.

My phone tells me that I�??m Away. That�??s because it�??s never recognized my current finger again. Obviously I�??m swiping yesterday�??s finger. Or I need to swipe yesterday�??s current finger.

Actually it�??s just as well that my phone is Locked and I�??m Away. Because the one time I had it unlocked, I did all kinds of damage. You touch it on its touch screen and it dials. Someone. Someone you�??ve called before or someone who has called you. Or someone it�??s found at random in your Outlook Address Book contacts�??a spammer in Nigeria, perhaps, or a thoughtful online pharmacy who has notified you of an impending 74% discount on V.I..A.G.,R.A. It�??s like pocket dialing, this touch screen, only more embarrassing because you see it dialing and all you can do is hang up on the person and hope they don�??t have caller ID.

Sure, it�??s less embarrassing than drunk facebooking, but certainly not as dignified as a normal misdial, where you end up talking to a stranger and simply apologizing. With this phone, you have the clear realization of just who you�??ve called accidentally.

I�??ve just taken to roaring into the phone: �??NO PRAWNS! NO PRAWNS IN THAT DISH!�??

Then the person at the other end doesn�??t worry about who you are.

The Walrus, you must realize, was my mentor.

There�??s a button with a question mark below the phone�??s touch screen. Sometime I become optimistic and press it, hoping to get some answers. Answers to anything�??perhaps answers to life�??s more pressing or elusive questions.

But you don�??t get answers. You get Windows CE Phone Edition documentation, which is just as awful as you�??d expect. Here�??s an entry: �??Forgot PIN �?? enter password to configure your new PIN.�??

Got that? You�??ve got a PIN. And it�??s different than your password. And if you forget it, you just have to remember your password.

Where�??s that darned Jakob Nielsen when you need him? Who�??d have thought you�??d need documentation to use your phone?

But I do, because I also don�??t know what the iPod-like touch wheel does. Probably if I knew how to select something from the File Menu using the iPod-like touch wheel, my phone would bake me a cake. Or empty my trash, where the fruit flies are beginning to congregate.

The real problem with the phone is that you have to take off your mittens to use it.

Oh, I forgot to say: It�??s cold in my new office. Really cold.

Offices are often cold. You have to build a small bonfire in that clearing between your desk and your whiteboard�??mind the sparks because your wastebasket will melt. And wear your parka. And your mucklucks. And you have to wear your mittens. Which makes it hard to dial your phone.

Mittens make it especially hard to swipe the current finger.

This office is colder than most. It doesn�??t have a regular thermostat, but rather it has some kind of T1 connector for you to plug in your laptop and reprogram the darned climate. Stan Lanning used to have the kind of hex wrench you needed to break into the thermostats at Xerox PARC, hex wrenches not dissimilar from the kind you use to assemble Ikea EXPEDIT bookcases. You�??d use Stan�??s hex wrench, remove the cover, set the thermostat at a comfortable temperature�??75 or so�??and get back to work.

But this thermostat is different. The Facilities guy who came out to address my office climate woes mumbled something about temperature cycles and speeding up the frequency and all kinds of mumbo-jumbo. Naturally, when he was finished, my office was no warmer. In fact, I half believe it�??s actually gotten colder.

Perhaps it�??s the icicles hanging from monitor.

I honestly can�??t complain though: I�??m perfectly happy to have an office again. And if they try to kick me out of this one, I�??ll mobilize the small army of fruit flies lingering over the wastebasket, and we�??ll barricade the door.

We can call out for Chinese food.

On my cell phone.

a delicate matter

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 00:20:00 +0000

First let me say that I don�??t shop for clothes very often.

That�??ll explain why I�??m trucking down Castro Street in 7 year-old boxy ugly slip-on shoes (shoes I almost didn�??t buy because they looked hideous even when they were brand new), 4 year-old ripped jeans, a black tee shirt of completely unknown provenance and stain types, and socks with a threat of matching holes in both big toes. The socks were once black, but now they�??re somewhere in between gray and black and brown and toe-colored. I�??m not exactly a fashion plate, right? And I�??m heading downtown on Muni to the belly of the beast�??to the Nordstrom�??s in San Francisco Centre.

I�??m intimidated already.

And it�??s not out of delicacy that I didn�??t mention how old my bra is. It�??s just too embarrassing. I think it�??s at least 8 years old. Any elastic it once had is completely shot. I�??m wearing it simply because it�??s indecorous not to wear a bra this many years after bra burning left America�??s cultural stage. Let it suffice to say that I�??m not wearing this garment for support; I�??m wearing it to show that I�??m trying.

But I�??m obviously not trying very hard.

And this is why I�??m heading to Nordstrom�??s.

My embarrassment at the state of my wardrobe is beginning to overwhelm my dislike for shopping. It�??s been difficult to reach this state of acquiescence, but I�??m there. Nordstrom�??s is not alternative, not cheap, not hip: just an old-fashioned department store where a girl like me can go buy a couple of bras without too much trauma.

Ha! I lied. I�??ve known from the outset it�??s going to be traumatic. That�??s why it�??s almost 4pm before we set off for downtown and why Mark is coming with me: he�??s supposed to keep me from fleeing into a bookstore or hiding in a bar once I get within range of Nordie�??s.

Luckily my neighbor Evert and his crew aren�??t lurking on the front porch when we set off. I�??m sure he�??d have something to say about this mission, something to say about my general unfashionability, something to say about the suburban impulse to frequent a chain department store, perhaps even something to say about how long elastic lasts even under the best of circumstances.

Muni�??s crowded. Crowded with normal people, people who might be going shopping too. Is it that I�??m agoraphobic? No. Probably not. I just don�??t like shopping. I don�??t like looking at my own sallow skin under fluorescent lights in an environment that has too many mirrors, too many spooky mannequins, and too much choice. Should I buy this or that? What difference does it make, I�??m prone to think (perhaps audibly); at this point I usually bolt without buying anything.

Nordstrom�??s is predictably jammed on a nice Saturday in October, but Mark is here to bully me into staying the course.

After some false navigational starts�??three laps around the central bank of escalators, alternating clockwise and counterclockwise, to find the list of different departments�??we make our way to the third level and to the hushed environment of ladies�?? lingerie (as opposed to men�??s lingerie�??this is San Francisco, after all). And Mark drops me off. He doesn�??t seem to want to hang out here any more than I do.

I wander between the racks for awhile, disoriented. Styles have changed since the last time I did this. In fact, I haven�??t done this for a really long time, since I reordered what I got last time from an online catalog without setting foot in a bricks-and-mortar store. That�??s right: the reason I�??m here at all is because the darned manufacturer discontinued the style I used to wear. Gone. No responsibility to those who had become dependent on its consistency. I think the darned manufacturer might�??ve gone out of business just to spite me.

So let�??s say it�??s been more like a decade since I last did this.

Pathetic, huh?

I�??m sure that�??s what Sylvia thought. Sylvia was my salesperson. A Latina with lots and lots of blue-green eyeshadow. My new BFF. She asked me my name and I knew it was all over: Once they know your name, you have a relationship with your salesperson and it�??s going to disappoint them personally if you leave the store empty handed. Sylvia. I�??m not leaving Ladies�?? Lingerie without one of those sturdy brown Nordstrom bags filled with tissue paper and product hooked over my arm.

�??This one�??s so cute!�?? Sylvia says to me while we�??re collecting the alternatives.

Cute?

After awhile, I decode cute to mean that it has some kind of trim�??a bow, or lace, or some other non-functional adornment. Or that it�??s aqua or the deepest shade of violet, not a businesslike white, black, or nude (their designation, not mine). Or that it has polka-dots, which are by definition cute.

She Wore an Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. See what I mean? Cute.

�??This one�??s a push-up.�?? Sylvia holds out a very structural looking model�??one that looks like it already has Madonna�??s breasts in it.

To me, a push up is something you do in the Marines. �??Drop and give me 50,�?? the drill sergeant barks. Push ups.

�??Here! Try this convertible.�??

Sylvia is so enthusiastic. I feel like a buzz kill. I haven�??t a clue what this bra converts into. A yurt for mice, perhaps.

I�??m dizzy. I begin to judge myself inadequate to perform this task. How can I even try some of these on? I�??m not sure where all of the pieces go.

I remember my advisor�??s wife, who was a lecturer in Linguistics, telling a joke in class that had something to do with bras. The punch line was booby hatch. She had a Polish accent and a minor neurological glitch which made her bob her head up and down as if she were in constant agreement with herself, which made the joke even stranger. I liked Bozena, so I laughed, but the utter incongruity of the joke has hung with me to this day.

Booby hatch.

I entered one of those posh fitting rooms with perhaps 8 different bras. I say �??different�??, but they all looked identical to me�??different from what I was wearing, but probably exactly representative of the current styles.

Now the trick is to orient myself in the fitting room so I can avoid looking at my nasty scar in the mirror and struggle into these 8 ridiculous looking armatures before Sylvia returns with more. And she will: she�??s already gone off to look for them.

I make an executive decision: I�??ll buy any that fit without regard to price, color, or cute-itude. Or the tricks that it can do, given the right informed lingerie consumer.

Do Mormons have to wear bras along with those garments that they buy from the special Mormon store? I could convert. As long as I could ignore the bits about caffeine and alcohol and missions and so on I'd be okay. But you�??re way, way ahead if you�??ve already got specified garments that steer you clear of Ladies�?? Lingerie at Nordstrom�??s.

Way, way ahead.

�??Cathy! Cathy!�?? Sylvia sings out as she walks along the bank of identical fitting rooms with their door closed. She�??s momentarily lost me and I consider being as quiet as a mouse until she goes away.

Aw, she�??s just trying to help. I meekly answer, �??I�??m in here,�?? and stick my hand out into the hall.
It�??s just as I feared: she�??s got more for me. I open the door a crack further and admit 2 more examples of neo-retro-postmodern undergarments. Was it the Wonderbra that caused this gradual paradigm shift? It�??s almost as remarkable as that shift away from the rocket-bras of the 50s, the ones that evoke memories of Sputnik and Khruschev.

Not that Khruschev wore a bra. I think that was just J. Edgar Hoover.

I don�??t want to ponder the semiotics of lingerie though. I just want to stop trying on these fiendish things�??buy a couple, bade Sylvia a nice evening, and ride Muni back to the Castro, where men aren�??t men and women aren�??t women and I don�??t feel like I�??ve tunneled through a worm hole to the Stanford Shopping Center.

The thing about bras is you can�??t just return them to their hangers. They don�??t look the same when you try. How were they even on there in the first place? I�??ve now got 10 of these that I�??ve tried on and have sloppily reunited with their original hangers. They�??re hanging by their straps like commuters in the bus, ready to let go at the slightest jolt. I�??ve made an enormous mess.

It�??s a good thing that I�??ve found a couple I�??m willing to buy, because otherwise I�??d feel too guilty about the amount of work I�??ve made for Sylvia. It�??s not like folding blue jeans, where it�??s obvious how to restore them to rack condition. The clerks probably have to attend special classes or a summer training camp to learn how to put a bra on a hanger.

I�??m in a daze by the time I�??ve proffered my credit card and start scouting for Mark. My guess is that he�??s by the elevators, slowly becoming surly, but I don�??t know where they�??ve hidden the elevators to prevent people like me from escaping.

He calls my cell phone and reels me in. By the time I find him, my spirits are almost restored.

�??I dreamed I was way out in front in my Maidenform bra.�?? That�??s what I say to Mark and I ask him if he�??as a tit-man�??remembers those ads.

�??No.�?? He looks at me like I�??ve made that one up.

�??I didn�??t make it up. Really. There used to be ads like that. The woman would be running a foot race in her underwear. And winning. Because she was way out in front.�?? I tell him this, but I don�??t remember whether the woman was actually just wearing underwear or whether she was wearing some other kind of athletic apparel on the bottom. Shorts, perhaps. I do remember the gist of the ads though. Would an ad like that�??so sly, yet so innocent and silly�??even make it to the pages of People today? I somehow doubt it.

I ask Mark if he minds me calling him a tit-man.

After giving the matter some consideration, he tells me that he doesn�??t mind. �??Cleavage shouldn�??t be passed up. It�??s there for a reason,�?? he tells me.

Better a tit-man than a tit-mouse I guess.

We pass Evert and a member of his posse on the way up the stairs to the front door.

We will not escape the snarky comments; I can see that. Evert is ready to pounce once he spots the Nordstrom bag that Mark is now carrying. And indeed he assumes Mark is sprucing up his look; after all, he has gone out into the wider world wearing fake Teva sandals with socks (dark socks, yet).

�??How come you�??re carrying the Nordstrom bag and she�??s carrying the food?�?? He�??s referring to the Chinese take out bag I�??ve got in tow.

I am tempted to try the Maidenform line on him, except that after my conversation with Mark, I�??m left with the vague feeling that I saw the �??way out in front�?? ad in Mad magazine, not in a real bra ad. And I�??m still shell-shocked by the shopping experience.

So much easier to shop for small appliances. Or donuts.

I'm sure that if I finally get to sleep, I'll have nightmares.

midnight rambler

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 05:34:00 +0000

Most nights�??very late�??I invent an errand for myself.

A short list of items must be procured before tomorrow morning, lest I wake and there�??s no cinnamon for Mark�??s toast, or no milk for my coffee. Or the dental floss shreds way too easily and must be replaced before I can begin my nightly flirtation with insomnia. Or Lumpy has deemed every remaining can of Fancy Feast inedible and I have to go looking for a new brand, one he�??s never rejected before. One with sauce rich in kitty MSG to tickle his jaded taste buds.

At the bottom of the steep hill behind our house is a 24 hour grocery store, an IGA, small and overpriced, but friendly. At that time of night, it's frequented by bears in plaid shirts and big boots looking for pancake ingredients for tomorrow�??s big breakfast and well-muscled boys after a steak and salad greens for a midnight dinner.

Alternatively I can go to the 24-hour Walgreens. The Sudafed and Wal-tussin DM have been locked away to discourage any late-night urges to cook up a fresh batch of methamphetamine or to go robo-tripping 'til dawn, but no-one cares if I contemplate an intimidating selection of dental hygiene products.

Will it be floss or tape? Teflon or waxed? Flavored or unflavored? Mint or cinnamon? The combinatorics of the selection are overwhelming. The thing is, I could stand there for hours researching just the right kind of floss to evict the small bits of Walgreen�??s-brand chocolate covered raisin from between my molars.

Fabricated desires for Fancy Feast and floss aside, what I really like is the walk.

Abstractly I like the idea that there are two 24-hour stores so close by. Need a replacement Signature Gourmet Coffee Maker at 2am? Fine. It�??s there. Need a small jar of Gerber ham baby food for a certain fussy gray cat? It�??s there too. Need a sappy greeting card to assuage some fit of conscience that strikes at 4am. No problem-o. Sure, you could wait for Does Your Mother Know to open at 8am to get that belated birthday card�??the one that�??s already 3 months overdue�??but sometimes you just can�??t sleep until you�??ve struck some items from your to-do list.

Urgency is good. I like to think that some things just can�??t wait �??til morning.

There are plenty of bars down there that are open too, the fellows spilling out the doors onto the street. Pulsing techno, strobing lights, and an emcee naming the finalists in the Mr. San Francisco Leather contest. They make the street seem festive and my minor errand a glimpse into a carnival.

San Francisco is at its best late at night. Really, it is. It can seem unbearably cold and windy in the late afternoon, but by nighttime the wind has died down and it is invariably warmer than you�??d expect. Some nights it�??s even balmy. There�??s enough activity that it never seems sinister like the �??burbs, either�??no gangs of heat-seeking adolescents are cruising around looking for something to trash or steal or some lone pedestrian to pelt with eggs.

Missed me! You missed me!

My memories of the �??burbs are sufficiently vivid to make my late night peregrinations even sweeter.

Regardless of the destination, the walk from our house is steep: in places, sidewalks devolve into stairs and front yards into terraces. It�??s not a sidewalk edged by lawns, but rather by ghostly perfect gardens, luminous in the dark. The gardens are small enough to afford absolute heterogeneity. One dahlia, one asparagus fern, one clump of Italian parsley.

Sometimes I shine my little blue LED cigarette lighter (a freebie from Sam�??s Smoke Shop in the Lower Haight) and admire my neighbor�??s miniature rectangle of plants. He�??s mixed fruits and vegetables with the flowers and evergreen tree. One bright red strawberry peeks out from under some leaves. An onion has flowered in a spherical explosion of white. Lacy frills of parsley frame purple wallflowers.

I used to glance into parked cars as I walked down the hill. I don�??t know why�??just to see what kinds of stuff people leave in their cars, I suppose, what CDs they listen to while they make their long commutes and what sorts of sunglasses they wear. I learned my lesson though. Oops. I forgot. People have SEX in parked cars on quiet streets late at night.

That Jetta might be the proving ground for an uncertain courtship or a venue for the successful Craigslist tryst. You�??d think �??Need that ass spanked?�?? or �??Bottom Daddy Seeks Top Son�?? would want more privacy.

But they don�??t.

I stopped glancing in car windows.

Instead I check out the gnomic graffiti that always reappears on a certain street sign with a double-headed arrow. It almost looks like it says SAME. Behind it, the Bay Bridge winks in the distance. In the daytime, none of this is particularly beautiful or mysterious. At night, it is both.

There are other people out and about too. Some are taking their pooches out for a last late-night stroll, plastic poop bags tucked in the doggie�??s collar. Others are walking fast, with a sense of purpose�??home from a late day at the office or an early night at the bars. Small groups and couples make their ways to parties, giddy with relief that they�??ve been able to park within walking distance to their destination.

One time, in the place where the street is so steep that the sidewalk becomes one long flight of stairs, it looked like a woman jogger was going to run right into me. That�??s an optical illusion. The stairs are narrow and bushes overgrow portions of them; people always look to be heading straight for you. She was humping it�??running fast up the stairs. She�??d left her sweatshirt by the stop sign at the corner as if she were planning to take a few laps up the stairs on one side of the street and down on the other.

I felt momentarily guilty I�??d let my Gold�??s membership lapse.

I also felt obliged to say something clever, something that�??d put me on level ground with this athletic creature so obviously attuned to her own health.

Why? Why does the sight of someone really exerting him or herself make you feel like you�??ve just got to say something? And why do you think the thing you say has to be so witty? It�??s like seeing some guy washing his car: you�??ve just got to say, �??Nice job. I have one you can do when you�??re finished with that one.�?? Who doesn�??t say that?

We approach each other. Me at a clip that you could only describe as an amble, her in full sprint.

I stepped off the steps, over the curb, and into the street, smiled at her, and said something I�??m pretty sure was extremely funny and winning.

She said nothing. Didn�??t even look at me. And kept thudding up the steps.

I was sure she saw me. There�??s a streetlight there to keep you from breaking your neck on the steps.

�??Snob,�?? I muttered and decided that nothing changed after high school: the jocks are still the jocks and they don�??t like smartasses like me.

It wasn�??t until she�??d finished the uphill portion of her lap and started downhill that I realized she must�??ve been wearing an iPod. Oh yeah. She didn�??t hear me say a thing.

Once I followed a much slower jogger up this same hill. She was wearing her iPod. I was in a car. She never heard me. I drove behind her at 3 miles an hour. She didn�??t turn around. And I didn�??t have the heart to use the horn.

Halloween decorations have been proceeding apace in the neighborhood. Needless to say, one house led the charge, the house that has the Xmas lights at Xmas, the heart lights on St. Valentine�??s Day, the shamrock lights on St. Patrick�??s day, the bunny lights at Easter, the firecracker lights on the 4th of July�??oh, wait! Am I forgetting anything? Did these guys have groundhog lights or solstice lights or MLK lights or Lincoln lights?

Each time I think there�??s a holiday they haven�??t got covered, they prove me wrong: Around the 20th of February, an LED cherry tree appears with an animatronic Geo. Washington chopping it down, for example.

I mean, it wouldn�??t surprise me at all if they celebrated Elvis�??s Death Day with twinkling TCB lights.

This time, at first I thought these were generic autumn lights. All I saw was an aluminum Xmas tree that�??d been duded-up to look various shades of red, orange, and yellow. I know that evergreens aren�??t deciduous and that aluminum trees seldom drop their leaves (needles, okay?), but these guys are really trying and I thought I should give them the benefit of the doubt.

But it turned out that the very next day, a rhythmically grinning jack-o-lantern went up, along with bats who flapped their wings. I don�??t think Ted Koppel was part of it; that must�??ve just been what they were watching on TV.

In any case, it�??s one of the highlights of my walk. Sometimes I think I�??d like to hang out and see who lives there, but I know I�??d be disappointed.

The tennis courts and playground are empty when I walk by except some furtive movements in the dark. I don�??t know if this playground is a good venue for gay cruising�??I sometimes think it must be�??but on this night I�??m more convinced that the crashing around that I�??m hearing is someone who has had more than enough to drink and is looking for a discreet spot to empty his bladder.

You go, girl!

But mind the pedestrians�?? shoes, okay?

The AA meeting is on break when I walk by the community center. Recovering alcoholics are standing on the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes and talking trash about the people who didn�??t make the meeting. The guys who thought it�??d be more fun to see what was up at Daddy�??s than it would be to collect their 30-day chips and eat lard-and-cardboard birthday cake from the IGA. Who wouldn�??t talk trash about them?

I approach the IGA through the underground parking. I figure it makes me look like I drove to the store in my, uh, Range Rover (the only car in the tiny parking lot at this time of night). Somehow it doesn�??t seem as embarrassing to drive to the store on a made-up errand as it does to walk, even if it�??s a horrible waste of fossil fuel. It seems desperate�??peculiar even�??to use a small overpriced grocery store as a destination for a walk.

Inside the IGA, the guard who is watching himself on the overhead video camera doesn�??t break his concentration to check me out when I emerge from the underground parking lot. He doesn�??t care about me. I don�??t look like I�??ve got a gun. I don�??t even look like I�??m gonna try to cut into the express line with 11 items or bust open that package of Three Musketeers Minis before I�??ve paid for them.

I whip out my alphabetized shopping list.
cat food?
cinnamon
toothbrush

It�??s the same shopping list I�??ve had in my pocket for almost a week; I�??ve shopped with it 3 times already.

The thing is, I always need a toothbrush; it�??s a safe bet to just leave it on the list.

Toothbrushes are so cool these days anyway, like running shoes with all the nubbly rubber and swoosh stripes and magenta and turquoise bits. But they don�??t last more than one or two uses: I mush the bristles almost immediately. No kidding. I don�??t know if it�??s the way I brush my teeth or what, but in no time at all, the bristles are splayed and flattened. It looks like I�??ve been cleaning the shower grout with my toothbrush.

In fact, it looks so much like I�??ve been cleaning the grout with my toothbrush that I try not to consider the option that someone else has been using my toothbrush to clean the grout.

Note to self: check visitors�?? expressions when they return from b. room. If they look guilty and/or smug, confront them. Directly. Don�??t pussyfoot. Toothbrush. Grout. Be direct.

What I wonder is, what with all this toothbrush buying and nightly shopping trips, what do the checkers at the IGA think of me? They seem like nice people. Cheery even. But I can tell that they�??re not fooled; they know I didn�??t drive and probably need neither the cinnamon nor the toothbrush nor the single can of Friskies Shredded Turkey and Cheese. But they�??re friendly all the same.

What I decide is that when you�??re a checkout clerk at a local grocery store�??a store that�??s so small and narrow-aisled that no-one uses a shopping cart there and every order is 10 items or less�??in a neighborhood that�??s almost a caricature of itself, you�??re probably pretty accepting.

After all, this isn�??t Safeway; people who frequent this store frequent it, um, frequently and in varying states of consciousness and dress. Still in restraints from the Folsom Street Fair? IGA welcomes you. On your way to a costume party all dressed up like Dorothy or an enema nurse? IGA welcomes you.

Look. All this talk has made my teeth feel furry.

I think I�??ll go on down to the IGA.

And is that a slight catarrh? My throat constricts.

I�??ll stop at Walgreen�??s for some Wal-Tussin along the way.

jury duty

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 22:25:00 +0000

How many of life�??s adventures start with a letter anymore?

By a letter, I mean an honest-to-god letter in an envelope sent via US Mail, legitimized with a postage stamp. And by life�??s adventures, I mean anything that doesn�??t involve me sitting in front of a computer.

Before I raise your expectations too high, I�??ll tell you what happened: I got a jury summons. Another jury summons.

When I tell most people about the summons, they�??re full of advice on how to get out of jury service or they�??re quick to tell me how they themselves would never be selected to serve on a jury.

�??All I�??ve gotta do is tell them what I do,�?? they tell me. �??They let me off right away.�??

They might even elaborate: �??Oh, I mean, they don�??t pick anyone smart, anyone with an education.�?? And a smug expression crosses their face. �??They always excuse me. I�??ve never served on a jury. Usually I just have to call in.�??

I instantly feel like a loser. I�??ve gone down to the courthouse. I�??ve served on a jury. I�??ve been someone�??s peer.

In fact, I�??ve been picked for a jury even after filling out a long form that leaves little of my background to the imagination. I didn�??t have to misrepresent myself, perjure myself, or conceal anything important. The picky lawyers for both sides thought I�??d be just fine.

It was an asbestos case, one of the kind that you read about in The Wall Street Journal. One that wastes huge amounts of time and public money. A civil suit where the jury is sent into a room to deliberate about the applicability of legal concepts like negligence, pain and suffering, and punitive damages.

Here�??s the story from my last jury service. The fellow who brought the suit in this asbestos case was 92 years old. At 90, after a lifetime of exposure to asbestos and asbestos-containing products, he contracted lung disease. Asbestosis. Not mesothelioma, the instant-death lung disease, but another kind of lung cancer that you can only get from contact with asbestos.

There was no doubt that the ambulance chasing law firm that�??d latched on to this guy had found a real one. No doubt. They had chased the right ambulance.

It was just a matter of narrowing down who to blame and how much it�??d cost.

By the time the case had gotten to court, the civil suit had been winnowed down to just four defendants. I�??m guessing the other 6 or so had already settled.

I mean, over a lifetime this guy had done everything you practically can with asbestos. He�??d worked in an asbestos mine in the 1930s; in a Navy shipyard (hotbeds of asbestos) during WWII; as a welder (covering himself with asbestos blankets) for 30 years after that.

For godssake: he�??d even built his own backyard pit barbeque out of cement and raw asbestos, following a recipe he�??d found in the April 1960 issue of Popular Mechanics. The wind, you see, had stirred up a lot of asbestos dust while he�??d been putting the cement/asbestos mixture into the wooden forms in his backyard and that dust had dived straight into his lungs. Ten years later, in the 1970s, after he�??d retired from his day job as a welder, he repaired the sheetrock in his home with asbestos-containing joint compound.

In the first 90 years of his life, this nice man had done everything short of wearing asbestos pajamas, brushing his teeth with asbestos toothpaste, and giving his kids stuffed animals woven out of asbestos to play with. I don�??t know�??maybe he did those things too. I tried to pay close attention, but almost a century�??s worth of asbestos exposure is a lot to track.

After his lengthy fireproof biography had drawn to a close, and the attorneys for the plaintiff wanted to illustrate what their client had lost, his legal team requested that the old man take the stand and pull out his harmonica.

No�??really. They did this. And he complied. The fellow pulled out a harmonica, a real blues harp.

And began to play.

Was that Sweet Georgia Brown?

I don�??t remember exactly. But it was a recognizable tune and he could hold it pretty well. I began to wonder: Was his playing supposed to sound anemic? Wheezy? Was it supposed to bring tears to the jurors�?? eyes?

It was competent harmonica playing by my amateur assessment. Maybe not as loud as it might be, but who plays a harmonica really loud in a courtroom? A courtroom is a dignified place, not a place where you bring that blues harp to your mouth and WAIL, COOL DADDY, WAIL. BLOW THAT HOHNER.

No. The California Superior Court is not a nightclub.

But even Tangled Up in Blue wouldn�??t have gotten the point across.

The harmonica might�??ve been a mistake on his lead attorney�??s part, a young associate from a big Marin law firm, a tall, confident, blond woman in Ann Taylor lawyer-wear.

Her law firm specialized in the chasing of slow-moving ambulances�??the kind of firm that goes looking for victims of mesothelioma, silicosis, Agent Orange, toxic mold, and oxycontin�??litigating the sad cause of the day with gusto. With a human touch, of course.

I liked the blond associate. She was trying hard for her client. She had charts and photos to teach us about the perils of asbestos. Expert witnesses were called, examined, and counter-examined. Local standards of industrial hygiene over the last seventy years were explained and analyzed. Back issues of Chest, the Journal of the American College of Chest Physicians were cited. The jury was thoroughly instructed in the facts of the case.

Nothing was left to chance.

Each morning of the month long trial, the attorneys for both sides chipped in and brought the jurors fresh fruit and warm bagels with cream cheese. Coffee and orange juice were served then and at the breaks too. It was very close to pleasant. I�??d walk to the Muni early in the morning, the San Francisco streets fresh and scrubbed clean. The homeless folks who sat in doorways were still sober at that time of day and never spit epithets (or anything else) at you. Other people on the street were purposeful; the tourists were still snug abed. When I'd arrive at the courthouse, the jury waiting room would be set up for breakfast. And my fellow jurors were an interesting crew from all over the city�??nothing wrong with chatting with them over our tasty breakfast.

I�??m embarrassed to admit: I enjoyed the experience. I enjoyed jury duty. I enjoyed the thing you�??re supposed to do everything in your power to avoid.

I even learned something about asbestos and lung disease.

During the jury selection process, one prospective juror, a South Sea Islander by birth, told the lawyer questioning him, �??In my country, if someone has an accident and hurts his countryman, he says �??I�??m sorry�?? and everyone moves on.�?? I think he was telling the truth: he seemed genuinely mystified by what was going on in the courtroom.

Of course he was excused with no further questions.

The rest of us must�??ve seemed like the type who could be readily moved by an old guy�??s strained harmonica playing. We understood the virtues of litigation and social responsibility.

The funny thing was that 25 days or so into the trial, one of the attorneys for the fourth and final defendant revealed that his client, a hardware store in the East Bay, wasn�??t even in business at the time the plaintiff claimed to be repairing his walls and using the asbestos-rich joint compound from the defendant�??s store.

We�??d been waiting for the other shoe to drop and there it was. That was the last remaining defendant and there was no way he was responsible. Two other defendants had settled and we�??d heard all there was to tell about the third.

It was like that moment in Columbo before the final commercial break where everything falls into place. Peter Falk turns and walks away with his raincoat flapping. Done and done.

The jury�??s deliberations were not hasty. We turned over every last piece of evidence and every judicial instruction and reached a consensus: the remaining defendant was not guilty. There was no reasonable way in 1960 for the Mom and Pop lumberyard that sold the plaintiff the raw asbestos for his backyard BBQ project to be aware of recent developments in industrial hygiene. They were not negligent.

Heck, they�??d been out of business for the last 25 years or so.

It�??s a little anticlimactic when a month-long trial peters out like that. But it was also satisfying, like a good paperback detective novel. The jury was in unanimous agreement. We felt sorry for the old guy and his diminished harmonica-playing capacity, but the defendants weren�??t guilty and the old guy�??s adorable ten-year-old granddaughter (who had been shuttled into the courtroom a previous day for our surreptitious inspection) wasn�??t going to get an amazing windfall.

The only other time I�??d almost served on a jury, I confess that I was disappointed not to have been selected.

It was a criminal trial. The young woman, a Stanford freshman, had been charged with shoplifting at a department store in the big snooty Stanford Shopping Center. Her lawyer, who coincidentally was also her father, was prepared to mount an eating disorder defense on her behalf. His daughter, his client, was bulimic and this somehow caused her to compulsively stuff cosmetics from Bloomingdale�??s into her purse.

Perhaps it was analogous to binge-eating.

Her psychiatrist was at the ready; he would offer supporting testimony.

I could hardly wait.

For one thing, the young woman entered the courtroom carrying the biggest, most capacious handbag you�??ve ever seen. It was ENORMOUS. Winona Ryder herself could�??ve fit in the handbag, in fact. Or at least Nicole Richie would�??ve fit. It was the biggest handbag I�??ve ever seen. Nice too: faux alligator, I think.

�??Pick me! Pick me!�?? I wanted to raise my hand and volunteer, the over-eager third grader with the right answer to the math problem. �??Pick me! Me! Me!�??

They didn�??t pick me.

I prepared myself to stick around and watch the trial anyway. As it turned out as, they settled. The bulimic girl copped a plea. I don�??t remember the details of the outcome, but I�??ll venture to say that the entire jury was disappointed.

So now I have a jury summons and a juror badge number and I�??m hot to trot.

I�??m excited. I hope I get to serve on a jury involving fast food, Tony the Tiger, Michael Jackson, or Phil Spector this time.

Dominick Dunne, eat your heart out!

new resistant strain of insomnia

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 19:28:00 +0000

�??I�??m depressed,�?? Mark says, and then he drops off to sleep.

�??I�??m angry,�?? Mark says, and then he drops off to sleep.

�??I�??m bored,�?? Mark says, and then he drops off to sleep.

�??I�??m nauseous,�?? Mark says, and then he drops off to sleep.

�??I drank too much coffee,�?? Mark says, and then he drops off to sleep.

�??I�??m not tired,�?? Mark says, and then he drops off to sleep.

Soon he is snoring, blissful. It doesn�??t matter what unpleasant place he starts from: in the end, he�??s fast asleep.

I�??m an insomniac. I always have been. I�??ve hardly ever experienced this casual dropping off to sleep that others report, that Mark demonstrates every night. I am jealous of people who drift off to sleep in an instant, who don�??t even bother reading a book in bed because they�??d just fall asleep and drool on the open pages.

The only time I readily drop off to sleep is when I�??m sitting at my desk at work, in full view of my co-workers, willing myself with all my might to stay awake and focus. I slump forward in my chair, my eyes roll back in my head, and I�??m unconscious, my mouth hanging just a little bit open, my forehead conveniently replying to some spam that�??s sitting in my Inbox. Even when I�??m asleep at my desk, I don�??t stay asleep. No, I�??m just asleep long enough to be observed by passersby. I awaken when I accidentally control-A, select everything, and forehead-type over the last two hours�?? worth of work.

^Z^Z. It�??s no good; that text is gone and it�??s never coming back. Even 5 minutes of crummy, poor-quality sleep has dire consequences.

The only time I stay asleep�??really asleep�??is when I have something to do in early in the morning. If I need to be awake at 6:30, it�??s as if I took a powerful soporific at 6; I invariably sleep �??til 10 and wake up groggy and disoriented.

If you confess all this to someone who�??s not an insomniac, they will tell you solemnly, �??Oh, you shouldn�??t drink anything with caffeine in it after lunch. You should always go to sleep at the same time.�?? And then they ask, �??Have you ever tried melatonin?�??

Melatonin? No caffeine after lunch? Give me a break!

Fellow insomniacs would never say anything like that. They know that even Ambien doesn�??t always work�??that half the time, you won�??t even fall asleep, let alone do any of that famous sleep-eating or sleep-driving that so scandalized non-insomniacs.

Most real insomniacs have special double-secret one-two punch formulas and sacred rituals for inducing sleep. Pills and potions and herbal teas and fitted earplugs and special egg-crate foam mattress pads. But, they warn you, don�??t take those pills and potions for more than two days in a row�??the whole intricately constructed nostrum will stop working.

In fact, it won�??t just stop working for you: it�??ll stop working for EVERYONE. It�??s like antibiotics�??a benzo-resistant strain of insomnia will develop. So don�??t tempt fate. Don�??t screw it up for the rest of us. We�??ll all never get back to sleep.

My own theory is that when all else fails, small, immediate changes will help. So I�??m migratory at night. I�??ll move from one horizontal surface to another. From the bed to the couch. From the couch to the guest room futon. From the guest room futon to the kitchen floor. I�??ll swap pillows. I�??ll switch blankets.

It�??s like going on a camping trip in your own house: you�??ve bushwhacked from the living room to the back bedroom. You set up camp. You find level terrain. You clear off small obstructions: pebbles, toasters, cats, government cheese. It�??s very important that the ground is perfectly smooth where you put down your Therm-a-Rest pad and sleeping bag.

Then you gather twigs and small branches and build a signal fire.

Wait. No. You may as well stop short of building a fire. You do not want to build a signal fire in the back bedroom. That�??s the kind of bad judgment a lack of sleep will foster.

Instead of building a fire, you should turn on the bedside light (that ugly reminder of sleeplessness) and pull out something to read. A book. A monograph. A magazine. A journal article. It�??s best not to torture yourself with something dull under the misapprehension that if you�??re reading something dull, you�??ll just go to sleep.

Because you�??d be wrong! So wrong!

You�??ll be bored, and instead of reading, you�??ll start worrying about something stupid.

Worry can actually be constructive, but the worry that comes with insomnia is not the kind of worry that MacArthur genius grant winners indulge in.

Here are five things that I don�??t worry about while I�??m lying awake at 3 am:

1. The US-led invasion of Iraq
2. What my carbon footprint looks like
3. The three degree cosmic background radiation
4. The existence of God
5. The plot for a best-selling novel

If you work out how many hours you could apply to this stuff, you can see that you might get somewhere. Let�??s say you�??re like me and you lie awake with your eyes pinned wide open like Malcolm MacDowell�??s character in A Clockwork Orange. And you do that for about 2 hours most nights. That�??s 730 hours per year. 18 and a quarter really diligent work-weeks. About 4 months.

You can do a lot in 4 months.

But I�??m not laying awake thinking about my carbon footprint and how to reduce it. No. I�??m more apt to light on one of these topics:

1. Whether I should force myself to look at the ugly vertical gash down my midsection
2. Whether the 80-foot tall redwood tree planted in a precarious place in back of our house is going to topple in the wind and squash my bed with me in it. Or worse yet, squash Evert who will sue us.
3. Whether it�??d be totally uncool to tell Evert�??s friends that they�??re disturbing me when they work on noisy projects and come and go at 3AM.
4. Suspicious moles, scaly patches, and other frightening skin anomalies
5. Why I don�??t just stash my money under the mattress instead of losing it on bad investments.

Notice that I can�??t really do anything about any of these things at 3AM. I can speculate about the nature of Evert�??s friends�?? projects, which involve whirring, grinding, pounding, coughing, and driving the jeep in and out of the driveway repeatedly. These are not the noises of kinky sex, hard partying, or fellow insomniacs; these are sounds I associate with miniature construction projects: building a teeny tiny replica of the Sears Tower out of authentic materials or assembling a warehouse-worth of IKEA furniture.

But notice: I�??m not actually worrying about what they�??re building next door. Instead, I�??m worrying about whether it�??d be way too uncool to get dressed and knock on the door and say, �??Hey, could you guys keep it down some? The sawdust and metal filings are clogging my lungs and the noise is making it hard for me to get to sleep.�?? That would label me as some kind of hopeless square. Someone who doesn�??t understand the nature of inspiration and the artistic temperament.

The thing is, I can picture what they�??d say about me as I turned to go back into to my own house to get back to what is now noise-free tossing and turning. I can picture it all too clearly. There�??d be some reference made to where I work and to the way I dress. And maybe to my age and gender. Aw. It wouldn�??t be nice. This makes me worry even more.

And so I merely fret about how hypothetically uncool it would be to go over there. What I actually do is this: I smoosh the pillow over my ears to block out the noise.

It�??s things like suspicious moles and nocturnal construction projects that make unsupervised 3AM thought ill-advised. So at 3AM I never read anything remotely oriented toward self-improvement, my research, or the life of the mind. I read strictly to be entertained, to have my thoughts steered toward the placid waters of popular culture and mid-list fiction.

By last night I�??d already used up this week�??s New Yorker (one of those accursed double issues that don�??t really contain twice as much to read), so I started in on my copy of Details. Details is an odd magazine. It�??s like a certain genre of gay porn, except that the young men are wearing clothes. The poses, the sullen expressions, the beautiful androgynous faces, the adolescent thinness�??it�??s gay porn with clothes on. The articles are too short, but Augusten Burroughs and George Saunders and other well-known writers put in a story now and then. It�??s glossy and it smells good. I find it very comforting. And�??best of all�??it never talks about women�??s diseases. Nothing in these pages to worry about.

This month�??s Details is disappointing though. Augusten Burroughs is talking about�??of all things�??testosterone. There are the usual pieces about skin care, avoiding unflattering jeans, and growing into Fatherhood. It�??s as if the writers are all on vacation and are phoning it in. Maybe these stories are computer generated. Certainly the computer could�??ve acted more enthusiastic. I flip through 350 pages of Dolce and Gabbana ads, introductions of this year�??s hot starlet and macho man-hero, and slick fashion photography in no time and, taking one last whiff of its scented pages, give up and chuck it on the nightstand. This rag isn�??t going to lull me to sleep.

Next.

I reach for 153 hardcopy pages of Volume 1 of a JD Salinger collection I printed out at work, 21 stories that JD Salinger apparently didn�??t want anthologized and pulled from bookstore shelves after a short underground print run. These stories had been published before in places like Collier�??s, Esquire, and the Saturday Evening Post. Perfectly respectable venues for an emerging writer.

Jaina had turned up a bound copy�??that�??s how I knew this thing existed. I was able to find it on a server in an Eastern bloc country. I�??d been looking forward to reading this illicit printing. I�??d even planned to read it through my insomniac haze; I planted the manuscript beside step three of my nightly migration (the guest futon in the back bedroom).

Phonys. Manhattan apartments with doormen. The Lunts. Prep schools and reversibles.

This is gonna be good. Since so little Salinger remains in print, the last time I�??d read any Salinger I hadn�??t read before is when I was in high school.

I�??ll cut to the chase: I was disappointed. So disappointed. I even found a short story called �??I�??m Crazy�?? that was the basis for the first couple of chapters of Catcher in the Rye. Whatever had happened between 1945, when this thing was published in Collier�??s, and 1951, when Catcher in the Rye hit the stands, was important. It�??s funny how just a few words and a few stray plot elements can make such a huge deal.

Phonys.

Okay. Here�??s what Salinger wrote in 1945, the first two sentences of his short story:

�??It was about eight o�??clock at night, and dark, and raining, and freezing, and the wind was noisy the way it is in spooky movies on the night the old slob with the will gets murdered. I stood by the cannon on the top of Thomsen Hill, freezing to death, watching the big south windows of the gym�??shining big and bright and dumb, like the window of a gymnasium and nothing else (but maybe you never went to a boarding school).�??

By 1951, he wrote, �??Anyway, it was December and all, and it was cold as a witch�??s teat, especially on top of that stupid hill.�??

See what I mean? Something happened in those six years. Something good and necessary.

In the original, the 1945 version, Holden�??s sister Phoebe is as precocious as ever, but she calls him �??Holdie.�?? Holdie. It makes a difference. And there�??s a little sister Viola too who�??s still in a crib and who likes olives (�??ovvels�??), the kind with pimentos. It�??s just as well that he pulled the older versions of the story from circulation.

Even Holden�??s failing essay, the one he�??s handed in to his history teacher, Mr. Spencer, has been rewritten by 1951 and is bad in a much better way.

In the later version of the story, the one that�??s in Catcher in the Rye, Holden still wonders what happens to the ducks in the pond in Central Park when it freezes, but there was absolutely no reason to change that detail. It was swell, grand even. Nothing phony about those ducks or about Central Park.

You can picture Holden, in those few seconds before he falls into the deep dreamless sleep of adolescence, thinking about the ducks and where they go when the pond freezes.

I think about Holden, the ducks, and the weird scaly patch of skin on my cheek as I drift into a fragile unconsciousness at the verge of dawn, the bedside light still on. Evert�??s friends pound, buzz, and grind on next door, oblivious, engaged in a struggle of their own.

searching for like-minded haters

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 20:17:00 +0000

It all started with my last post�??s bonus fun fact: I ate raw pork.

It�??s hard to push a fun fact like that out of one�??s mind; it�??s more evocative than you�??d think, like accidentally sharing a dirty needle. I tried to convince myself that trichinosis isn�??t necessarily a BAD thing�??that soon they�??ll be selling trichinosis parasites on late night cable shows as a diet aid�??and I was just a little ahead of the curve, an early adopter, a trendsetter.

It�??s like TrimSpa, trichinosis. Nothing to get upset about. Trichinosis: Parasite of the Stars. Coming soon to TMZ and PinkIsTheNewBlog. In fact, trichinosis is better than TrimSpa since everyone knows that a TrimSpa, Methadone, and wheat grass smoothie is actually what killed Anna Nicole Smith. And when�??s the last time you heard of anyone keeling over from trichinosis?

But then I began to wonder about my theory. Maybe it�??s tapeworms that�??ll be the new diet aid. Or cholera. And trichinosis will still constitute a dire medical condition, contracted through unwise consumption of raw pork. Maybe trichinosis is just a little too far ahead of the curve.

I have to find out more; I have a gripping need to know. But googling for trichinosis would be stupid. Then I�??d likely find noteworthy cases of the disease, lavishly illustrated and lovingly described. I need to be more strategic about my Internet research so I don�??t get the wrong answer or something I don't want to hear.

What about using a query like �??I ate raw pork�??? That�??s simple. That�??d be a turn of phrase you�??d put in your blog or forum post if you just so happened to eat raw pork and wanted to casually chat about the outcome, good or bad. If you wanted some peer support or good advice.

So I google for �??I ate raw pork�?? to see what turns up.

As it turns out, a number of people report have eaten raw pork. Fourteen, counting me. Or perhaps 16 if I don�??t let Google omit the results very similar to these. Who�??s to say if one incidence of eating raw pork is very similar to another?

At first glance, it appears that none of these chow hounds is crying in his trotters. Or writing a blog post from his hospital bed.

I follow each link carefully. The problem is, these people are even less sensitive to the delicate sensibilities of their audience than I am. One recounts eating French dishes made from raw wild boar; I can almost hear him grunting with gustatory pleasure. Another describes eating a raw pork sandwich in a German cafe. A Russian site transforms my innocent blog post into an ersatz raw pork recipe even as it infects my PC with some type of virtual parasite. Another site debunks the widespread myth that Coca-Cola forces worms to crawl out of raw pork.

My stomach churns.

Although none of the sites�??including the Russian one that twists the words from my own blog�??makes me feel any better about eating raw pork, they do entertain me. And often it�??s more important to be amused than it is to tame one�??s raging hypochondria. In fact, didn�??t Reader�??s Digest run a regular column called �??Laughter is the Best Medicine�?? in which scary medical procedures were reduced to occasions for hilarity?

Here�??s one now:

The phone by my hospital bedside was driving me crazy. Every hour or so it would ring. Because I was recovering from hip surgery, I couldn't reach it. Around midnight, it started ringing again. I noticed the light was on behind one curtain in my four-bed ward. "Excuse me," I called out. "Are you ambulatory?" "No," the answer came back. "I'm Martinez."

See? Hilarious. ROTFLMAO. Couldn�??t be funnier. My intestinal parasites have been expelled through the power of the anecdote. They left, offended, while I was ROTFLMAO.

Laughter truly is the best medicine. Next to, say, Vicodin. Or stuff that kills worms.

But what has really impressed me is how this search for other raw pork eaters has proven to be so much more satisfying than any of my other recent searches. To be certain, my search history reveals such pedestrian queries as:

"cone of silence"
"bell bean" "cover crop"
GWAR
lipoma
milli vanilli
teletubbies
Elvis death day 30
David Redmiles
tiny cat pants
Dick Brass

Why is it that �??I ate raw pork�?? yields more exciting results than searching for GWAR, Teletubbies, Milli Vanilli, bell beans, or Dick Brass? Why? I think it�??s because using that first person pronoun in my query puts me squarely in the middle of a veritable army of like-minded bloggers, forum participants, myspacers, and soul-searchers instead of just flooding my already-clogged short term memory with more information. And it keeps me out of Wikipedia.

Information? I got plenty of that. Facts? A surfeit. I watch The Colbert Report, after all.

I don�??t need information; I need connection. And LinkedIn isn�??t going to tell me who else ate raw pork.

So let�??s test this theory. Here�??s another one. How about:

�??I love convenience stores.�??

Because I do. Some years I attempt to do all of my Xmas shopping at convenience stores: Slim Jims, 5-hour Energy shots, Auto Traders, Funyuns, and windshield wiper fluid all around! That�??s what�??s under our tree.

On Thursday, I walked over to the 7-11 on Pear Avenue�??halfway between Microsoft and Google�??to buy my lunch. It had an entire display of dried noodles: Ramen noodles. Cup of Noodles. Pad Thai noodles. Korean noodles with mystery seasonings and dried vegetable packets. Noodles. Noodles. Noodles. I read all of the noodle packages. Then I bought a small carton of cottage cheese and a banana, which I could�??ve got at the corporate cafeteria.

But I have a hard time curbing my enthusiasm for convenience stores.

When we lived in College Station, every day I rode my bike 11 long miles to the university and back home again. Past new housing developments shedding carpet scraps and discarded black plastic landscaping pots. Past suburban yards with crazy barking dogs straining at flimsy fences. Past a row of semis parked at the Ponderosa Motel with its new red metal roof. I�??d pedal and pedal; it was hot and no matter which direction I was going, I was invariably riding against the wind.

On my way home, I always stopped at a certain Circle K, the convenience store at the corner of farm-to-market road 2818 and Longmire Street. Once I saw a truck parked at Gas Pump 3 with its bed full of chickens; the air was thick with feathers and the smell of poultry in motion. But usually at the time of day that I stopped, the mini-mart was devoid of customers and the clerks were sitting at the checkout counter, bored, but never sullen. No matter how hot it was, I bought a coffee there. The pot would�??ve been cooking on the warmer since morning. No-one else seemed to drink coffee in the heat of the Texas summer.

I poured myself a big cup of scalding stale coffee and doctored it with two stomach-coating shots of non-dairy creamer.

Once one of the clerks ventured, �??Have a good day, ma�??am�?? after I paid for my thick, foul-tasting drink and was heading out the door.

And I shot back, �??You have a good day too, sir!�??

And then, waiting a beat, I added, �??Oh! Wait! I almost forgot! It�??s always a good day at the convenience store.�??

This banter was too much for the Circle K clerk. He very nearly pushed that button that summons the cops. Almost. His hand was poised.

Either that, or he was going for his gun. His Glock 9mm. That might�??ve been what he was doing.

Convenience stores. What�??s not to love? Armed clerks protecting the till. Unsupervised use of a powerful microwave oven. All the catsup, mustard, relish, and non-dairy creamer you can eat. Little Debbie Snack Cakes. Wax lips. Twang. Miller Lite. Wholesome porn showcasing udder-sized mammaries. Dinty Moore Beef Stew. Marlboro Reds in the hard pack. Enough sunflower seeds to transform the floor of your pickup into a compost heap. In short, merchandise that�??ll satisfy almost any minor vice you might have picked up along the way.

It�??s easy to see why I�??d want to find out who else loves convenience stores, loves them enough to say, �??It�??s always a good day at the Circle K.�??

I�??ve got to know who these people are.

If you google �??I love convenience stores,�?? you don�??t find an army of other convenience store lovers. You find 20 other convenience store lovers. Just 20. Oddly enough, one of them is a homeschooler mom responding to a 6-facts-about-you meme. As I read her blog, I muse on how our love for convenience stores and our mutual participation in a �??random facts about you�?? meme probably cannot sustain a relationship between us.

There is no connection.

In fact, as I scan through the writings of my fellow convenience store lovers, I begin to feel a trifle alienated. I don�??t think I�??d even be able to go on my annual Xmas shopping trip at the local 7-11 with any of these people. Even if they were in the car with me, I�??d make �??em wait in the parking lot.

I�??d throw �??em the keys and say, �??Here. You can listen to the radio.�??

It turns out that there are lots of ways to love convenience stores, some of them earnest and unseemly. A full 20% (i.e. 5) of these people just love convenience stores in Japan. Their love isn�??t big and encompassing; their love is small and particular. You can apparently buy iPods at convenience stores in Japan and that�??s enough to warrant a loving relationship. It�??s like loving your girlfriend because she drives a cherry-red Mustang convertible.

It is wrong to love convenience stores because they carry an undeservedly fetishized consumer item. Wrong. It is a Lolita kind of love, one that should not be admitted, unless one has a Nabokovian command of the language. Otherwise, it is simply banal and creepy. If you love Japanese convenience stores because it�??s the best place to meet drunk and disorderly Australians, that�??s okay. Or because they carry smelly daikon and burdock Oden in the winter. But not because you can get a Super Big Gulp + Big Bite hot dog + iPod combo for $404.99. That�??s just wrong.

Let�??s face it: what I�??ve learned is that most peoples�?? love for convenience stores has nothing to do with the abstraction that made the Circle K clerk reach for his Glock in reaction to my exuberance. No. It�??s because people like to buy ranch dressing and nachos with their gasoline. Or hot dogs with their iPods.

But still I�??m fascinated with this idea of finding fellow travelers by declaring my love for something quotidian.

Maybe hate suits this paradigm better than love.

Hmmm. What do I hate?

I hate mayonnaise.

I hate it. It�??s the one condiment that�??ll force me to discard the soiled half of a sandwich (usually the top half). It�??s a serviceable lubricant, but surely you can find something more aesthetic. Whatever your purposes�??whether it�??s to skate on the kitchen floor with inverted cantaloupe rinds strapped to your feet, to increase the opacity of your jell-o mold salad, or to make your hair shine�??there�??s always something that�??ll work better.

Into the google search box it goes: �??I hate mayonnaise.�??

Here�??s the thing: I�??m in good company here. The results peter out at 287 unique mayonnaise-haters, but that�??d still be enough to populate an academic conference or the dance floor of a really hot night club (floor slick with some other lubricant). From 287 submissions, Jon and I could surely put together a special condiment-themed issue of Lunch: An International Journal of the Midday Meal.

There�??s a Worldwide I Hate Mayonnaise Club. I Hate Mayonnaise discussion boards. NO MAYO bumper stickers. Other people even report googling for the phrase �??I hate mayonnaise.�?? In My Mean Girlfriend, a blogger tells of his girlfriend Annie taunting him with a mayonnaise-smeared sandwich.

People get worked up about mayonnaise, but in a good way. A way I can respect.

I feel connected again.

I hate mayonnaise. I ate raw pork.

But maybe I feel just a little less fond of convenience stores.

Eight random facts meme

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 22:20:00 +0000

Paul Jones (The Real Paul Jones, not some ersatz Paul Jones) recently tagged me to participate in the �??8 random facts about me�?? meme.

Eight random facts about me. Got to make the most of it.

In fact, just to be an overachieving underachiever, I�??m giving you a BONUS FUN FACT at the end. It�??s really good and it�??s something I learned just yesterday. It�??s guaranteed to leave you feeling superior to me. You�??ll shake your head and say, �??I�??d never do that!�??

So here goes. Then I�??ll tag eight more of you and you�??ll have to do it too.

1. I�??ve had a bump on my forehead since I was 17.

One day it wasn�??t there and the next day I brushed my hair aside, and there it was. I�??ve never considered getting rid of it; it�??s like a second nose, one that doesn�??t smell. It�??s just part of my face. Nonetheless various people have referred me (unbidden) to plastic surgeons to see what they could do.

When people express concern this way, I just sing another verse of My Lipoma (sung to the tune of My Sharona).

According to Wikipedia, that font of all knowledge, 1% of the general population has one.

A lipoma. M M M My lipoma.

2. I have an ENORMOUS collection of postcards.

I stopped collecting them about 10 years ago, but I still have all the old ones. Boxes and boxes of them. Pictures of airplanes, zoo animals, Jackalopes, butts large and small, surfer girls, city skylines, the Rapture, the beaches where I grew up. Beautiful antique hand painted postcards. Funny postcards. Boring postcards. Postcards in unimaginably poor taste.

Sometimes they make their way into my talks.

My friend Carol used to write me whole letters on a series of postcards that she�??d number consecutively so I�??d know the order in which to read them. Her writing was small and slanty (I�??ve always thought she held her pen very tightly). I�??m surprised now that we shared such private stuff on postcards that everyone could read. But she knew I collected postcards.

Randy Trigg also knew I collected postcards; he once bought me a book deceptively called Boring Postcards.

But generally most people realize that I�??m too disorganized to be a collector of anything except perhaps lint.

3. I once consulted a psychiatrist.

I was 24. It was just one visit, just one hour, just one seemingly stereotypical conversation on the couch, except that I sat in a regular chair and he sat on the other side of a desk.

He asked me what I did at work and I told him that I worked in a lead-lined basement and that I couldn�??t tell him what I did: what I do is secret, SCI even. He thought I was making it up and that I was crazy�??that my real life couldn�??t be as strange and isolated as what I�??d described to him. He seemed all too anxious to prescribe something strong that would once and for all curb my delusions.

I filled the prescription on my way out of the clinic, took one, and gave one to Kevin. We both felt terrible. After that, I couldn�??t even give away the rest.

Eventually I flushed them. Probably some Pacific flounders became placid and far less psychotic.
4. One autumn I disappeared.

I got fed up with Pasadena�??oppressive fall Santa Anas, a persistent stalker, and a bad case of the blues at work�??and left to spend a weekend in early October in New Haven, Connecticut, ostensibly to see Hot Tuna. The trees had barely started to turn when I got there. I got distracted and ignored my return ticket. A weekend turned into a week that slunk along into November. I just continued to send rent checks to California Street Condominiums (our landlord�??s optimistic name for our condemned, cockroach-infested fourplex on California Blvd) and didn�??t come back to Pasadena until Rose Parade Season.

I spent three months reading fiction�??Alan Paton, Walker Percy, Christopher Isherwood�??lying in an old claw-foot bathtub in a basement apartment. Every half hour or so I�??d run fresh hot water into the tub. The cat, Ezra, circled the edge of the tub warily, but well-balanced. I left the house mostly to buy more books from the used bookstores, which were cheap and plentiful in New Haven.

Yalies thought I was a townie and townies thought I was a Yalie.

Sometime in November it got cold and I had to buy a coat, an ugly dull lilac-colored synthetic down coat, a coat that turned totemic and followed me around (back to California, to Texas, back to California), haunting me for more than a decade. I finally abandoned it in Rochester, New York.

�??Give it to Salvation Army,�?? I told Francoise and Pat. �??It�??s really very warm.�?? And, from all evidence, tenacious and almost indestructible.

5. As a child, I often chewed three pieces of Double Bubble gum at once.

I usually slept with the big wad of gum in my mouth in case I had insomnia and wanted to blow bubbles in the middle of the night. It passed the time better than balancing my pillow on both feet with my legs straight up, but not quite as well as locking myself in the bathroom and re-reading my entire collection of Mad magazines until dawn.

6. I�??m irrationally afraid of dogs.

There�??s no dog bite story to justify my fear. I�??m just afraid of them.

If a nearby dog barks or growls, I get a surge of adrenalin. Dogs used to chase me on my bicycle; I eventually started carrying the clip-on can of doggy mace�??Halt!�??that postmen carry.

In 5th grade I was late to school almost every day since I walked along ever more circuitous routes to avoid dogs: once a dog had chased me on a particular street, I stopped walking on that street. The streets in my neighborhood were long and winding. Instead of leaving home earlier to compensate, I just got to school later. Eventually I was getting to school after 10am, then after 10:30. I sat in the back of the class so I could creep to my desk via the back door.

7. When I was in 7th grade, I wrote a report about the dangers of methamphetamine.

I cribbed it by and large from an article published in an old issue of Harpers (or perhaps it was Saturday Review) that we had lying around the house. I used the graphic from the article to create a spectacularly lurid cover for my report. It had a face reminiscent of one of Jason Mecier�??s mosaics; it incorporated capsules, tablets, a syringe, and a handgun.

I think about my methamphetamine report every time I�??m down in the Castro and see posters from the anti-meth ad campaign on bus shelters.

In 7th grade, I took Sudafed almost every morning to curb a perpetually runny nose (allergies); I can't say I didn't enjoy the lift.

8. I didn�??t vote until the 1990s.

I stumbled and stuttered through the library�??s copy of Das Kapital when I was in junior high school. I didn�??t get it, but I thought turning the pages would be good enough to partially assimilate Marxism. I read Ramparts too and felt thoroughly radicalized.

By high school, I�??d abandoned Marxism as stodgy and decided I was an anarchist, which seemed to be a more provocative stance. Better still, it irritated Mr. O�??Rourke, the Vice-Principal In Charge of Discipline and Keeper of the Permanent Record.

Then, abruptly, I stopped paying attention to anything remotely political (save a few really interesting scandals like Mr. Reagan�??s Iran-Contra debacle) and didn�??t start paying attention again until the first Gulf War. I didn�??t register to vote; I didn�??t read about politics; I didn�??t talk about politics; I thought it was crazy to put bumper stickers on cars. No-one knew what my political views were or if I harbored any at all.

I caught up during Poppy�??s administration, reading The Nation and nurturing an unsustainable sense of moral and intellectual outrage.

�??Enough!�?? I finally thought. �??Enough! I have done sufficient penance.�??

So now I have vague misgivings about politics although it�??s hard not to have a strong opinion about the clowns, miscreants, and Teletubbies who are in office as I type this (you have noticed a more than passing similarity between the verbal stylings of Alberto Gonzalez and Laa-Laa, the yellow Teletubby with the liar�??s horns, haven�??t you?). But I have little original to say about politics (or Teletubbies) and can barely tolerate most pundits.

I do vote now though. Regularly. Conscientiously. Hardly ever just picking the name I like the best.

Bonus Fun Fact. I ate raw pork.

Remember when I complained about that saran-wrapped item I bought at Tuk-Tuk Thai Market in Berkeley? You know--the item that was roughly the same size and shape as the banana sticky rice cakes? Remember how the smiling guy wasn�??t sure how much the saran-wrapped item cost? And remember how I wrestled with the saran wrap casing in the car, in the low light of early evening, eager to eat whatever it was.

Here�??s what I said:

�??But what�??s this? The rubbery texture is a little too familiar. I grew up in LA; I�??ve had menudo. This, this outer stuff that�??s been so tightly encased in plastic is TRIPE. Ick. I can�??t even imagine what the ground up material inside it is. It looked pink in the store�??s fluorescent lighting through the partial translucence of the tripe. I�??d originally thought it was one of those red bananas. But now I know I don�??t want to know. ICK. ICK. ICK.�??

I found out what the mystery item was.

Are you ready? Ready for your bonus random fact?

It was�?� raw pork sausage. Maybe you already figured this out but I hadn�??t.

I ate raw pork sausage. No wonder I was scrabbling around looking for something to kill the taste.

How�??d I learn this? My brother and I were at Tuk-Tuk yesterday and I saw the same inscrutable pile of saran-wrapped items on the prepared food counter, right where the banana sticky rice cakes used to be.

Except this time, there was a sign. Clearly written in big black block letters. RAW PORK SAUSAGE.

I turned green with the recollection of biting into the as-yet-unidentified food item at twilight in the front seat of my car.

�??You�??d know already if you got trichinosis from eating raw pork a couple of months ago, right?�?? I asked my brother as we walked home from the market. �??You�??d have symptoms soon afterward, wouldn�??t you?�??

He reassured me that I�??d know already, and added that he thought the Thai sausage would be fermented raw pork anyway, not just plain old raw pork.

He said this to make me feel better. Some food is cooked without heat, like ceviche, which is cured via the acidity of the lemon juice. In fact, there�??s something fashionable these days about ordering cured meats�??witness the charcuterie plate in lots of fancy restaurants. Very French. Very stylish.

Raw pork. That�??s all I could think. I was eating raw pork in the car because my blood sugar was low. Raw pork.

But when I thought about it yesterday, I just about tripped over an irregularity in the Berkeley sidewalk. I felt dizzy.

Raw pork.

Ick. I�??ll never eat again.

And that�??s your bonus fact: I once accidentally ate raw pork sausage encased in tripe. Recently, in fact. I made this mistake recently.

This meme requires that you tag 8 more people to do the same. I�??m going to point you to their blogs, but I hope a few of them will take care of this assignment via skywriting. Something about those puffy white facts against the summer sky...

Mark, Jaina Bee, Erich, Connie Lynne, Susie, Rock, gem, Diane. Go for it!

found on the ground

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 23:27:00 +0000

The other day I found a piece of blue lined paper torn from a spiral notebook. It was lying on Castro Street, in the gutter. I had to turn around and go halfway back across the street to retrieve it. Mark and Frank continued on, not yet registering that I�??d backtracked to pick up what appeared to the untrained eye to be litter.

Litter, yes. But irresistible litter.

An abstract blobby-looking flower decorated the bottom where the page number should be. It was girlie notebook paper. Retro 1960s girlie notebook paper, judging by the flower.

The handwriting wasn�??t neat either, not at all. It strayed from the lines as if all this writing were done in the dark, during the audio-visual portion of the school day; the lowercase letters were small, jagged and crabbed. But there were fancy architectural flourishes on the capital letters like the �??F�?? and the �??D�??. Swoops and curlicues.

The promise of junior high school drama on the half-shell.

One side said, �??Friend Chart�?? and listed three names, one per line:

Deja
Janaeah
Cameron

Cool names, those. Friends anyone would be darned proud of. Clearly the names of the junior high school royalty. Names that aren�??t mispronounced at roll call. Names that no-one makes fun of.

Didn�??t Freakonomics have something pithy to say about names as destiny?

Deja. Janaeah. Cameron. They�??re the modern replacements for the friends on the last generation�??s Friends Chart. Gone, the perky Cheryls, the slutty Francines, the ingratiating Lindas. Gone too are the names that came after, the Caitlins, the Taylors, the Heathers. They�??re grown up now, breeders themselves. They�??re pushing Peg Perego strollers in Noe Valley.

Enter Deja, Janaeah, and Cameron. It�??s your 15 minutes, girlfriends! Your turn to be the dELiA*s models and Trendspotting spokespeople.

But the short list I found was hardly a chart. I�??d expect some lines connecting Deja with Janaeah telling me whether Janaeah liked Cameron, or vice-versa, and how much. Or maybe a matrix, comparing the features and foibles of the three girls. Who�??s all emo? Who�??s got the hippest playlist on her iPod? Who�??s got the worst case of camel toe? As I recall, the cruelty of 7th grade girls knows no bounds.

But shouldn�??t there be social networking software to do this?

Didn�??t I just read about MyYearbook.com, a site with the tag line, �??You�??ve got friends!�???

Ah, but the real list is on the other side. Here we�??ve got all of them, the �?�Friends�?�. Deja, Cameron, Janaeah, Lj, Isoke, Allie, Anja, Giselle, Ellen, Gabby, and Miriam make the grade. BFF, as the tween trendspotters would say.

I�??m assuming these are all girls, even though the only other Gabby I know is a dog. A girl dog, but a dog nonetheless�??that�??s the kind of relationship that should be conducted on Dogster, right?

If the anonymous list maker were using a real social networking service, she�??d have a lot more friends than that. And isn�??t that the point, to have a really, really (rilly rilly) long list of friends (even if you have to pad it with products you use, weird guys that hit on you, and bands you occasionally listen to)? You�??d be embarrassed to have only 11 friends on MySpace; you�??d need to have at least 7227 friends.

Actually it�??s more fun to snoop around on social networking sites than it is to imagine what�??s behind a scrap of notebook paper. The MySpace version of Allie, for example, tells me that she�??s sick of my shit, that she�??s just adopted a one-eyed dog, that she�??s bought a Jayne Mansfield movie, and that she loves her girlfriends. Julie, Ashley, Tracy, and Paige.

I look for Julie, Ashley, Tracy, and Paige among the 539 names on Allie�??s friends list. I find Paige among scads of Betties in mid-century glamour poses and cat-eye sunglasses, but no sign of Julie, Ashley, or Tracy. Jenny and Katertots (TM) figure prominently though.

Oh, this friends stuff is *fickle*. One minute they�??re your friends and the next minute, they�??ve defriended you forever. Oh, the harsh realities of drunken FaceBooking.

Maybe there�??ll eventually be a social networking site for exes.

Haven�??t you ever had the experience of meeting the ex-girlfriend of your ex-boyfriend and bonding instantly? You�??ve got this great thing in common: you hate the same person, a person who has no doubt exhibited the same bad behavior to both of you. Now you agree that Cameron is an irredeemable skank or Jason needs to take far greater interest in his personal hygiene.

Any ex of my ex is a friend of mine. Sounds like a fine basis for a social networking site.

Think about it: who makes you feel the best about your break-up? Another ex, of course! You have more in common with your ex�??s exes than you do with the people you�??ve gone to school with, the people you�??ve worked with, the people who listen to the same bands that you do, or the other dog and cat owners of the world. You might even share important things like social diseases (possibly contracted through other social networking sites): imagine that!

There�??s more too: I�??ve heard many people say that when they�??re trying to stay awake in a dull meeting, they make a list of all the people they�??ve ever slept with. The cognitive effort of this exercise keeps them awake and entertained.

So a social networking site for exes is just the thing.

What�??ll we call it? ExTeriority, perhaps. That sounds sufficiently post-boom, doesn�??t it? We don�??t want anything too obvious�??that signals pre-Internet bust thinking. Y�??know. Pets.com. Match.com. Friendster. All of the obvious names demonstrate that you�??re too naïve to embark on an online venture in 2007.

Venture Capitalists. Are you listening?

I can see the comments area now.

ROTFLMAO.

You know how he always flossed his teeth all over the apartment, while he was walking around or watching Buffy or something. Little flecks of tooth scum everywhere! Stuck to the TV, even!! Eeeewwww!!!!

It could get fairly gruesome and unbecomingly obscene, which seems like the hallmark of any good and successful social networking site. There�??s apparently a real human need to air that dirty laundry.

To wit: I found this one on torn UPS packaging, again in the street in front of our house. GLEN STROUD CANNOT BE TRUSTED.

It�??s a simple accusation. GLEN STROUD CANNOT BE TRUSTED. It seems to be everywhere, all over town. It�??d be a perfect comment for the social network consisting of all of Mr. Stroud�??s exes. And unlike the creepy (and discriminatory) eHarmony, we can make this an open site that respects exes of any orientation or level of commitment.

What a perfect opportunity to Rate My Service! That�??s one of the future-looking features of the site: it�??s not just for ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, but also for next boyfriends and girlfriends. Such valuable information. It might not cause you to change your mind, but you�??d know what to expect. And it wouldn�??t demand full disclosure from the prospective partner�??after all, full disclosure is a style not everyone appreciates.

It�??s just the opposite of LinkedIn, which we have already established as the Amway of social networking sites.

And no matter what I say to my friends and colleagues, I still get invitations to join LinkedIn because people have a compulsive need to sweeten their numbers. Already have 1047 connections on LinkedIn? Why not go for 1048! And they invite me, thinking theirs might just be the invitation that breaks my cone of silence.

But my cone of silence is invincible. We can�??t talk here, Chief.

Of course, I make it a point to perversely hang on to my listing in LinkedIn, with its single link, just to demonstrate how very tenuously linked to reality I am. (In case you�??re wondering, my one link is from Larry Masinter, who himself gets around. Larry�??s the one who was prescient enough to invite Sir Tim B-L to PARC in 1992, when the WWW was finite and innocent, a repository of folk song lyrics and high-energy physics papers. I figure a link from Larry is enough.)

But you just wait �??til there�??s ExTeriority.

Then you�??ll be dishing the dirt on your own scrap of notebook paper.

The best excuse in the world

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 23:29:00 +0000

For once I have a really good excuse.

Usually my excuses barely qualify as lame. Face-saving, really�??they�??re just face-saving excuses that no-one believes, but they allow all parties involved to carry on without feeling too bad.

�??Oh! I thought the party was next Saturday.�??

�??I really was intending to come back in after I stepped outside. I didn't plan to be gone for 3 months.�??

�??I�??d have brought a bathing suit if I�??d have known you had a pool.�??

This time though, I have an impressive excuse, one that�??d get me out of almost anything. A Get Out Of Jail Free card.

Two weeks ago, I almost bled to death.

Everywhere I went looked like a crime scene with blood spatters and bloody handprints. Then, with little preamble, I ended up on an operating table, and like Keith Richards, had my blood changed (with the same degree of apparent casualness that my Honda has an oil change). I also seem to have lost four or five non-essential parts in the process.

Who�??d have known that people are so similar to IKEA bookcases? Not because they have names like �??Knappa�?? or �??Glörg�??, but rather because you can leave out parts when you put them together. I was under anesthesia at re-assembly time, so I have no idea whether the surgery involved small black hex wrenches, but some suspicious-looking bruises lead me to suspect it did.

I was put back together with hex wrenches and some parts were left over and left out and presumably thrown away or perhaps even used to re-assemble someone else.

I suppose I could�??ve asked for the leftover parts so I could�??ve enshrined them in Lucite and put them on the mantel next to my Five Year Clock, Aunt Yetta�??s cigarette dispenser, the bust-of-Lenin butane lighter, and all of that other special bric-a-brac, but I didn�??t. I forgot. I was unconscious. And when I wasn't unconscious, I was dosing myself with Fentanyl at ten minute intervals.

Frankly I was too distracted to ask for a doggy bag.

So my only souvenir of this unexpected hospital stay is an 8 inch vertical incision down my midsection. At least, that�??s what I�??m told. Any kind of medical imagery makes me so queasy that I�??ve been unable to inspect my own surgical artifact. In fact, I�??ve discovered it�??s not all that hard to avoid peeking at it. I just don�??t look.

And unlike LBJ, there�??ll be no photos in which I show you my scar by way of telling you that I�??m okay. Unlike Andy Warhol, I don�??t want to show you the extent of the damage.

You�??ll have to take my word for it.

If you asked me three weeks ago, I�??d have told you that an 8 inch incision down one�??s midsection would be damned painful. I�??m happy to report that my intuitions were exactly right: it is indeed damned painful and I�??d be reluctant to recommend you do this by way of body modification.

Sure, pierce your ears�??or even pierce those more tender parts�??but tell �??em to leave your belly alone. Get that career-limiting tattoo on your forehead. Sear a corporate logo onto your haunches with a red-hot branding iron. Paint your Lee Press On Nails with liquid paper. But leave that tummy be. You don�??t want to modify the configuration of your midsection. Trust me.

Sometimes when I stand up too quickly, I have the momentary sensation that my entrails are about to pop right out and go sploosh on the floor. There�??s no provocation too slight. This causes me to move around more slowly than usual, because if my entrails do pop out, I want to be able to stuff them back in right away. I�??m thinking that the 5 second rule applies, as it does to fumbled roasts, dumped pans of lasagna, or dribbled canapés. Just pick those entrails up and stuff �??em back in and no-one will be the wiser.

Pop. Sploosh. Stuff.

But shouldn�??t there be some perqs to being down and out? Surely there must be a few besides the usual offering of pain pills (which are used and gone all too soon) and the glamorous bouquets of cut flowers I�??ve received (and they are quite lovely).

I had my tonsils removed when I was 4 or 5 years old. What I remember from that experience is that the complicit adults told me I could have all the ice cream and jello I wanted after the surgery was over. It sounded like a fabulous deal. All of the ice cream and jello I wanted. And I wanted unlimited ice cream and jello. I believe the forbidden red Kool-Aid figured into the deal too. Ah, a promise of paradise.

What they didn�??t tell me is that my throat�??d be way, way too sore to want any ice cream or any jello. That all of the ice cream and jello would be consumed by Kathleen Philips who came to visit me in my sickbed, attracted by the ready availability of unlimited ice cream and jello. That my hellacious sore throat would only be superseded by my mounting resentment of Kathleen Philips whose throat wasn�??t too sore to eat my rightfully-earned ice cream and my rightfully-earned jello and to drink my rightfully-earned Kool-Aid.

What�??s that red stain on your tongue, Kathleen? Been drinking too much Kool-Aid?

I could�??ve bopped her one for enjoying my treats when I was too sick to partake. Except she was bigger and healthier and would�??ve beaten the crap out of me. So her tongue got redder and redder and she got higher and higher and more hyperactive from all that sugar while I sulked in bed, feeling deceived and ill-used.

I�??m not sure what the equivalent perq is as an adult. Probably to watch all of the mind-numbing TV and DVDs you want, all day, every day. So naturally now I don�??t feel like watching TV.

Right after I got out of the hospital, I went through a brief flirtation with the Food Network, where there are shows featuring Horchata experts and hot dog experts and funnel cake experts and pirogi experts, all willing to comment authoritatively on their respective foodstuffs. I watched X-treme sports for awhile too, musing all the while about head injuries and what they must do to an eighteen year-old�??s capacity to make intelligent remarks during on-camera interviews. I even tuned in to the Comedy Channel, knowing full well that if I laughed, it would really hurt. It was okay: I never found occasion to laugh. Finally I clicked over to the high numbers, to the XM satellite radio channels. There�??s only a vague visual component to satellite radio channels on TV, cartoon raindrops, unreadable song titles, instructions how to order�??that kind of thing.

Boring. Boring.

Susie came over on Saturday and loaned me DVDs of the first season of all the TV series I�??ve missed in the past decade. Sex in the City. Weeds. Buffy. Veronica Mars. I haven�??t started in on those yet (although I suspect that�??s what I�??m going to do after I publish this post). Nor have I broken into my three Netflix videos, videos that have been sitting on top of the TV since last October.

What good is a life of ease on the sofa if you can�??t hunker down with the TV? I had no trouble watching 8 hours of TV each day when I was a kid. Drat! What has happened to me? Did one of those surgically removed parts house my F Troop enjoyment apparatus?

Will I ever be able to watch TV again?

Now that I have unlimited license to watch bad TV, I just don�??t feel like it.

And after only two weeks, work has become a distant memory, perhaps gone with my old blood or spare organs. The strangers�?? blood I have coursing through my veins instead must have a strong slacker factor. Heartier than my own blood to be certain, but not inclined to force me to break though the lassitude of recovery and return to work.

So there you have it: the best excuse in the world.

And what am I going to do with it?

Take a nap, of course.

[Note: If you have any predisposition to give blood, please do. Especially if you're Type AB Positive. I was grateful to have it there for me. Thanks.]

rate our service

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 00:28:00 +0000

Over Memorial Day weekend, I somehow found myself staying in a hotel, one of those unremarkable �??business traveler on a budget�?? places.

Okay. I didn�??t exactly find myself staying in a hotel. That sounds like I awoke from a Rohypnol-induced trance and discovered I was in a hotel room, furniture upended, clothes strewn, empty whiskey bottles overflowing the wastebasket, generic Monet prints defaced with bodily fluids, and the shower spraying full force, flow restricting shower head irresponsibly tampered with.

If you use the phrase, �??I somehow found myself staying in a hotel,�?? it implies that you wouldn�??t be surprised no matter whom you discovered retching in the wastebasket the next morning.

It also implies that you might not even know which hotel chain you were in, whether it was 9am or 9pm, and perhaps which exurban office park you�??d see if you were brave enough to part the blackout curtains and peek out into the day or night, whichever the case may be.

Nothing would surprise you.

Found myself staying in a hotel, indeed!

No. It wasn�??t like that at all. I�??d made careful plans to stay in this hotel, a Courtyard by Marriott at the junction of Rock Prairie and Highway 6 in College Station, Texas. The room happened to be part of a block of rooms reserved for out-of-towners attending a wedding. I�??d made my hotel reservations almost two months in advance, right after I�??d noticed that the wedding was scheduled for Memorial Day weekend.

I knew better than to be flaky about room reservations for Memorial Day weekend, especially since The New York Times recently published an inexplicable travel column that implied you might actually go to College Station on vacation.

A vacation in College Station? Some journalist needs to have his meds adjusted, maybe kicked down a notch, Emeril-style. That�??s all I can say.

But, I thought to myself as I dialed the hotel�??s reservations line, you never know who�??ll believe the Times. And Aggies will be Aggies. No telling who�??ll interpret Memorial Day weekend as an invitation to examine the new Bonfire Memorial (which looks rather like Stonehenge) or pay homage to Reveilles 1 through N-1.

Their lives were not lost in vain. That�??d be well within the Memorial Day theme, wouldn�??t it?

The Courtyard Marriott did indeed seem to be filled to the gills with hearty, robust families climbing out of their maroon mini-vans. Memorializing something or other. Fossil fuels, perhaps.

�??Can we go in the pool, Dad? You said we could! You promised!�?? shrieks a child right out of The Far Side.

It�??s raining, but nothing�??s going to diminish my fellow travelers�?? enthusiasm for the new hotel�??s many business-traveler-on-a-budget amenities.

Me? I�??d be the last one to knock the business-traveler-on-a-budget amenities: I like the free broadband connection and the fact that the carpeting doesn�??t seem so skanky that you have to leave your shoes on all of the time. In Room 206, my room, there�??s a weird shiny place in the carpeting next to the closet, but since it�??s exactly the shape of the face of an iron, I�??m happy to assume a previous occupant just had a little pants-pressing mishap.
Nothing toxic, nothing unhygienic, just some nice, clean, melted synthetic fibers.

The towels are thin and small, but there are lots of them.

Who showers anyway? Showering is for sissies. I�??ve seen Psycho. I know what happens in showers. Safest not to take them.

It doesn�??t mean that I don�??t need the towels though: I use them to mop up around the Signature Gourmet Jr. coffee maker when I slop water all over the counter. I don�??t think you can get electrocuted from making coffee in an artificial lake, but you can never tell. Best to mop up before setting the small appliance about its duties.

In short, Room 206 in the College Station Courtyard by Marriott is a perfectly normal hotel room. Nothing of note. And, because of the rain and the fact that there�??s no good walking destination �?? the Courtyard by Marriott isolates you on the wrong side of Highway 6 �?? I�??m happy to hunker down in my room, eating BBQ pork and brisket left over from my Two Meat Plate at C&J�??s BBQ and toweling the excess slaw off my chin with a thin and suspiciously stained washcloth.

I could walk to one of the new big-box churches�??Lowe�??s plus a steeple�??on this side of the highway or to the Silk Stocking, the strip club that used to be in a metal building on the edge of town. The Silk Stocking is now stucco�??d and more or less inside city limits; I�??m certain they�??ve gone upscale and let the creaky old dancers retire, replacing them with nice fresh Poultry Science majors looking to pay off student loans (Live! Real Co-eds! Girls Gone Wild! Buck Naked! Dance, Dance, Dance! Bawwwwk!).

But what I�??d really rather do is stay in my hotel room and wait until it�??s time to go to the wedding.

The wedding. That�??s why I was in College Station in the first place. Not to enjoy the Courtyard by Marriott. Not to march along the side of the highway, dodging fire ant mounds and Chevy trucks, in search of elusive reading material. I was here to go to a wedding.

Did I say that the wedding was lovely, the bride radiant, the wedding party well-behaved, the guests circumspect?

And that�??s the crux of the matter. You stay at places like the Courtyard Marriott in College Station because it�??s nice to stay where everyone else is staying. Because it�??s cool to have those chance hallway encounters with the other people in the bride�??s or groom�??s life. If you�??re family, you get to see the friends and co-workers that�??ve always been shooed out of the way when you�??re in town. And if you�??re a friend, you get to see the seamy underbelly of heredity, how things could have turned out (or ultimately will).

So you can imagine the thoughts that flitted across my mostly empty mind on Tuesday morning�??the day following Memorial Day Weekend�??when I saw nestled amid the usual spam in my Inbox an email invitation to RATE OUR SERVICE.

Rate our service? Good grief. I�??d rather rate almost anything else: the DJ at the wedding (I�??d tell �??em, �??hokey games are for bar mitzvahs�??) or the wedding cake (two thumbs up on chocolate wedding cakes with chocolate-dipped strawberries) or even the other guests (I�??d rate the statement, �??that ex-girlfriend wasn�??t always a girl�?? with an �??agree somewhat�??).

It�??s all about indelicate hands and over-broad shoulders when you rate apparent gender.

But rate our service? I haven�??t traveled in awhile, 4 months it�??s been, probably a longer hiatus than I�??ve had in years. I was in a good mood, neither burned out nor over-anxious. But I couldn�??t have cared less about the Courtyard by Marriott. I didn�??t even give them my Marriott Rewards number when I checked in.

They don�??t ask you about particular towels in these surveys (I�??d like to note on my survey that the handtowel by the sink must�??ve been used to mop up after a gruesome serial killing) or whether the check-in clerk gave your gift basket to David Redmiles (he did). They ask about vague �??people�?? things. Were the maids efficient? Did the clerk at the front desk smile?

Am I going to tell the truth on a survey so some poor snotty kid at the front desk gets bounced from the minimum wage job he�??s using to buy occasional dime bags of weed and 12 packs of Miller Lite? And the maids�??if things aren�??t right with the room, the maids are the ones who are going to get the blame. They have a grim job as it is, since people who stay at business-traveler-on-a-budget hotel are notoriously poor tippers. Rate the breakfast? Aw, c�??mon. Rate cinnamon raisin bagels? You�??ve got to be kidding.

I�??d rather rate my fellow travelers. They never ask about that.

�??Were the other guests satisfactory?�??

You know how I�??d answer that. No. No, they weren�??t. No. No, I think the hotel needs to solicit guests who are more exciting and, at the same time, much quieter. Isn�??t Lyle Lovett from around College Station? Can�??t he stay here?

The guests don�??t measure up. Agree strongly.

Or I would�??ve agreed strongly with the statement, �??No-one in College Station sells magazines I read. They never have and never will.�??

It seems that there�??s nothing I do these days that�??s too trivial to warrant a survey.

It�??s a trend. Every time I interact with a real human, the interaction is followed up with a survey. I call our IT support line; they make me reboot 3 times in rapid succession, click my heels together 3 times, and then they send me links to three separate surveys, even though I could�??ve sworn I was reporting a single problem.

And each of the three surveys exhorted me to Rate my service!

I never know what to do with these questionnaires. If I don�??t fill them out, they�??re each re-sent. Once per day. Over and over. Until I relent and fill them out. And every service person I interact with sends me another one. Every reservations agent, every help desk person, every support staffer�??even our legal counsel�??sends me another survey.

They add up. They really do.

And I can�??t do anything but lie and say the service was great. Because who wants to be a mean asshole? It�??s like undertipping. I can�??t undertip even if the service is awful. This isn�??t American Idol. Some poor sap�??s livelihood depends on the cooperation of every damned customer he instructs to reboot.

Sometimes I�??m superstitious and I think that if I give them a bad rating, they�??ll do the moral equivalent of spitting in my coffee. Have me reboot a dozen extra times. Give me a room next door to the ice machine. People always point out to me that the survey follows the service, so how could they possible do that. But in this case, I believe in time travel. They will go back in time and spit in my USB port. Really they will.

It�??s not just because I don�??t feel like I can tell the truth on these surveys that I don�??t like to fill them out; it�??s also because it just feels wrong to me. Our social fabric doesn�??t work that way. It�??s like having a neurotic girlfriend or boyfriend who�??s always asking, �??Do you love me? Could you put that on a scale of 1 to 7?"

See. It�??d get annoying very quickly. You�??d break up at the first opportunity.

�??Call me back when you�??re done with therapy,�?? you�??d tell �??em. And you�??d change your phone number and get new locks for your place.

And you know where this is going: soon the survey-makers will want to get into the act too. How was my survey? Rate my scale on a scale of 1 to 7.

Scales are for fish.

In the end, I don�??t want to pass judgment on everyone who services my car or hands me a magnetic card key. I don�??t even want to rate the movies I see or products I use. I see from my Netflix account that I�??ve rated 122 movies. 122 movies! I doubt I�??ve even seen 122 movies. I must've rated them without watching them just to save time.

3 stars--that sounds safe. Unless we're talking about that cinematic menace Steven Spielberg: No stars for you, Mr. Spielberg!

And what about those 5 star movies? The top category forces you to throw together movies you thought were in good taste, like Lost in Translation, Adaptation, or Bartleby, with movies you thought tasted good, like Repo Man, Twister (which you'll note defies plot synopsis), or Naked Lunch.

The truth of the matter is, rating stuff is just unpleasant, a task you�??d outsource to Bangalore if you could.

In fact, if I asked you to rate my blog, you wouldn�??t do it. On a scale of 1 to 5, you�??d just say, "Sorry, Charlie."

And if you asked me to rate your reading of my blog, I wouldn�??t do it either. On a scale of 1 to 5, I�??d say, �??What lovely blue eyes you have!�??

Maybe we should make a deal: I�??ll give you a 5 if you give me a 5.

Done and done.

Tastes good.

you talk too much

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 02:22:00 +0000

You talk too much you worry me to death,
You talk too much, you even worry my pet
You just talk, talk too much
You talk about people that you don't know,
You talk about people wherever you go
You just talk, talk too much
You talk about people that you've never seen,
You talk about people, you can make me scream
You just talk, you talk too much

�??Joe Jones

The other night at dinner, Michael told me that my blog posts were exhausting. It makes him tired to read them from start to finish.

He tells me this as I eavesdrop on the conversation at the other end of our table in a fancy Northern Italian restaurant in Arlington, VA, just outside of DC. The guys who ordered the expensive bottles of wine are yakking about details of air travel�??the appetizers in first class, a particular airport lounge, the vicissitudes of frequent flyer programs�??that sort of stuff. The kind of conversation that just wears you down, slowly, upgrade by upgrade, delay by delay.

You should get airline miles for listening to people yak like that.

More than being a virus, words are corrosive. Not just the obvious kinds of words either, like hate speech or solemn platitudes. Other stuff too. And not just the obvious boring conversational fodder like retold movie plots or punchline-free office jokes. And not just epithets, epitaphs, and Churchillian epigrams either. No, all of those�??ll clearly do you in. But I�??m also throwing in the gradual abrasion caused by everyday cocktail chatter. Each clause has the capacity to gently, gradually pummel you into submission.

LOL. AFAIK. YMMV.

And my new RAZR phone has 15 Quick Notes to get you started. �??Will arrive 15 minutes�?? and �??Can this wait?�?? In their preposition-free brevity, they have their own capacity to wear away ground, to carve a conversational Grand Canyon over the years, byte by byte.

So I can see how my blog posts would be exhausting. Perhaps not corrosive, but certainly tiring.

Michael isn�??t the first one to tell me this. My own mother might�??ve said almost the same thing�??that to read my posts was to open up oneself to a minor barrage of words. A veritable windstorm. Like opening the moon roof while you�??re cruising down Highway 280 at 90 mph. Screenful after screenful of words. A shitstorm of words. Words about egg cartons, pink Canadian caffeine pills, and Signature Gourmet Coffee Makers.

And if every picture�??s worth a 1000 more of those words, then I�??m in even deeper trouble.

I�??m sensitive about my prolixity. After all, when I was a kid, there was a popular doll called Chatty Cathy whose sales were no doubt bolstered by the catchy alliteration in her name as well as by the handy pull string in her back. A tug on the pull string yielded one of 11 different phrases, uttered at random.

It�??s like talking to me before I�??ve had coffee in the morning.

11 phrases, uttered at random. Yep. That�??s me.

Chatty Cathy could say things like �??I have earned every cent�?? or �??In all of my years of public life I have never obstructed justice�?? or �??I am not a crook�?? Oh. No. Wait. That wasn�??t Chatty Cathy. That was Richard Nixon. It�??s so easy to get a period�??s important historical figures mixed up. Chatty Cathy was the creepy doll with the pull string that appeared in the notorious Twilight Zone episode; Richard Nixon was the creepy guy with the stubble who appeared in the White House.

D�??oh.

Just imagine how confused I get by Tickle Me Elmo and George W. Bush.

Maybe someone could do a Barbie Liberation Organization prank on the two of them (Elmo and GWB) and swap their voice boxes.

�??See, I'm the decider, and I decide what is best.�?? Elmo would say. "Uh uh uh! No peeking! Hahahaha!" GWB would answer. I don�??t think it would make Elmo any less appealing or GWB any less coherent; it�??d be a pretty even swap.

But Chatty Cathy. I hated Chatty Cathy. I was afraid of dolls at best�??especially that mute dominatrix Barbie with her tiny stiletto heels and pink strap-on�??but a doll with an insulting name like Chatty Cathy hit a little too close to home when I was 6. I may�??ve just told my classmates my name was Catherine rather than Cathy for awhile back then.

Maybe they were right. I do go on, don�??t I?

And, as Joe Jones�?? song would have it, I may even worry my pet, although really Lumpy is my equal when it comes to having a lot to say. �??Meow,�?? he insists. �??Meow. Meow. Meow. Meow.�?? Which variously means, �??Whatever could you be thinking? I had Fancy Feast Cod Sole and Shrimp Dinner just yesterday�?? or �??I can�??t believe the condition of my cat box. It�??s like a service station restroom on Interstate 10�?? or even �??You�??ve stayed up late enough. The Colbert Report is over and it�??s time for bed. March!�??

Yeah. He says all that and more. Over and over sometimes if he doesn�??t think you�??re listening. The �??March!�?? command is often issued with a claws-out tap on bare feet.

And he likes to meow in the shower or the back hall, where it echoes. Who doesn�??t?

Ah-oooo. Lumpy says. Ah-oooo. A feline banshee.

But still�?�

You blog too much you worry me to death
You blog too much, you even worry my pet
You blog about people eating schools of sea bream
You blog about people�??say, there goes Steve McQueen
You just blog, blog, blog, you blog too much.

I�??m not being paid by the word. Why do I do it? Why aren�??t I more concise?

This made me wonder, just how long is the average blog post? It�??s not been in the news, so I can�??t ask June Thomas over at Slate; she�??s the one who always records the Slate Explainer podcasts that answer the pressing questions underlying today�??s news. (For example, this week�??s offering addresses the puzzler: How do spelling bees work in other countries?)

I�??m sure someone�??s done the stats though: if there�??s something that can be readily counted, someone will have done it.

There�??s the study by Nardi, Schiano, Gumbrecht, and Swartz. In their sample (which we�??ll pretend for convenience is representative, and covers blogs like mine), the words per post range from 80 to 494 (with a mean of 209) and the links per post range from 0 to 6 (mean 1).

A 209 word post with one link? You�??d have to be yelling FIRE or spilling the beans about an affair you had with a politician for 209 words and one link to have any pizzazz.

But this is confirmed by a more prescriptive analysis reported in a blog called Modern Life, which tells us that �??it may be worthwhile considering that most popular blogs have an average of 100-250 words per article.�??

There it is again: popularity. �??All of the really popular blogs�?��?? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Reminds me of the advice, �??All of the really popular girls drink plenty of water�?� and apply makeup carefully.�??

A quick analysis of the last 30 posts of my own blog reveals a factor of ten discrepancy. Yes. That�??s right. Almost an entire order of magnitude. My blog posts range from a terse, emotional 550 word post about the airlines�?? current ban on liquids to a whopping 4500 word analysis of the fly-over states�?? appeal (what can I say? It�??s a large area to cover in a single post). My mean post length is a bulky 1968 words, only a medium-length sentence short of 2K.

The link situation is even worse. On average I�??m 20 times more profligate with my links than the study sample; my mean is 18 links per post, with a high of 51 in the post about the Middle West and a low of one lonely link in the short post about the new airport security regulations. You�??ve got to link though�??what�??s the point of hypertext if you don�??t link?

Okay. I admit it. Michael is right. My prolixity is worrisome.

The posts look even more daunting as hardcopy. I archive them by printing them out and stashing them in a three-ring binder. A year�??s worth of posts has filled a big ol�?? 3�?? 3-ring binder that used to hold the business plan for a failed start-up called Public Mind. I must�??ve used a whole ream of paper printing all these posts out. And surely it was an obsessive effort to use my dinky 3-hole punch to put holes in them.

So, yeah, it�??s exhausting to read my blog posts�??and even more exhausting to print and file them�??but I have to admit that it�??s exhilarating to write them.

I used to just talk to myself instead, gesticulating and sometimes frothing at the mouth to get my point across. Occasionally I�??d grip myself by the collar and shout in my own face. It�??s a technique honed by many years of riding public transportation and observing Muni riders far more schooled in auto-conversationalism than I am.

But blog posts? Much better than talking to myself. I can link and illustrate! I can fact-check! I can make up stuff! (�??I saw Thomas Pynchon at the taquería on Mission and 24th. He was wearing lime green golf pants and eating a breakfast burrito.�??) I can violate copyright! (Take that, M. Mouse! Take that!) I can name-drop! And no-one watching me thinks I�??m a crazy person. My wild gesticulations will never tear a Picasso.

And�??best of all�??my posts come up when innocent people google for meat bees, Lester Gas, the Midnight Mysogynist, pig catapult, and other terms of art.

They�??re looking for information; they�??re looking for re-assurance; they�??re looking for an address, a phone number, or store hours. They�??re looking for built-in dinettes.

And they get me instead. Chattering away.

Sometimes they don�??t just leave; they add great comments. Bill Dearing, the fellow who penned the Bat Brain comic I liked so much while I was at UMass, amended one of my posts with vital context. Erich Schneider had something to say about dining out in College Station (for better or worse). Susie straightened out my misapprehensions about minty French breath. And several anonymous readers ID�??d my yellow fungus; I�??d have never figured out what it was.

There is, of course, a solution for my obsessive fascination with words. A time-honored solution. One that�??s worked in the past.

I need an editor.

My prose�??ll turn crisp and clear, like one of Hemingway�??s trout streams.

But after all is said and done, I bet when Mom reads this post (which weighs in at a sleek 1800 words) she�??ll say,

�??Your last blog was so short. Are you not feeling well?"

reunion secession

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:27:00 +0000

Every summer thousands�??maybe even billions�??of high school and college reunions are staged at venues across the US. Optimistic ex-students, usually larger, older, and more garrulous versions of their former selves, show up in a variety of hotel ballrooms, country clubs, and probably even high school gymnasiums and subject themselves to different forms of nostalgia and ritual humiliation. There might even be some self-administered anesthesia to numb the pain and a deejay who can spin Truckin�?? without grimacing.

Why do they do it? Why?

I�??m missing one of mine, a significant college reunion, right now. There was intense speculation beforehand about who would show up and who would shirk. I was lucky. I was irretrievably and uncontroversially busy this week, so I didn�??t have to think about whether it�??d be a good idea or not.

I neither had to goad myself into it nor talk myself out of it.

In fact, the only reunion I�??ve ever attended�??willingly or otherwise�??was a high school reunion marking one of those decade anniversaries. And that was quite a few years ago now.

My high school no longer exists, at least conceptually. Physically, the small complex of penitentiary-like buildings on the corner of Hawthorne and Silver Spur is still standing, is still the same ugly colorless color, and still has the capacity to evoke my high school days, both pleasant and not so pleasant. The buildings have no street-facing windows: perhaps that�??s why I think of them as penitentiary-like; it�??s not as if there�??s actually razor wire and guard towers, although it�??s easy to sketch them in to round out my recollections of the place.

The only thing that�??s changed is the name. The school board renamed the school in 1991, probably in honor of the Gulf War. Rolling Hills High School became Palos Verdes Peninsula High School and the mascot changed from a generic Greek mythological figure to a generic predatory feline. I think the school colors were ditched too, which was probably for the best, since blue and gold seem awfully dated and mid-century by now.

Judging from the website, the core nature of the students may have changed too. They look to be more ambitious, more driven, more achievement-oriented. Not so apt to stroll into Biology with bare sandy feet and a lame excuse:

�??Oh? Me? I went to the beach. I, like, totally forgot there was school today.�??

Unlike the hard-toiling pioneers of yesterday or today's Ivy League bound scholars, my class was not afflicted with any work ethic. We had it made and we knew it.

I was bounced from school near the end of my junior year. I�??m still not sure why. I blame society.

I�??ll spare you the details. But for one reason or another, I did not graduate with my class. In spite of this, I have a very strong sense of which class is mine. The year I left RHHS, gracelessly, with no-one�??s particular blessing, without a handshake and sans diploma, was NOT my senior year and the graduating class that year was NOT my graduating class.

Period. End of story. If I�??d been in that class, I would�??ve gotten a senior picture, one of those marvelous black-and-white headshots with all of the zits airbrushed off. Furthermore, I had to carve out my own fucking-off time; real seniors had a sanctioned period�??from receipt of college acceptance letters to graduation�??to exist in a sublime state of apathy.

I had to make my own disaffection and keep it fresh.

Yet, unlike many of my fellow geeks and perpetual misfits, I didn�??t hate high school.

And because of all this, I�??ve always had LESS incentive to go to my high school reunions. It seems like people go to these things because they�??ve changed. They�??ve lost 100 pounds. They�??ve made 100 million dollars. They�??ve married Heather Locklear. They�??ve had 10 kids. They�??ve found God. They�??ve come out. They�??ve survived a life-threatening illness. They�??ve found their true calling, be it real estate, face reading, prostitution, ambulance chasing, or performing a sword balancing dance.

They�??ve been busy, but it�??s rewarding. Or so they say.

I haven�??t changed a bit. Not really. I�??ve done none of the above. I'm not particularly busy and it hasn't been particularly rewarding. And I�??ve barely even bought new clothes or parted my hair differently.

Nothing to show. Just a few wrinkles and some keratosis. Go home folks. There�??s nothing to see. Just go home.

I went to one of these dreadful affairs anyway, against my own better judgment. Robert Chess had something to do with it. �??I�??ll go if you go,�?? he told me. It was before he�??d met his wife and before his wife had the triplets. He was still up for a dare.

So he went and I went too.

It�??s just like your mother said: �??If your friends went out and jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?�?? It�??s an important piece of wisdom about social dynamics and the nature of peer pressure.

The reunion was in a ballroom at the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown LA. That was a peculiar venue for the event and most certainly should�??ve been seen as a warning sign. Why would a high school reunion be held 270-odd blocks from the actual scene of the crime? Especially in LA, where none of us had probably spent any significant time downtown when we were growing up.

Robert and I arrived together, looked in at the registration desk, did a snappy about-face, and took the express elevator up to the top floor bar.

Did I mention that I crashed my high school reunion? Just for old time�??s sake. I�??ve always been a determined and exuberant party-crasher. It�??s a symptom of my low self-esteem: It�??s not going to be much of a party if somebody�??s thought to invite me.

Once Robert and I had overcome our initial resistance and walked in to the hotel ballroom, I realized I knew almost no-one. Who were these people chomping the cherry tomatoes off the top of the baby spring greens on their salad plates? Party hearty, dude! Did I actually go to high school with a guy who looks like a game show host?

Oh. That�??s the waiter. A hotel staffer. Oh.

He did look a little less bleary than everyone else. His face had less sun damage. And he was circulating from table to table with one of those gravy boats of vinaigrette.

Not in my class, nor the one before. A waiter. Should�??ve figured that one out.

Most of my reunion-ing female classmates had the great good sense to wear generic black cocktail dresses; and most of my male classmates had the great good sense not to�??not a cross-dresser visible in the bunch. The women showed a tasteful amount of décolleté. They�??d applied evening make-up. In fact, they knew what evening make-up was.

Me? Still clueless after all these years.

My creased trousers and enormous David-Byrne style suit coat in last year�??s color (remarkably close to the color of the high school itself) put me squarely in the small camp of Out Lesbians. Not even the fashion no-nothings wore outfits like that: they overcompensated by wearing what looked for all the world like souped-up versions of their high school prom dresses. Poufy and foufy. Acres of sherbet chiffon.

I ducked under the table when someone came around with a camera.

But it was all right. Why would I care? Besides Robert, only a couple of my old friends (Jim Swift, Sarah Susanka (nee Hills), Linda Satchwell, and Bruce Mirken) saw fit to show up. Pictures should�??ve been the least of my fears.

The thing is, everyone else we hung out with in high school had figured out that you don�??t go to reunions.

This is where all the guys who went to USC and majored in Business surfaced. It was a big high school and a 700-person graduating class, but you�??d think I�??d know more than 5 people at the reunion.

Maybe I didn�??t go to high school at all. Maybe it was all a simulacra, like Las Vegas. After all, my high school years marked the period when Baudrillard and hyperreality were really taking hold.

Or maybe the reunion itself was the simulacra, a phenomenon that takes advantage of the fact that we never really recognize our classmates at these things. Instead we rely on implanted memories stirred by the bio-sheets the organizers collect beforehand. There�??s really only one reunion for all of the high schools in LA and all of these middle-aged people at this one are actually strangers.

High school? What high school? Reunion? What reunion?

This is just a Twilight Zone episode, a failed Candid Camera stunt.

By the time the next reunion came around, when I asked Bruce whether he was going again, he said, �??Part of me is tempted, but the more sane part of me says I have better things to do.�??

So he didn�??t go and neither did I.

But you might argue, this time you�??re skipping your *college* reunion and college reunions are nothing like high school reunions. Nothing at all.

Of course, I know nothing of the ways in which college reunions differ from high school reunions; I�??ve never been to one. In my imagination, these reunions are venues for intense networking with past and future Nobel Prize winners and captains of industry. You clink glasses with Ed, who sat in front of you in sophomore physics recitation. Back then, you fixated on the large pustulant boil on the back of his neck, along a 30 degree arc offset from his right earlobe. Now you are listening with fascination as he details his results on identifying the Higgs Boson.

Or you sit opposite from Bill, who has launched five ridiculously successful technology ventures and now sits on the board of Fortune 100 companies when he�??s not racing in America�??s Cup. You note that he�??s no easier to converse with now than he was at Frosh Camp. Not a bit easier. That doesn�??t mean that he�??s silent. Oh no. Anything but. He holds forth. You�??ll get your turn to hold forth too�??just hang on. The airspace between you will open up for your own monologue in another five minutes.

See? My imagination has done a swell job of dissuading me.

That and the Seminar Day booklet which promises me technical and scientific talks offered up by other alums and current faculty. One demystifying snowflake formation. Another about the hindgut microbial communities of termites. A third about stress accumulation at tectonic plate boundaries.

You get the picture: talks aimed at the people who remember the math and science they learned during four grueling undergraduate years (or twelve grueling undergraduate years, depending).

Me? I travel light. I�??ve likely forgotten everything I learned in four years of a powerful science education that left me reeling and listing 84.5 degrees off the horizontal toward the humanities, a cognitive Tower of Pisa. I�??m better off with the Discovery Channel. Really I am. Seminar Day is a waste on me, an absolute waste.

I�??m not much of a networker either; I liked the people I knew while I was a student at Caltech, but�??like high school�??those aren�??t the people who�??ll go. You go to network with the people you didn�??t meet in college because they were in their rooms, busy studying, achieving, striving, fulfilling their academic ambitions.

The people who don�??t continue to be a source of disappointment to their advisors well into their advisors�?? emeritus years.

The people who�??ve schlepped down to Pasadena for this thing are the same people who were attacking those problem sets that I was trying desperately to avoid. The students, in fact, who were attacking them with relish, since I know that even my favorite source of completed problem sets, Jeff (not his real name) Klein, isn�??t going. And they can probably still do second order partial differential equations or Fourier Transforms. They remember more than the right hand rule for sorting out the direction for the magnetic field and force.

Damn them!

Yep. They were off trolling, while Gesine, Big Doug, and I were in the Dabney House lounge pretending we were a Sixties cover band.

And that�??s the thing: the reunion I�??m missing isn�??t just a Caltech reunion, but a Dabney House reunion.

Unless you went to Caltech, there�??s no reason you�??d know the significance of the student house reunions. The idea of student houses isn�??t all that unique�??lots of universities have these residential arrangements that are more frat-like than dorm-like�??but, as the Alumni Association has sussed out, the student houses are at the root of alum allegiance and thus alum fundraising.

Yet I have the feeling that the reunion effect will still hold true; you�??d be going to reclaim something that isn�??t really there anymore. The fact that wine and cheese are the refreshments they�??re serving at the reception says a world about then and now. And you can bet it�??s not Night Train Express and Cheez-Whiz.

Although�?� if I went, at least I could get away with not wearing my little black cocktail dress.

commuting my sentence

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Wed, 09 May 2007 23:57:00 +0000

I�??ve joined the rest of you commuters.

Just in the nick of time, the April 16th issue of The New Yorker featured an Annals of Transport article titled There and Back Again. Nick Paumgarten started his piece by reporting that the Midas Muffler Company gave their award for America�??s longest commute to an engineer at Cisco who drives 372 miles each day to San Jose and back home.

Do you know the way to San Jose? Bert Bacharach apparently believed that you drove there once and stayed.

Got that? You only need to know the way to San Jose. And that's that.

I don�??t drive nearly 186 miles to get to Mountain View (which is not far from San Jose). It�??s only 35 or so miles from my house to my office down scenic California Highway 101.

Not far at all by the standards of the people described in the New Yorker article. And unlike them, I�??m not �??pumped up, ready to go�?? when I get to work. No, nothing of the sort. I�??m by no means invigorated, nor am I ready to evangelize the commute. I�??m stiff and groggy when I get to Mountain View. I�??m not tempted to understate the length of time I spend in the car.

And I�??m thinking, I could have been blogging. Napping. Walking. Working.

I could�??ve been brushing and flossing my teeth in preparation for some kind of dental hygiene award. I could�??ve been exfoliating until my skin was as smooth as a baby�??s behind. I could�??ve read several chapters of a Richard Ford novel�??stopping to ponder over the semantics of larky-farkying�??or written this post.

I could�??ve investigated what happened to the bees. Both mine and everyone else's.

Instead I�??ve read cryptic billboards about Ask�??s algorithms, envied the pampered youngsters who work at Google (tap-tapping away on their laptops while the Bauer�??s Limo service delivers them door-to-door), yelled �??Get off the fucking phone and drive, assmunch!�?? to my fellow commuters, screamed in fear as an inattentive DeSoto cab driver changes lanes to occupy the same space as my little white Honda, and gasped as a Yahama 600cc sport bike splits lanes 3 inches from my right door (and a half inch from my right mirror).

I�??m not a commuting lightweight either. I came of age�??motor vehicle-wise�??driving on the 405 in LA. It�??s no accident that after I�??d spent a few years wrapped up in one of these cross-city commutes, Pasadena to Santa Monica, I decided to look for my first job out of graduate school close to home. Close enough to bicycle. In fact, close enough to bicycle in the rain. I didn�??t care what I did or whom I worked for; I just wanted to be able to bike to work.

I didn�??t violate this principle until recently.

Highway 101, the spine of Silicon Valley, is a pistol, a real pistol. �??Race track rules,�?? Mark tells me.

The primal urge is to react with anger, to yell �??Fuck you, motherfucker! Fuck you!�?? each time an Audi or Beemer cuts you off, parallel parking between you and the white panel van ahead of you. Parallel parking at 80 mph. The white panel van has a Wild 94.9 bumpersticker. The Audi is fresh from the dealer and doesn�??t have license plates yet. The Beemer has a $5000 crunch on his left rear fender.

You can get carpal tunnel syndrome giving that many people the finger. Really you can.

Just calm down.

I�??d like to be more like David Byrne. Remember the beginning of True Stories? Where David Byrne�??as the Narrator�??said in a dreamy voice:

Well, I suppose these freeways made this town�?� and many others�?� possible. They�??re the cathedrals of our time. There are names for the various kinds of freeway drivers. The �??slingshotter�??�?� the �??adventurer�??�?� the �??marshmallow�??�?� the �??nomad�??�?� the �??weaver.�?? It�??s fancy driving�?� Things that never had names before now are easily described. It makes conversation easy�?�

It�??s hard to feel that calm, that surreal, that absorbed. It�??s hard to resist giving someone the finger.

True Stories is a movie. David Byrne is a narrator. This is life. I�??m a salaryman.

Wild 94.9 brings me back to reality. Is that Steven Seaweed playing AC/DC on 107.7 The Bone? AOR. REO. Time has stood still on decency-loving Clear Channel stations. Dark Side of the Moon is still number one. Didn�??t I have not one, but three, Dark Side of the Moon posters on my dorm room wall when I was a freshman? I feel myself ossifying even though I�??ve just listened briefly. It�??s dangerous to tune in too long; someone might see you singing along with �??Walk This Way.�??

Some people, people who are otherwise reasonable and pleasant, would suggest that I listen to KQED, 88.5, National Public Radio and drive on Highway 280, which advertises itself as the �??World�??s Most Beautiful Freeway.�??

Yeah. Yeah. Both have their moments.

I remember listening to Terry Gross interview a writer who�??d written a book about suicide bombers. The writer was talking about the changes of heart that unsuccessful bombers sometimes experienced. �??What about the successful bombers?�?? Terry asked him. �??Do they ever have similar changes of heart?�?? I remember the writer as being very polite. Possibly more polite than I was, there in my white Honda.

�??Think about it, Terry,�?? I said back to my radio. �??Think about it very carefully. For godssake!�??

And of course Highway 280 has honest-to-god sights, not just the carpet of California poppies in the spring.

Junipero Serra, monkish symbol of repression of California�??s indigenous people, points the way along the curvy part of the freeway just north of the Highway 92 junction.

The Flintstone house, that famous blobby 1970s architectural experiment. Tasteless? Yes. Likeable? Even more so. Look: it could�??ve been avocado green or carpeted with shag on the outside. Instead its only crime is formlessness.

Compare and contrast these concrete loofahs on the peninsula�??s burnished hills with Berkeley�??s scruffy Whale House. It�??s no contest.

But these two high points, the Flintstone House and Terry Gross�??s disarming interviewing techniques, are only recognizable as such because the rest is so darned boring.

KQED and Highway 280 just aren�??t for me. No controversy. No billboards. No bumperstickers. The Audis and Beemers weave through the slower traffic with balletic precision, but there are no white panel vans, no Camrys with outsized JC Whitney spoilers. Just rich people, wide lanes, and German engineering.

KQED and Highway 280: boring, boring, boring.

You know I�??m going to eat my words, don�??t you?

There�??s but so long the billboards and signage can keep you entertained. For awhile, Ask.com sponsored a horrible advertising campaign that even mystified geeks whizzing along high tech commute routes like 101. Stuff like �??THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSEY�?? and �??THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES�?? and �??THE UNABOMBER HATES THE ALGORITHM.�?? Huh? Talk about in-jokes.

Then there�??s the IKEA sign that�??s just a little too high tech for its own good: it regularly promotes the Internet Explorer error �??The page cannot be displayed.�?? Certainly not an appropriate message for an IKEA sign.

Perhaps it should say instead, �??Do not despair. There are often parts left over. Your Flarb will still stand sturdily.�?? or �??Leftover parts present a choking hazard to children and small dogs. Dispose of carefully.�?? or even �??Here are five project ideas that involve hex wrenches and broken pieces of particle board.�??

So, yes, I did get tired of reading the signs. I�??ve never felt tempted to Thrive at the behest of my HMO or use Blinkx or go to the thoroughbred races at Bay Meadows.

But you don�??t really get bored on 101 when you get tired of the signs and the radio; you get angry. No-one, the reasoning goes, knows how to drive anymore. Either there are geriatrics (everyone older than oneself) clogging up the fast lane with their moralistic 65 mph pace-setting, or there are testosterone fueled Type A drivers (everyone crazier than oneself) buzzing and zipping imprudently close.

I would go crazy if I didn�??t find something to do besides attending to how everyone else drives.

Some people talk on their phones. Other people talk to themselves. I�??ve discovered the wonders of podcasts.

This is not to say that all podcasts are wonderful. It seems to be all too easy for terminal bores to adopt the medium. You can include as many pointless details as you desire in a podcast: an hour talking about a first date where you feel the need to account for subway stops, coffee shops, and poker games.

I was lucky. The first podcast I found was Gem�??s Misadventures in Taiwan. Gem is an art student studying animation at the Tainan National University of the Arts. And she�??s got stories to tell about the night market, about tiny crabs, about the sights and sounds of the Taiwanese countryside. She talks very fast and she�??s very funny. I burned through her podcasts during the first couple weeks of my commute.

And here�??s where I eat my words. I�??d listened to This American Life before, but not regularly. It�??s on at some time I never listen to the radio. Sunday at noon or something like that. So I�??d only caught snippets.

I�??m hooked.

HOOKED!

Sure: at times it�??s maudlin. But no-one sees you weeping in the car. It�??s more discreet than picking your nose.

Like heroin, the first This American Life is free for the downloading. It�??s only $.95/dose thereafter, which would be a fine price. Except they�??re not MP3s. They�??re instead M4Ps, Apple�??s DRM-protected iTunes format. Dyslexic people refer to them as MP4s.

Curse you, Apple!

I�??m certainly willing to buy This American Life. And I promise not to distribute it. But I want to play it on a device that doesn�??t run the iTunes codec.

Curse you, Apple! May hackers eat your lunch! And steal your lunch money too. You and your smarmy hipster corporate branding army. If you were *really* hip, I�??d be able to listen to This American Life on my non-standard non-iPod device. Apparently the only solution is to burn and re-rip it. Or trust one of those DRM removal tools.

But I�??ve been mollified by Slate�??s numerous podcasts. June Thomas with her subtle accent (is that a hint of Glasgow? According to the web site, June hails from Manchester) is the foreign correspondent who records the Explainers, questions from the day�??s news. Those are fun. Emily Bazelon, who�??s part of the political gabfest, has a reassuringly girlish voice. Not the voice of a radio announcer. She�??s my new best friend in the car. I can picture these podcasters crammed into their tiny, dingy conference room, eating potato chips left over from box lunches consumed during an earlier meeting.

Podcasting doesn�??t require many resources.

I�??ve picked and chosen among recordings of my favorite writers. There�??s not enough David Sedaris nor Amy Sedaris: to the microphones, my favorite functional/dysfunctional family members! To the microphones! Richard Ford reads Raymond Carver. Jeremy Irons reads Nabokov. But, in general, writers don�??t seem to read much and often it isn�??t even their own stuff. You�??ve got to fight with the DRM of books on CD.

It�??s a long drive from San Francisco to Mountain View.

A penny for your thoughts.

Especially if you podcast them for me.

the case for lowercase

noreply@blogger.com (Cathy) — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:38:00 +0000

"PLEASE CALL ME TO DISCUSS." Stockbroker Gordon�??s email to me has been typed with the Caps Lock on.

Great Aunt Frances is fond of using uppercase for her email too; if you keep the sentences brief and the punctuation minimal, email messages revive the now-defunct art of composing telegrams. Perhaps she's even found a discount ISP who charges her by the word.

If I may quote my great aunt:

"FUNERAL SUNDAY.. VERY SAD..KEEP IN TOUCH ALL SAME HERE LOVE"

Brief. Sad and succinct. Evocative. Except for the stray adverb and the stuttered periods, Aunt Frances's uppercase lets us know the gravity of the message. You can almost hear the STOPs.

And when Gordon writes, "PLEASE CALL ME TO DISCUSS," I�??m convinced that I need to pick up the phone. Today. Before the stock market crashes. Or more likely, immediately after it crashes. He's not exactly shouting at me (which would be the original interpretation of an all uppercase message, back in the heyday of email etiquette manuals), but he is typing loudly. I can visualize keycaps flying off the keyboard as he hammers out his message to me.

Back in 1985, I remember Rand Corporation's Norm Shapiro and Bob Anderson writing a monograph called Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail. You can still buy it from Rand for $20 if you�??re so inclined. Or you can just download it like I did.

If your ISP doesn�??t charge by the word.

Norm and his co-author not only advised us to �??Shoot with a rifle, not a shotgun�?? (good advice whether you�??re hunting varmints or hammering out email); they also warned us, �??Never say anything in an electronic message that you wouldn�??t want appearing, and attributed to you, in tomorrow morning�??s front-page headline in The New York Times.�??

Aha! So this is how The New York Times has been coming up with those headlines; I knew I�??d seen them somewhere. They just added initial caps and forgot the attribution. But I�??d been under the misapprehension that the Rand report was the one that cautioned against profligate use of uppercase. It wasn�??t. Yet plenty of email etiquette manuals did, back when the whole idea of manners in cyberspace didn�??t make most people roll their eyes.

In their email style manual, the Yale University Library web site cautions:

�??Do not capitalize whole words that are not titles. Capitalizing is generally interpreted as SHOUTING to your reader.�??

SHOUTING. How quaint.

But I�??m certain that neither Aunt Frances nor Gordon are really shouting. I�??m not sure how the Caps Lock key has become stuck on their respective keyboards, but I do realize that accidents of this sort are more common than one would think.

I once had a bad laptop accident involving my Sony VAIO, a 12 ounce bottle of Widmer Hefeweizen with a lemon slice, and a smallish tub of sweet and salty pickled ginger. I�??ll spare you the details, but I�??ll elaborate only so far as to say that even after I used the hotel room hairdryer and all the towels in the room to mop up my poor laptop, I was still typing things like, �??tgV&JKM.:: HD:jslDXXF�?? when what I meant to say was �??Hi Jon, Greetings from Redmond.�??

By then, the pickled ginger had rendered all the hotel towels a bright purple-pink and I�??d figured out why I never use those hotel room hair dryers. Surely an instrument that is insufficiently powerful to dry my keyboard would never be able to dry my hair. And how could such an ineffectual hair dryer smell like that?

Uppercase-only email messages now seem almost as old-fashioned as the injunctions against them. It is far more common to receive a quick email dashed off in all lowercase, typed in the dual-thumb method on a Blackberry.

A few people (and I'm not naming names here) have decided they're through with uppercase for good and insist on signing their names -- which would involve just a couple of capital letters at best -- all in lowercase. In fact, they correct you if you dare to fix things up.

�??If it�??s good enough for e. e. cummings, it�??s good enough for me�?? they seem to shout louder than an all-caps signature ever could.

Even though it sounds like I'm disparaging those lions of lowercase, they�??ve had their effect. Now I�??m doing signing off in lowercase too, lest I seem unfriendly or overly formal.

cathy. cathy. cathy.

Cathy�??s never going to seem like a formal name anyhow. Even my mother believes I should�??ve reclaimed the more dignified and seemly Catherine by now. Catherine the Great. Catherine de Medici. Catherine of Aragon. Cathy�??s a cheerleader�??s name, the name of a perky girl who can do a proper cartwheel and evince school spirit at the drop of a megaphone.

A quick look through my email tells me that I�??m not the only one self-conscious about the capitalization question.

lowercase=fun, informal, friendly
uppercase=loud, stuffy, carpal-tunnel prone

Lately though the lowercase trend has become more pervasive than just in my email or riffling through the output of mid-century poets. Last week I took Muni down to Civic Center to meet Francoise and her niece Clemence at the Asian Art Museum. The Asian Art Museum �?? as you would expect �?? maintains the permanence and dignity of capital letters chiseled in granite. Muni does not.

Or, more accurately, Muni no longer does.

I didn't notice the change at the Castro Street station, where I embarked (do you embark onto Muni? Sounds less sticky than the actual experience feels). I was too busy eavesdropping on the girl explaining to her boyfriend that Harvey Milk was �??a senator or something from around here�?? to catch the altered signage.

Nor did I catch the Church Street sign as it passed by the window. Muni wasn't crowded yet and I scarcely paid attention to what was going on as we rumbled under Market Street.

At Van Ness, finally, I noticed.

Was that van ness I espied on the station sign? I remained alert. Perhaps I mis-saw. Perhaps I�??ve had one too many Robo-tini.

civic center. Indeed. The perfectly respectable CIVIC CENTER stop had become civic center.

civic center indeed.

I shivered slightly. Lowercase in public places has always seemed so self-consciously hip, like those Mac vs. PC ads that make you love stodgy old John Hodgman rather than that smarmy hip guy that Apple expects you to love. Legislated hipness.

I like conventional signage. I�??m sorry. Lowercase seems so transient. So flaky. So outdated from the get-go.

Not that this latest move surprises me. Muni�??s always exhibited signs of multiple personality disorder. Look at their weird op-art logo. And Streleski �?? you�??d think that a municipal transportation organization that embraced lowercase signage wouldn�??t be so quick to fire Ted Streleski (or should I say �??ted streleski�??) when they were alerted to his past hijinks. But they did. They dropped Mr. Streleski from their programming rolls like a hot ball-peen hammer.

Muni: Make up your mind! Radical not-so-rapid transit organization or quaint refurbisher of cable cars? Adjunct to the mental health system (after all, Muni harbors more genuine crazies than Camarillo does) or symbol of urban elitism? Muni: Major character in Pynchon�??s The Crying of Lot 49 or backdrop for Clint Eastwood and Don Johnson? Which will it be?

Gordon and Aunt Frances: You keep going with the uppercase.

As for me, the jury is still out about capitalization. I guess it�??ll depend on what I spill on my keyboard next.