Torrential Parentheses

#143 - Dishing It Out

2012-01-28T12:33:00.000-08:00

Dishing It Out

1/28/12 (#143)

Why have dishes and silverware if you're not going to use them?

That was the inside joke at our house to justify a sink cluttered with dirty plates and bowls, coffee mugs stuffed with so much flatware they resembled metallic hedgehogs or some found-art installation. My wife and I both dislike washing dishes, so for years, we simply wouldn't do it until we had to. When one of us would inevitably be forced to stir coffee with a butter knife or contemplate eating cereal with a serving ladle, we would resign ourselves to the task and invest two or three hours into cleaning and returning every item to its respective shelf or drawer. It was a massive undertaking, but it only takes one serving of coffee from a Tupperware container to know that you've reached the end of your dishware tether.

While we were equally willing to build mock city skylines with piles of dishes of varying heights, I am better able to tolerate dismantling the towers — it satisfies my latent obsessive/compulsive tendencies, the dish rack becoming a blank canvas and filling every square inch an art form. An hour into excavating the porcelain midden we formerly used as our sink, the dish rack bowed under the weight of its contents, items propped and dangling with such precarious complexity that it called to mind the finale of a Cirque de Soleil show. At this point I would back away slowly and say to my wife in my best Nigel Tufnell, "Don't touch it. Don't even point at it."

When I was staying at my Mom's house this past summer, I noticed that she washed the dishes every night. Once the food-consumption portion of the evening was done (which for her meant "dinner", while in our house that means "post-prime-time chip raid") she would quickly and efficiently clean the kitchen before settling down to relax for the evening. As a result, every morning, the kitchen was spotless and inviting. Her favorite coffee mug was sitting next to the coffee maker, not buried under the rubble of a three-course meal. I know, it was a simple, deliberate routine that made this happen, yet every morning it seemed like magic.

Of course, applying this simple, deliberate routine to my own home was akin to telling a would-be dieter, "So you just eat healthier food and less of it." Yes, simple to describe — the challenge is in the execution. I have things I want to write, Words with Friends games to play, bad TV I need to watch then scoff at — there simply wasn't time for washing dishes every day. Anyone who would argue otherwise does not understand the depths of my laziness. (To help you put it in perspective, I watch reruns of Chopped. I know what dishes they're creating, I know who wins, and there is nothing to be gained from watching it. But it is so much easier to watch it than to get up and do something productive.)

By the beginning of Winter, an opportunity for changing my mindset finally arrived — my wife's birthday. I'm ashamed to admit this, but I'm not a great gift-giver. I fret over what to get her every year, wanting to give her something that's creative, thoughtful, useful, and not an item of clutter. Along with the creative gift (read: clutter) that my daughter and I made for her, I also made her a pledge: She would not have to wash dishes for an entire year. This might not be a fun gift to pull out of box, but if ever there was a gift that keeps on giving, this was it. Needless to say, she loved the idea of the gift, even if she was skeptical about delivery.

But I'm delivering. It required a complete lifestyle change, but knowing I have a few of my mom's genes in me, I knew it was possible. I abandoned my previous ignore-as-long-as-possible approach and made dish washing part of my daily ritual. The gift was intended to benefit my wife, but I've realized essential benefits for myself:

I'm smarter, which has nothing to do with dishes but everything to do with the audio books I listen to while I wash. It is so nice to have a warm voice whispering some writer's brilliant words into my ears, transporting me to some faraway place where no one is scrubbing meat residue from the bottom of a no-it's-not-non-stick pan.
I'm not dumber, which is how I often feel when I watch television. I'm not against TV as a media form, as there are many thought-provoking and informative shows available to the viewer. But in my case, I'm just as likely to watch Wipeout, the obstacle-course competition that celebrates contestants being bludgeoned by giant padded apparatuses. (Mindless? Yes. Fun? Also yes.)
There's magic in the house, just like there was at my Mom's house. Every morning, I step into the kitchen and revel in the cleanliness, knowing we won't need to move a pile of plates to find space for making our daughter's lunch. You might think this would eventually cease to be noteworthy, but 60 days in, it is a daily delight. And since I'm not the type to take the good things in my life for granted, I expect this will remain a delight.

It hasn't been a seamless transition — my hands are getting dry and cracked, and I'm struggling to find a dish glove that affords the dexterity I prefer when washing dishes. But the bottom line is this: My wife is happier, and isn't that the ultimate goal of a birthday gift?

You may be expecting a feel-good-movie ending to this essay, a thoughtful summarization of how the value I've found in this finite, focused task has expanded to other parts of my life. Nope. My office desk still resembles a paper-only time capsule, my workshop looks the before picture on a power tool safety poster, and the basement continues to look like an amateur audition for Hoarders.

But c'mon, my favorite coffee mug is always clean. How much magic can one house accommodate?

#142 - Men In Pink

2012-01-09T22:57:00.000-08:00

Men In Pink

1/9/12 (#142)

I have gender issues. Not with being a man (I'm smart enough to I appreciate the good fortune my chromosomal composition has afforded me in America) but with the way our culture continues to define gender, and by reflex, the expectations of each gender. Specifically, what it is to be a "man".

For instance, I wear pink shirts. I like pink shirts. Not as much as blue or white shirts, but enough that I'm glad to have the option to add that color to the palette of my life. That shouldn't be worthy of note, any more than liking yellow shirts, yet at the office recently a woman said, "I like your shirt. It takes a confident man to wear a pink shirt."

Actually, it doesn't. If I could bottle self-doubt, I could make a fortune — though the product seems to be in plentiful supply, so I can't imagine who would buy it. What it takes to wear a pink shirt is fatigue with blue and white and plaid and whatever other shirts a man has in his closet. It's not just me — I work with other guys who wear pink shirts, and if you believe some people's prevailing wisdom, we're either a troupe of swaggering mavericks who boldly thumb our noses at conventional perceptions of manliness, or we're a bunch of dandies. In fact, I DO thumb my nose at the archaic yet common conventions of masculinity in our society — but it has nothing to do with a pink shirt. Because a pink shirt is just a shirt that happens to be pink. I'm not making a statement, I'm simply aware that with ivory-colored khakis and a brown suit jacket, a pink shirt looks quite nice.

I was recently in a Facebook "conversation" (my euphemism for the exchange of opposing viewpoints that follow many posts) about women who ask their men to get tampons or hair dye at the store, and one female commenter stated that any man who would buy these things "doesn't have a man card." This strikes me as a juvenile approach to both menstrual cycles and grocery shopping. I have no problem buying tampons — I know the brand and box my wife prefers, and I don't feel a need to disguise the product in a larger pile of groceries. That doesn't make me less of a man, nor more of a man - it makes me a shopper. If tampons are on the list, it would be ridiculous for me to tell my wife she needs to make a special trip to the store after I've returned with all of the other groceries because I am honor-bound by my Y chromosome to avoid the feminine hygiene aisle.

It was that exchange that enlightened me to a flaw in my thinking: Historically, I have blamed the ongoing delineation of gender roles on men. I thought feminism was working to make women genuine equals, and it was vestiges of the old-boy network that perpetuated the narrow idea of "manly" behavior. This bias was based on my personal observation that many men remain very much hung up on being "manly" - choosing a manly drink at the bar (because what kind of pussy would order a drink with grenadine in it?) or driving a manly car (which explains why VW is trying to define their new Beetle as manly) or refusing to wear a pink shirt. I find these attitudes misguided, but they're common, and I've come to begrudgingly accept it. My error was in thinking that I was taking the women's side on this, because I've been noticing lately that women are just as likely to have a skewed gender perspective.

I remember my wife (before she was my wife) pointing out a "starter" toolkit at one of the big box stores, made for someone who wanted to have basic tools in their home: hammer, pliers, screwdrivers, saw, wire cutters, and an assortment of nails and screws. What made this set noteworthy? Every handle was pink, and they were all encased in a box labeled "Her Toolkit." (In a flowing font that looked like it had been lifted from the front of a cheerleading outfit.) My wife laughed because she owned a black-handled, non-gender-specific hammer, because she never perceived a hammer as an outlet to express her femininity - she simply wanted something that could drive a nail into the drywall. The idea of someone marketing a pink-handled hammer to her was absurd. Of course, she only felt that way because it was absurd.

Another example: a woman called my friend's hardware store and asked to talk with a deck specialist. They sent the call to the resident desk specialist, an experienced woman with a deep knowledge of materials, construction, and local zoning ordinances. The caller asked again to speak with a desk specialist. "That's me," the salesperson insisted, "how can I help?" In short order, it became clear that the caller didn't want to speak to the smartest desk specialist in the store - she wanted to speak to a male deck specialist. Because men really know that kind of stuff, you know? Satisfying the caller meant transferring the line to a less-qualified male employee. Fortunately, they had such a person on staff.

I know that I'm not exposing some seedy, secret underbelly of American culture. This is par-for-the-course even in the 21st century, and that's exactly why I'm speaking of it. These attitudes get reinforced every day, and too many people seem to shrug it off as "just the way things are." We can blame marketers who create ad campaigns like Dr. Pepper 10's inane "It's not for women" or beer ads that contribute catchphrases like "man card" to the cultural dialogue; we can blame Hollywood for perpetuating gender stereotypes under the guise of "that's what audiences respond to"; we can blame anyone and everyone, but there comes a time when we have to accept some responsibility ourselves. Yes, it's the way things are, but it's not the way things ought to be.

With all the negativity that life can throw at us - job insecurity, health scares, resource depletion, domestic violence, terrorism, poverty, natural disasters, insert your personal demons here - does it really matter what color shirt a man wears or who's buying the tampons? Gentlemen, if you like vodka on the rocks, by all means, drink up - but don't choke it down because your preferred Tequila Sunrise makes you "look" like a pansy; and ladies, recognize that a man who faithfully adheres to the testosterone playbook may only be showing his studiousness, not his strength. Rather than worrying about who's wearing the proverbial pants, how about we all put on whatever we want to wear and get to work addressing the things that really matter.

#141 - Loss

2011-10-20T06:55:00.000-07:00

Loss

10/20/11 (#141)

I lost my dad this summer, a fantastic man who gave me 44 years of guidance, wisdom, humor, and love. I can't do him justice in an essay, as none of us really could with our parents — his influence on me and my siblings is so broad, so subtle, so all encompassing that any attempt to define it leads to endless addendums and clarifications, each tangent getting no closer to a complete truth than the insufficient phrase it expands upon. There would be no me without him, literally and figuratively. For every good thing I am and I've done, he and my mom deserve the credit. I will miss him forever.

When he passed, I was blessed to have many people who expressed condolences, and I was reminded of a very peculiar aspect of human communication: despite thousands of years of evolution and enlightenment, humans are still struggling to build a language to respond to or assuage a deep loss. Perhaps it's a complex emotion that we are fortunate to not have enough practice at expressing; perhaps it's an instinctual sense that the language we use to corral and quantify our ideas is simply incapable of addressing the pain and sadness of losing someone we love.

Whatever the reason, it is always hard to know what to say. I love words, but they are simply not suitable for all occasions. The platitudes of sympathy cards, however well-intentioned, seem formulaic; the tried-and-true stock phrases we rely on have become the accepted cliches because we have collectively and silently resigned ourselves to being unable to express what our hearts are experiencing. There's certainly no wrong thing to say, because we know that whatever we say is simply a placeholder for something larger, something more inexplicable. I appreciated everyone who tried, right down to a friend who said simply, "I don't know what to say" and wrapped me in a bear hug.

Yet one recurring theme that gave me genuine solace was stories. My friend Scott recalled the era when our band practiced at my parent's business, a cavernous woodshop that could fully accommodate our four-piece band and the racket we created. When we practiced, dad would come over to check in on us now and then. I know he didn't like the volume, and he wouldn't stay for the actual practice, but he was great company as we set up, relating well with all of my band mates, sharing laughs, telling a joke, whatever. I suspect he would have preferred that I wasn't in a band, worried that we would emulate the career path of Motley Crue despite us behaving more like The Wonders from "That Thing You Do", but he kept that to himself — I was obviously passionate about songwriting, I was playing with three great friends (and great people), and he was there to support me.

If I had listed 1,000 memories of my dad, I wouldn't have listed the story Scott told. But when he brought it up, it felt like yesterday. The same was true for all of the stories that friends and family recounted — their stories were the ideal expressions of sympathy because they didn't mourn his death, they reminded me of his life. They told me that, while I have an intensely personal image of my dad, it wasn't an image I had simply conjured — so much of what I saw in him was visible to everyone, and that was never more clear than when I heard these simple little stories of moments that had no particular significance yet lasted through decades of life. The moments may have been insignificant, but the characters were essential.

I reflect back on a life with my dad and realize that memory is like an iceberg - we might think we can recall a lot, but there are so many more memories resting comfortably in the recesses of our minds. I wonder how many more there are in there, but I don't wrack my brain trying to find them, because they rush out suddenly with the simplest provocation: when I think about where to get coffee and hear my dad advising, "keep your money local"; when someone notes with incredulity the amount of sugar I put in my coffee and I hear him chiding, "you don't drink coffee, you drink dessert"; when a photograph captures me channeling him through a particular expression or gesture. There is so much of him in me and my family, and while I would have groaned to hear that when I was 18, I celebrate it at 45.

I have a lifetime of memories filed away, yet I cherish the stories I hear from others. In the scrapbook in my brain, my mental snapshots are all taken from the same angle; these other stories give my father more dimensions and allow me to see things I might have missed from my vantage point. That's something Hallmark can't offer, and it reminds me that when I have to try to express the inexpressible when someone else suffers a loss, I'm not going to try to wordsmith the right thing to say — I'm just going to say, "I remember one time..."

#140 - Sonic Coincidence

2011-05-25T20:13:00.000-07:00

Sonic Coincidence

5/25/11 (#140)

As a prologue to this story, let me quickly recount a music listening experience from my college days, when a friend said he loved how the harmonica in REM's "Pretty Persuasion" was strangely out of key. Harmonica? I had heard that song at least 40 times and had no recollection of a harmonica. He popped on the album (kids, your parents can translate) and as the third verse started, he pointed at the speakers. Sure enough, buried deep in the mix, there was a hard-blowing harmonica, clearly not the right key but close enough to make the friction interesting. 40-plus listens and I had never heard it, and from that day on, it was impossible to miss. How had it eluded me for so long?

Flash forward a couple of decades to the necktie-wearing version of me standing at a downtown Portland Max stop, waiting for the Yellow Line to whisk me home. I was in the midst of a serious fascination with The Roots, the Philly-based hip-hop/funk/awesome ensemble, and one of my favorite funky songs began flowing through the thin white wires of my iPod. I stood close to the platform edge so the world could shuffle behind me while an involuntary sway took hold of my middle-aged body.

About 15 seconds into the groove, I began hearing a violin line that I had never heard in the song before. Hearing unusual instruments is not unusual in a band with a full-time tuba player, but this was one of my favorite songs---how had I not heard this before? It wasn't pushed up to the front of the mix, but it was clear enough that I was astonished that I was hearing it for the first time.

As I focused my ears, I could feel my jaw dropping. The violinist was totally adventurous, pushing against the textures and rhythm of the song, veering toward chaos and suddenly resolving into achingly gorgeous melodies. He bowed right over Black Thought's rhymes, seemed only loosely tethered to Questo's beats, and played with an enthusiastic abandon that made the song completely new. I stood on the train platform, entranced and ecstatic. It was truly one of the best listening experiences of my life.

Then the song came to an end, and the violin didn't. In the pause between songs on my player, I realized that the violinist was standing behind me, playing an entirely different song that was coincidentally in the same key. What I had been hearing was pure chance, a cosmic fluke that could never be repeated intentionally, a private headphone moment juxtaposed against a public sountrack. It was like a DJ's mash-up, and god was the DJ, squeezing disparate elements into the same sonic space.

On the train home, I contemplated the odds of what had happened: eight minutes on the platform that happened to overlap with the violinist's performance; 25 hours of music on my iPod, all in various keys, dozens of songs in the violinist's repertoire, all in various keys, and within that eight minute window, we were in tune. If the train had been early, if I'd gotten off work late, if the violinist's tips had been enough to call it a day before I arrived, the unlikely duet would have never materialized.

I wish the violinist could have heard what I heard. I wish I could have recorded it. But it wasn't meant for that - if I could listen to it again and again, I would be more critical, mentally mapping the missed notes, lamenting the sections that weren't as seamless as I recalled. This gorgeous collision of sympathetic melodies was meant for that moment, a cosmic spark that flared and faded in a matter of minutes, burning itself into my memory and disappearing forever.

#139 - The Wrong Right Jeans

2011-04-08T18:41:00.000-07:00

The Wrong Right Jeans

4/8/11 (#139)

All the cool kids wore Levi's jeans.

I was in eighth grade, at my second Junior High School in two years following my family's relocation to Maine. I was the new kid, and like most new kids — and like so many eighth graders — I wanted nothing more than to assimilate, to disappear into the crowd, to not feel like I was being assessed and summarized by a class full of kids who had known each other since they were sticking rulers into paste pots in kindergarten. And that assimilation wasn't going to happen in rust-colored corduroys. Even if they were Levi's cords. Levi's blue jeans were the invisibility cloak my 12 year old soul dreamed of.

Now to put this into perspective, my parents gave me everything I needed. I always had a few new outfits at the start of the school year, I was able to play little league baseball and hockey and soccer (with hand-me-down gear, but that meant it was already broken in for me), there was always delicious food on the table at dinner time. But my folks had four kids, so we couldn't have everything, and Lee and Wrangler were more affordable jeans. My mother was incredulous when I expressed my disdain for Wrangler - wasn't Wrangler a brand name? Weren't they better than the ill-fitting denims available at Zayre and Kings? I'm sure I seemed like an ungrateful little cretin when I lamented that, no matter what they were, what they weren't was Levi's.

"Bill," my mom assured, "anyone who judges you by your pants isn't a friend worth having." Thanks mom. Straight out of the Parenting 101 handbook. Mom was an adult - how could she understand what it felt like to be the new kid? I was exhausted by feeling alien and out of place, and all she could do was utter meaningless lies like "no one is paying any attention to your pants." Of course they are — I AM, so why wouldn't they? I resigned myself to a lifetime of lunches at the misfits table, eating brown-paper-bag sandwiches while the cool kids ate school-lunch pizza in their cool jeans and planned their fabulous futures.

That was my reality until the day my mom came home and flopped a stiff pair of denim pants onto the bed - LEVI'S! I was ecstatic, quickly slipping into the rigid fabric, buttoning them up and feeling like a changed man. I couldn't wait to go to school the next day, imagining the nods of approval from boys who barely acknowledged me the previous day, hoping one of the blooming eighth grade girls would notice all the wonderful qualities about me that had been hidden by my corduroys.

The next day, I proudly donned my new jeans, strutted to school with newfound enthusiasm, and was delighted when the guy at the locker next to mine remarked, "Hey, new jeans." It was just as I had imagined, and it was happening as quickly as I had hoped. I replied with forced nonchalance and overt brand-dropping, "Yeah, I just got these Levi's yesterday."

"Are they red tag or orange tag?"

I quaked at the question, unsure what it meant but concerned for the possibilities. "Turn around," he said, taking a peek at the small brand tag sewn into the stitching of the back pocket. "Yeah, orange tag. I prefer the red tag." And as I walked to class, I quickly learned that all the cool kids preferred red tags. The tiny tabs on everyone's pants suddenly shined like tiny LED christmas lights, and less than 10 minutes into the school day, I felt foolish for trying so hard to fit in and for failing so completely, the inflexible fabric scraping the flesh of my legs as the orange tag scraped my psyche.

I don't know how much I actually learned that day, but I look back on it as a milestone, my first glimpse behind the facade of "cool": even if you buy a ticket, the ushers at the door can call it out as a fake. It also showed me that those ushers are assholes, guarding the gates to a club I no longer wanted to join. My mother was right: If the test of my worth is based on a 1/4" tag on my back pocket, I had no desire to pass that test. My Lee jeans never felt so comfortable.

I'm sometimes reminded of this when I attend music shows in Portland or stroll on North Mississippi, seeing the meticulous effort some people put into their exterior identities. The self-concious haircuts, the skinny black pants, and vintage t-shirts and white-plastic sunglasses seem to serve as beacon calls to others of the species, a preliminary filter to sift out anyone who supports chain restaurants or network television. I'm probably wrong — I prefer to imagine they're all thoughtful folks who judge their fellow citizens by the content of their character, not the cut of their coat — but to me, it all looks like red tag Levi's, and I outgrew those many decades ago.

My daughter is eight, and I know there's nothing I can do to save her from learning this lesson on her own. At this moment, she has no awareness of clothing brands, and judges every outfit on color and comfort - the only true measure of a good wardrobe. I hope that remains her focus, but I know that once she hits junior high, her concern with the tag is going to come, another of those heinous rites of passage that occur as we try to figure out how to live in our own skin. She's probably going to want her generation's version of Levi's, and if my current budget is any indication, I'm going to have to buy her something else and assure her, "anyone who judges you by your pants isn't a friend worth having." She's going to look at me and think, "Sheesh, dad, you have no idea what it's like to be a kid."

Of course I don't. What could an adult possibly know about that?

#138 - Waxing Psychological

2011-01-08T13:48:00.000-08:00

Waxing Psychological

1/8/11 (#138)

I was passing time on the bus by peeking over the shoulder of the woman in front of me and reading the headlines of her People magazine. Personally, I would never buy People magazine — and I say that with so much righteous intellectual superiority that my you'd think I didn't own a television — but in truth, it's always my first choice when I'm at the doctor's office. It's the cotton candy of magazines: no nutrition, no substance, but so much pointless deliciousness.

What immediately startled me during my visual eavesdropping session was the awful appearance of the stars featured on a particular two-page spread. Each one seemed happy enough, but almost catatonic, as if they were all auditioning for a starring role in The Stepford Wives and the casting agent was facing some difficult choices. I jockeyed for position in hope of finding an explanation, my face close enough to smell the other rider's hair, and saw that the article was comparing which celebrity women faired best at wax museums.

Halle Berry was featured, looking far more ordinary than she ever looks in film or photographs. Actually, her breasts looked fabulous, it was only her face that failed to match reality. (It's clear where the artist spent the most time on their work.) Lindsey Lohan looked spacey and stupefied — surprisingly lifelike in that regard, though her paraffin doppelganger sported a pre-tabloid innocence that looked oddly anachronistic. I shifted to see the other women featured, but my move coincided with the bus hitting a pothole and caused my chin to gently bump her shoulder, so I spent the rest of the ride glued to the back of my seat in order to make it perfectly clear that, no, I did want to nuzzle her neck (anymore), and no, security did not need to be called. But those glossy photos of those glassy-eyed celebrity duplicates continued to haunt me.

It's clear that wax museums have a solid base of supporters, but I am not one of them. I just don't understand the allure — the creepy figures they house may bear a general resemblance to a Hollywood celebrity or historical figure, but their lifeless gazes and frozen postures make the museum experience seem like an open-casket wake for 300 irrelevant personalities.

There are a few I can understand: What is it like to stand next to 7'6" basketball star Yao Ming? It's rare we encounter anyone approaching seven feet in our daily life, and I am unable to imagine the scale and proportions of his size by making a mark on the wall at 90". Maybe jockey Willie Shoemaker as well, though he was 4' 11", and I see people that tall when I drop my daughter at school every morning.

But what is the excitement of seeing a wickless-candle version of Matthew Mcconaughey? A wax casting of Princess Di? A plasticized Michelle Obama? Boy George, Adolph Hitler, Franz Kafka and Gandhi all standing rigidly at the world's most boring cocktail party? I don't get it.

Looking at wax museum sites online, I found one that boasts of a life-size facsimile of Glee's caustic cheering coach Jane Lynch — if ever there was a celebrity who you would want to be vocal, Jane is it, because without her wit, she's a middle-aged Old Navy display hawking affordable red sweat suits; another brags of their lifelike Julia Roberts, though the awkward expression and shimmering creepiness of her molded face makes her look like the dream date for BK's King.

It seems like a strange commentary on our culture that our celebrity obsessions are so deep that ogling claymation replicas of Beyonce Knowles and Jennifer Lopez is deemed an afternoon well spent. Yet countless online photos confirm the popularity of the pastime, fans posing with mannequins dressed as their favorite movie characters, the lifeless eyes of James Bond or Jack Sparrow or Al Gore staring slightly away from the camera as if they themselves don't want to be in the picture.

I'm not passing judgment* on people who spend $35.50 for a day of silent socializing with a warehouse full of Hollywood has-beens. I simply don't get it. A few hours spent at the Smithsonian Museum is an opportunity to see or experience something tangible — observing the scale of Linburgh's plane and the Apollo 11 space capsule, examining the skeletal frame of a triceratops or the confines of a Chicago "L" transit car. Is there a similar historical value to seeing the waxy version of W.C. Fields or the original cast of television's Star Trek?

Personally, if I'm ever going to have my picture taken with the likes of Snooki or Speaker of the House John Boehner, I don't want it to look like I'm standing next to a scientifically preserved version of those people, because...wait, maybe those aren't the best examples.

* Of course I am.

#137 - Marriage (A Primer)

2010-11-05T16:55:00.000-07:00

Marriage (a primer)

11/5/10 (#137)

Talking about marriage is like talking about religion — it means different things to different people. Even to people in the same marriage. You've got your Orthodox Married who believe that everything after "I do" is a compromise of one's personal self for the good of the institution; you've got your Reformed Married who are willing to compromise but have recognized that two televisions in separate rooms is a matrimonial blessing; there's your Born-Again Married, who keep a Deepak Chopra book in the drawer of the night stand because marriage is too complicated to get through without an owner's manual; you've got your IRS Married who tie the knot for financial reasons, though with the US tax system, getting married to save money is like swimming in the Willamette river to save laundry money. None of these are necessarily better than the other, because there is no right or wrong marriage — you get from it what you invest in it, and it's yours. For all the discussion of the "meaning" of marriage on a public and political level, the people who define each marriage on a personal level are the two people who say, "I do."

But marriage is more tangible than religion. Marriage is like family, except you volunteer for it, which means that when you get to challenges, you have to accept some of the responsibility for the circumstances. With the family you grew up with, you can blame them for everything — all those weird little foibles and flaws ingrained in our personalities? Most of us trace them back to the family dinner table. Of course, all the weird little strengths and specialties we proudly claim as our own can be tracked to the same roots. We marry a person because we love them, and their family is included in the dowry, the bonus and baggage DNA entwined in their psyche. But your spouse understands that. Even embraces that. Otherwise, why would they agree to attend big family gatherings, the type preceded by a roster of warnings about this one's politics and that one's biases and so many other one's peccadilloes. Few things prepare a person for life with another as well as watching the family dynamic when it comes to seemingly simple events — for example, taking group photos. You can learn a tremendous amount about a person and their family in the brief (or often excruciatingly long) duration between "Okay, let's get a picture" and the actual click of the shutter.

But the family gathering isn't the most reliable crash-course in life another person. A more stringent test is the long drive. And I'm not talking about a couple of hours across the state line, I'm talking about a driiiiiiiive — a map-unfolding- cross-border-multi-day mobile living excursion. The depth of one's affection cannot be accurately measured in living rooms or restaurants or even at family reunions because these places allow too much breathing room, too many escape routes, too many buffers, either intentional or accidental. The confines of a car, endless hours of humming tires, enduring a CD you wish you never lied about liking, bare and unwashed feet on the dashboard, splitting a bag of pretzels and a Mountain Dew and calling it dinner…again. A long drive is a concentrated imitation of life: adventure, anticipation, anxiety, excitement, fatigue, monotony, redundancy - but best of all, intimacy. Not honeymoon-style intimacy, but the deep backstory that gets shared between mile markers 71 and 134, tales that simply don't come to the surface amid the bustle and distraction of life. Memories jarred loose by radio songs or roadside diners, dusty tales that lack the practiced fluidity of our standard storytelling repertoires. The irregular flashes of oncoming headlights are like camera flashes, snapshots of tired eyes and relaxed smiles or the quiet repose of an exhausted head pillowed by a folded sweatshirt against the car window. These snapshots endure in our memory, reminding you of the reason you were excited about this journey. Even as the journey takes you past creepy roadside rest areas and countless mediocre chain restaurants, as weary eyes try to focus on the task at hand, these snapshots remind us that life is good, and even better with a copilot you can count on.

Most importantly, marriage isn't the same thing as love. Love is like an idea for a movie, unlimited in scope and ambition; marriage is that same movie when it's exposed to budget constraints, impromptu script changes, bad lighting and confusing, unexpected jump cuts. As you make your movie, don't focus on how the dailies aren't matching your imagination; instead, look closely at the reels and try to make it the best film you can. That movie you have in your head is just one version of the story, limited by your imagination. The one you make every day is a collaboration, and it has every potential to exceed anything you could have imagined by yourself. Share the writing, share the editing, and most of all, make sure both of your names get equally billing in the credits.

This piece was originally written to be read by several readers at a friend's wedding. I have modified it to commemorate my 11th anniversary with my wife. I am grateful every day to have her in my life, and look forward to every moment of the proverbial car ride ahead. (Though I'm probably going to ask to skip a few tracks on that one CD.)

#136 - Audible Residue

2010-09-23T20:57:00.000-07:00

Audible Residue

9/23/10 (#136)

At this moment, I am humming Buddy Holly's "Everyday." You know the one: "Everyday, it's a-gettin' closer, goin' faster than a roller coaster..." and so on. Buddy's charming paean to the promise of impending love is a sweet little ditty, but frankly, after more than an hour of it, I want to carve it out of my cranium with the thin plastic knife that I got with my bagel at the same time I got this freakin' song stuck in my head.

The café in my office building is notorious for such subliminal gifting. I stop in to order a latté or some peanut butter toast, flip through one of the newspaper sections left on the tables while waiting for the item is toasted/steamed/whatever, grab my purchase and jump on the elevator. It seems innocuous enough, until there in the empty silence of the elevator car the thought crime is revealed — suddenly I'm whistling the opening synth riff from "The Final Countdown" or realizing with great alarm that I have been reassembling the lyrics to "Hotel California" in my head. It's enough to sour the taste of whatever treat I have in my hands.

The bizarre array of music that sneaks from their speakers and into my brain on successive visits makes it clear that the various employees take turns choosing the playlist, and I'm willing to bet, often choosing a station for ironic effect. I've worked in such environments, where it's fun to pick stations that will playfully annoy particular coworkers or set a strange mood for the work day. The trouble for the customers is that we don't have Madonna to cleanse our audio palette after Bad Company has muddied up our short-term memory — we exit while the latter is still playing, and the offending chorus follows us around like an inescapable pest, nipping annoyingly at our thoughts every time we have an idle mental moment.

It's not just that café, of course. Ambient music plays almost everywhere we go, which explains why we can be sitting somewhere quiet and some long-forgotten melody will suddenly be front and center in our mind. I usually leave my bank with some passé radio hit by Alanis Morissette or Crowded House burrowing into my psyche, and leaving Target empty-handed rarely means I'll leave empty-headed. Worst of all, it's the catchiest songs that cling tightest, sonic burdocks that can't even be loosed by a headphone session with the iPod: I once pumped a blissful medley of irresistible Guided By Voices songs into my ears in order to flush a freeloading 80's hit, and ten minutes after turning off the device, I was once again banging my head on the table to shake loose the cloyingly effervescent da-da-da-dum-dum intro of A-ha's "Take On Me."

I know there's someone reading who is thinking, "Wow, I haven't thought about Alanis in a while. I'd love to hear 'Ironic' again." And therein lies the problem with these unavoidable soundtracks that fill our air and our ears — everyone likes different things, so a business has no idea how their so-called mood music is impacting their customers' moods: one might find Peter Cetera to be the ideal background music for filling out a deposit slip, while the next might close their account simply to avoid the risk of ever having to withdraw money to the strains of Jewel.

It's not really about Alanis (who, I confess, is one of my guilty pleasures) or Jewel (whose voice is impressive even when her songs are not.) It's about the reckless use of these voices in public settings. Companies constantly remind me about the convenience of online banking and online bill paying and online shopping, but it isn't the convenience that attracts me: it's the fact that all of these transactions can occur without the fear of some schlocky Heart ballad pirating the mental radio in my brain. Am I ready to skip the in-person retail experience completely? I don't know. But everyday, it's a-gettin' closer...

#135 - Lovely Weeds

2010-06-15T22:19:00.000-07:00

Lovely Weeds

6/15/10 (#135)

"It's like being inside a model train set." That's how my father described the few acres of college town that surrounded his business. The century-old paddle and oar factory sat next to train tracks that, ¼ mile north, carried freight cars across a picturesque trestle bridge that spanned the jagged rocks that made up the bed of the Stillwater River. To the south, the train rails passed a old New England homes adorned with painted porch chairs and bright potted flowers before crossing several roads in quick succession, each intersection, each featuring the flashing lights and ringing bells of classic black-and-white "X-ing" warnings. When a train passed, it was easy to imagine it had all been laid out by some fussy hobbyist, intent on making an improbably accurate scale version of an idyllic Maine town.

I worked at the factory for 10 years, and never tired of walking out to the trestle for my lunch breaks. The primal force of the river as a whole was a satisfying sound, but just as an orchestra sounds like a cohesive unit until we begin picking out the individual melodies of each different instrument, there were rich layers of sound that could be picked out from the river's white noise: The low-end rumble of the major flows, the hollow midrange as it met the resistance of the rocks, the high end "shhhhhh" that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It wasn't a mystical experience or a metaphor for life — it was simply a roaring, awesome soundtrack for eating a turkey sandwich and escaping from the smell of varnish and sawn wood.

When college was in session, I often saw students crossing the trestle, an easy shortcut from the rental houses across the river to the charming couple of blocks called downtown. In the summertime, I usually had the whole trestle to myself. One sunny late July day, I took my chicken salad and a soda and set out for the bridge, turning the corner behind the factory store to see what seemed like a scene from a movie: a beautiful woman I had never seen, gleefully tromping through the tall grass and picking weeds.

I'm never been much for horticulture, so I'm sure they were officially known as flowers, but when something grows everywhere, uninvited and untended, we tend to call them weeds. All along the unkempt paths along the train tracks, tiny wild flowers grew and bloomed and died without anyone taking notice, yet this college-aged woman was plucking them with the enthusiasm of a six-year old. As our paths converged, I marveled at her smile, her long blondish hair, her deep suntan, and risked making a fool of myself by momentarily pretending to know something about flowers: "Making a bouquet?"

She smiled wider with a nod, reaching down to add another spindly yellow stem to the couple of dozen sprigs in her hand, and gushed, "These are so wonderful!"

I looked at the collection: a couple of pale purple buds about as big as your smallest thumbnail, a few of the miniature daisies that grew throughout the neighborhood, and a random scattering of other miniature flowers that would grow and whither along the tracks until the railroad company did their annual mow. A less impressive bouquet could not be assembled unless it featured clumps of overgrown grass, but I was far too impressed with her face to tell her that, so instead, I said, "Great colors. Though pretty common flowers."

"You're so lucky", she replied, looking at them one by one as she continued, "I'm here visiting my aunt. I'm from Hawaii, and all of our flowers are big and bold. I love them, but they're almost ostentatious. We don't have anything like these," and she pointed to the purple buds, just like the patch I had scythed the day before to allow air to flow around our stacked ash lumber. Recalling a few small orange flowers on the backside of the wood pile, far enough from the stack that they were spared from the blade, I walked behind the pile, picked them from the long grass, and offered them for her collection. More delight, more smiles, a quick thank you, and her eyes went back to the ground.

In the movie version of the moment, the act of adding the orange to her bouquet would have allowed our eyes to meet, and the scene would jump-cut to the two of us sitting on the rail sharing a chicken salad sandwich, the roar of the river requiring us to lean in with unexpectedly comfortable intimacy. Sadly, it wasn't a movie. Instead, it was clear she had barely noticed me, my being too big and bold to hold her attention. She moved south through the model train set, and I went out to the trestle to eat my lunch and imagine how the rest of the movie might have gone.

Years later, a friend described her reasons for quitting a landscaping job: She loved working with plants and digging in the dirt, but one day saw her boss ruthlessly tearing up a cluster of flowers. She asked why. "Because they're weeds." She explained that they weren't, naming the flowers that now lay in a dead pile, and he replied, "It's a flower if it grows where I want it to grow. If not, it's a weed."

I suspect we all do that a lot in our lives — deeming something worthy or expendable based on its value to us, not its intrinsic value. I often think about that woman from Hawaii when I'm out walking with my daughter, seven-years old and yet to "learn" how to separate the world into flowers and weeds. I'm glad, because it's amazing how many lovely weeds she is able to find.

#134 - The Brighter Side of OCD

2010-06-05T18:54:00.000-07:00

The Brighter Side of OCD

6/5/10 (#134)

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, commonly known as OCD — especially by people who have OCD and don't have time for so many syllables because there are sock drawers to organize — is the bastard child of logic (the nurturing mother) and insanity (the demanding father.)

This disorder (as clinicians call it — people with OCD call it "hyper-efficiency") is easily misunderstood by people who think that putting the crayons into their cardboard box in correct spectral order is a waste of time. Of course, some adherents to OCD also think that putting the crayons into their cardboard box in correct spectral order is a waste of time, as the satisfaction of even the most attentively ordered rainbow is offset by the frustration of finding a proper home for burnt umber and timber wolf. (I have a functional form of the condition, so my solution for the 64 pack is to populate one of the eight rows of eight with all of the misfits, including black and white; it's unsatisfying, but at least it corrals the dissatisfaction into a single tier.)

If you say to a person with OCD, "I know it seems pointless, but in the spoons slot of the silverware drawer, I stack the three types of spoons in groups so they don't mix," these folks won't roll their eyes or stare in disbelief. Instead, they'll usually respond with some variation of, "As opposed to what, haphazardly tossing them into some willy-nilly collision of flatware? Stacking is the logical thing to do. Duh." Others may even contribute advice: "I used a glue gun and some 1/8" clear plastic strips to subdivide the fork section between dinner and dessert forks. Not only is each type isolated, the plastic wall keeps both piles neatly stacked."

I use this example for a reason, which I will get to in a moment.

To be clear, I have never been diagnosed with OCD. Nor have I ever asked anyone to explore such a diagnosis, because I am not afflicted with any of the symptoms that make OCD an obstacle for my life. (One look at my home office demonstrates that I am not fetishistic about order or cleanliness, as the shelves around my desk look like the aftermath of an explosion at a paper recycling depot.) For some, OCD is genuinely debilitating, and it's not a joking matter. For me, it's more like an idiosyncratic anomaly, a quirk on performance-enhancing drugs.

So back to the spoons. Over the years, our silverware drawer has evolved by necessity only. When we moved into our house a decade ago, we gave ourselves a housewarming gift of a great set of silverware, tossing all of the mismatched pieces we had acquired through hand-me-down generosity or Goodwill necessity. The new set was gorgeous, felt great, and was worth every penny.

In the ten years since, the collection has suffered the standard homeowner attrition, pieces of the collection whisked into the same black hole that consumes single socks and Tupperware lids. Each time the count of a particular utensil type drops below a usable number — that number defined by the inconvenient frequency with which we must wash the remaining items — we purchase a small set to supplement the collection.

We now have three types of spoons: four from the original set, six acquired for a comically low price at Ikea, and four found in the close-out bin at Marshalls. Each is a different size and shape, so when they're randomly placed into the silverware drawers spoon slot, it's an ill-fitting mess. To solve this, I stacked them in like piles after taking them from the dish drainer — the spoons better suited for ice cream, the others for stirring coffee, and the third for meals (though I use those for ice cream, too.) Rather than having to rifle through a disheveled array of utensils every time I wanted a cup of yogurt, the sorted piles saved time and accelerated yogurt enjoyment.

But I was concerned that this preference for order would mutate into a demand for order (I'm even obsessive about my compulsions), so I decided to let go of this one — to let spoons be spoons, freely intermingling within their designated silverware slot. One small step for me, one too-small-to-be-noticed-step for anyone else who opens that drawer. It hardly qualified as a milestone, but I congratulated myself as I closed the silverware drawer. I had tamed the OCD beast.

Until the next morning, when I opened the drawer to get a coffee stirrer and witnessed the utter mayhem that lay before me, the haphazard tangle of spoons looking like it had been picked through by a swarm of indiscriminate yard-sale shoppers. I tried to extricate a stirring spoon from beneath the pick-up-sticks array of flatware, but the pile kept rearranging itself with a frustrating clatter. What had once been a simple matter of sliding out the drawer to make a simple selection had become an annoying game of three-spoon monte, and I was the sucker.

So much for minor victories. I immediately took the time to sort all three types of spoons and stack them neatly within their designated slot. It would have been nice to not care, to take any old spoon for any old task, but the inefficiency was unbearable. I hated giving in to the beast, but what choice did I have? It was the logical thing to do. Duh.

#133 - A Parental Perspective on Math

2010-05-19T22:18:00.000-07:00

A Parental Perspective on Math

5/19/10 (#133)

Every few years, a new study points to American children's dismal math capabilities compared to students around the globe. These mediocre showings usually trigger a string of efforts to improve math education in public schools, to bolster interest in mathematics, and to find the reason that American youth fail to compete in this educational category.

As a parent, I know the reason. The cause is evident, even obvious, nearly every time I hear a parent speaking to their kids. Even talking to my own daughter, I sometimes catch myself unintentionally sabotaging her academic future. The root of the problem is Parent Math.

Parent Math is a calculation system that relies on the language of traditional math, but discards the requisite rules that tether abstract concepts to real-world results. While academic math pursues an objective truth, Parent Math is a means to an end, utilizing a flexible set of rules that are unencumbered by consistency. In academic math, two plus two equals four; in Parent Math, two plus two might equal four, depending on whether the desired sum is four; if the desired sum is three, then two plus two can equal three. It's not math at all, frankly, but because it shares the same language as math, it sneaks into the brains of our children and irrevocably dooms their math SAT scores.

Here are a few common examples of Parent Math at work, and how it renders number-based phrases meaningless to a young mind:

Five Minutes: This all-purpose phrase can be used as either an ultimatum or a promise, with equally inefficient results. The way parents use it, a "minute" is like a "donut" - there are a thousand varieties that all fall under the same descriptor, yet there are few similarities between a glazed chocolate cake donut and a yeast-type maple bar.
As an ultimatum, it is issued anywhere from two to twenty minutes before actual departure time, making the conceptual value of five frustratingly fluid. For instance, if my daughter is playing with friends at the playground and the cacophony of screaming children has frazzled me like the participant in some graduate-level college psychology experiment, then "we're leaving in five minutes" means that she has 90 seconds of swing and slide time left; if my wife retrieves our daughter from a play date at the home of another interesting mom, "we're leaving in five minutes" allows the children enough time for several costume changes, a quick board game, and a languid goodbye.
As a promise, the words "give me five minutes" literally translates to, "I will come inspect your block tower or answer your question about leggings when I complete this entree/project/email/thought." The phrase has no regard for the accuracy of the words "five" and "minute" because the goal is simply to prolong the duration the parent has to focus on their own life. Sullying the meaning of "five" is unfortunate collateral damage.
Two cookies: You might think that the concreteness of cookies would make them less suspect mathematically, but in some homes, "You can have two cookies" is the serve that starts a long volley of negotiations and compromises. I've seen conniving kids argue with the craft of a seasoned attorney, citing precedent ("At the apple orchard you said I could have two apples and I ate three") and extenuating circumstances ("the first cookie was twice the size of the second, so really, two smalls and a large are equivalent to two cookies") until the fatigued parent will acquiesces, thereby damning the number "two" to an eternity of representing two, sometimes three, and occasionally more.
100 times: It's amazing how many things have been said or done 100 times. For instance, at various points in recent history, someone in our home has announced that we've watched iCarly 100 times, we've read Ferryboat Ride 100 times, and we've eaten cheese quesadillas 100 times. (Most of those were sighed by exasperated parents; the last one came from Sage as part of her petition for Pizza - as the house quesadilla chef, I struggled to shrug it off.) The problem is, my daughter goes through life as if she were an umpire with that little balls/strikes/outs clicker hidden in her hand, noting the frequency and duration of nearly everything, and we haven't experienced any of these things exactly 100 times: Quesadillas for dinner? 25 tops in my culinary memory. Ferryboat Ride? Closer to 75 times in Sage's life. iCarly? It's been on at least 600 times in our house this month. (I swear it's true.) The collective effect of these inaccuracies is the complete bastarization of "100" as a descriptor.

Is there anything that can be done? It's hard to say. Mathematical inaccuracies remain an essential child management tool, providing a foundation of so-called facts to support a desired agenda. Changing that mindset in order to improve our children's math comprehension is a noble goal, yet at the end of an exhausting day, the path of least resistance is an alluring route, and that path usually circumvents any noble goals.

I should know, I've taken it a hundred times.

#132 - Past Life Regression

2010-04-15T21:46:00.000-07:00

Past Life Regression

4/15/10 (#132)

There are two kinds of bad memory: The first is like having a great collection of photographs that have faded over time, yellows and whites merging, crisp edges of foreground objects slowly assimilating into the background. The other is more like a great collection of photographs all categorized in folders in a cabinet, and over time, folders inexplicably disappear. The latter describes my memory.

For instance, I can recall hundreds of mundane moments of my high school English classes, ridiculous minutia that has no value to warrant such long-term storage; yet I can't recall the name of a single science teacher in my high school. Not one. I'm not confident I could even pick one out of a multiple choice list. That file folder is gone. Maybe I took it out to make room in the cabinet for something more valuable - but of course, I don't recall.

The joy of this type of memory loss is that I can't remember the things I've forgotten, so it hardly seems like I've forgotten anything at all. The downside is that people with better memories than I can make me feel like an amnesia victim --"So the Emily you're talking about went to our high school? That doesn't ring a bell. And she was in my Biology class? Huh, I don't remember her - or Biology, for that matter. And you're sure I went to the junior prom with her?")

I've long acknowledged the particular inefficiencies of my memory, and accepted them. So I don't remember my Science teachers - big deal. I can't think of any reason why I need to remember them. (Of course I can't.) But that inefficiency is becoming a problem because of one fairly recent addition to my life: Facebook.

As Facebook users know, the social networking site is uncannily adept at dredging up ghosts of people who had, for all intents and purposes, died to me over 25 years ago. Every few months there is a new wave of Friend requests from people who went to my high school - sometimes identifiable because I remember their name, and sometimes only because Facebook has anticipated the massive holes in my memory and added a version of, "Seriously, you went to high school with him" in the thumbnail caption.

One person sent a "Friend request" that included a personalized note that clearly made reference to some inside joke we had shared in the early 80s - but I couldn't remember the joke. I couldn't even remember the person. It would have seemed like a hoax if we didn't share a couple of dozen common friends. Apparently, the referenced inside joke was something we shared in a Science class.

My failure to remember her makes me feel bad - what kind of unsentimental monster can't remember the people he shared the socially formative years of his life with? But the day before her note, when I didn't even remember that I had forgotten her, I didn't feel bad about it at all. Then she sent a note, and suddenly I felt guilty. I have enough shortcomings in my psyche without virtual strangers reminding me of more.

I still have a handful of folks from my high school in my closest circle of friends, though our bonds were forged after graduation. I've kept in touch with these people because they are friends - as the dictionary defines friend, not as Facebook defines it. As for the other people in my high school, we've gotten along fine without each other for more than 25 years - I expected we'd get along fine without each other for the next 25, too.

I'm sure a lot of folks from my high school are wonderful people today, and if we were randomly seated next to each other on a plane, I'd enjoy reminiscing from Cleveland to Boston. But high school was eons ago, and these people have no context in my life. And I have no context in theirs. (My favorite absurdity is hearing from a senior year acquaintance whose note, in its entirety, read, "Hey Bill, what have you been up to?" Seriously? I'm supposed to document the most essential quarter century of my life, my marriage, the birth of my daughter, my many career changes, all because you pecked out an eight word question on a web portal?)

I admit, there are some wonderful exceptions. I heard from Scott, and as you might by now guess, I had to wrack my brain to recall him. As I looked for clues on his Facebook page, I was completely impressed with the person he is today, felt a kinship in how he wrote about his family, and enjoyed comparing the cardboard castle he built for his daughter with the one I built for mine. (They're both awesome.) Then there's Rob, who I actually remembered (!) but like even more now. There are a few other examples, too. That I knew these people in the 1980s is irrelevant to me - I like who they are now.

I don't presume that old high school acquaintances have been waiting 25 years for the opportunity to get in touch with me. Most folks are just curious, doing the personal version of "Where are they now?", and reconnection rarely involves more than a couple of quick exchanges. Heck, maybe they don't even remember me, and they're just requesting friendship from everyone who is listed in our graduating class, hoping to revive some of the color in the faded photographs of their memory.

I wish I could help. But in most cases, I lost the file with those pictures.

#131 - Girl Scouts and Greed

2010-04-07T21:15:00.000-07:00

Girl Scouts and Greed

4/7/10 (#131)

I pause with the refrigerator door propped open, eyeing the visible portion of the colorful box. Its hastily torn end-flaps are tucked into each other, as if a 1/4" tab of cardboard is sufficient security to repel co-workers from helping themselves to a sample. Apparently aware that the vague existential state of the box (Is it really closed, or did the initial opening change the box forever?) might not be sufficient protection, the owner had deployed additional defenses, including the writing of their initials in black Sharpie on two sides of the package, and the strategic placement of a tub of cream cheese atop the box – not exactly disguised, but clearly an effort was made to make them less inviting.

Of course, the words "less inviting" are only used in the same sentence as Girl Scout Cookies if the phrase is, "Eating those nine boxes of Girl Scout Cookies this week has made my physique less inviting."

While many treats are tempting, the irresistibly of Girl Scout cookies is uniquely intense. Sure, there are a few lamas in Asia who have the willpower to resist the allure of the Do-si-do, but in my home, the time between the opening of the box and the deposit of the empty packaging into the recycling bin defies the physics of cookie consumption. That's why it's essential to place them in a hard-to-reach area, so that later (and by later, I mean in six minutes) when I've justified "finishing off the row" in the interest of symmetry and find myself kneeling on the kitchen counter to retrieve them from their "hiding" spot behind the breakfast cereal boxes, the effort to reach them makes me feel that I have earned them. Maybe even one from the next row, too.

But this isn't home, and in the office, different rules apply. Rule #1 in the corporate lunchroom: Do not eat other people's food. I have no trouble abiding when it comes to tuna sandwiches, leftover pizza, or yogurts flavored with weird fruits, but does the expectation of culinary privacy extend to Thin Mints? Of course it does – or at least, it should. But seeing that broken-seal box on the fridge shelf, the lawyer for the committee in my head begins looking for a loophole.

Technically, a loophole isn't necessary. The owner's initials were on the box, so I could easy visit their desk and ask permission. But they didn't scribble their initials on the box as an instruction for how to properly acquire a taste of the contents – the subtext of that all-caps identifier was, "These are mine. Your cookie train doesn't stop at this station."

Besides, one can't ask for a Girl Scout Cookie. They're sacred snacks. If someone has a big bowl of Tootsie Rolls on their desk, sure, ask away. Take three, it will barely show, and there's more where those came from, which is the Safeway just a few blocks from the office. Girl Scout cookies come around only once a year, delivered by pony-tailed pixies who are visible strictly during the cookie season. Plus, thanks to the elaborate structure of the packaging materials, they are in short supply the moment you open the box. (I'm talking about Samoas and Tag-Alongs, which come packed with a care usually reserved for diamond rings, the noisy plastic tray keeping the cookies a safe distance from each other as if science is unsure what will happen if they touch. Compare that to the Thin Mints, which come stuffed like poker chips in dual cellophane tubes. Why the caste system, Scouts? Why are the mints allowed to mingle while the coconuts get solitary confinement?) All the initials do is identify the exact person who will tell me they're sorry, but they "have plans" for the cookies. (Plans? Are you going to take them to an art museum? Bowling?)

There are a few folks in my office who would offer up a hearty "help yourself" if I asked for a cookie, and they'd sound plausibly sincere in doing so – but that's because those people are nice people and they wouldn't dream of calling me on the audacity of my inquiry, which means if I ate one of the cookies, it would taste like a mix of butter, sugar, and shame. No one enthusiastically shares Samoas, because it isn't sharing, it's giving away – and who gives away Girl Scout cookies? Someone might bring in a box with the intention of sharing it with their coworkers, but that's different than writing your name on the box and disguising them amid a refrigerator of packed lunches. Once the initials are on the box, those cookies are off limits.

Which would be fine, if they were hidden up behind some cereal boxes in the break room like you're supposed to do with Girl Scout Cookies. But here they are in plain view between leftover Thai food and a bag of string cheeses, the sweetness dripping from my memory and into my ambition. Surely they can spare one. (Well, three, actually, because I may as well finish off the row.)

The refrigerator door remains propped open. What was I looking for? Oh, that's right – a loophole.

#130 - Communication Breakdown

2010-02-04T21:49:00.000-08:00

Communication Breakdown

2/4/10 (#130)

Years ago, I used to write letters. As friends dispersed to various greener grasses across the nation, I took great pleasure in slipping into a booth at the Bagel Shop or settling down at Dysart's Truckstop with a pot of coffee, a pad and a pen to knock out a few pages about life, longing, and the pursuit of that elusive thing we call our self.

Letters are an incredibly efficient communication device, allowing for vast expressions of thought with no investment beyond the time. No hosting fees, no connection costs, no hardware purchases - just a pad and pen, and a bit of spare change to get a person to come to my door, pick up my note, and hand deliver it to a person living on the other side of the country. Best of all, writing letters greatly increases your odds of receiving letters, which make the mailbox more than a repository for bulk mail and bills. On any given day, there may be brilliant thoughts and sly observations spilling from the confines of a white A8 envelope.

A well-crafted letter - or at least, enthusiastically-crafted - is more than an act of journalism, a mere recounting of facts. Even when there is a reader in mind, a letter transcends expression of self and becomes an examination of self. As we take the tangled yarn of our thoughts and lay them in linear format of the college-ruled pad, we understand them better ourselves. We expound on a topic like a lawyer delivering a closing argument, and at the same time we are the jury, weighing the evidence of the argument. Quite simply, the writer learns things that even the reader will not - especially because the writer knows exactly what has been left out.

A decade ago, I acquiesced to the convenience of email. The allure of immediate delivery and the efficiency of production (I type faster than I scribble) made it the communication medium of choice. Yet there was a dark side to that convenience: Every letter was typed from the confines of my apartment, and letters began to be notes, more efficient but less effective, stringed bits of data increasingly focused on facts rather than feelings. Just as digital recording failed to capture the sonic warmth associated with analog tape, email was a sterile substitute for the penned page, the backspace button removing the richness of cross-outs and overwrites and addendums penned in the margins.

Emails have now fallen away themselves, replaced by the small confines of social media boxes. Facebook gives the illusion of staying in touch because we see photos of people's lives, we read quips and blips about exploits and interests, but the format doesn't serve deep dives. Social media is creating a society of broadcasters, with pithy replies and a quick click of the "like" button expressing our approval of the life being led. The list of grandmother-boggling acronyms (i.e. OMG, LMAO) continues to grow to accommodate our thirst for brevity and accelerated delivery. As a culture, we are constantly striving to communicate in fewer and fewer characters. (WTF?)

Where will it end? That's my worry---that it will end. While I embrace the value of new technologies, I'm disappointed that our embrace of these new tools has caused us to lose our appreciation for the old tools. It alarms me to realize that several of the great friendships of my life have spent a year limited to the confines of social media. It hardly feels like "staying in touch" when communication is reduced to bulk-distribution tweets.

Writing letters is the antithesis of Twitter. I appreciate the economy of language that application imposes (many thoughts benefit from such rigid editing), but I worry that as a culture, we are defining 140 characters as the communication norm. More frustrating, the space limitations have not improved the quality of ideas being broadcast. Hasn't the blogosphere lampooned eating-updates with sufficient frequency that reports on the contents of one's lunch burrito should remain a personal experience? (Judging by my Facebook wall, apparently not.)

Perhaps the letter is the interpersonal communication analog to newspapers, an archaic form serving fewer and fewer users. Perhaps - but I'm not going to be party to its demise. This weekend, I'm going to dig a blank pad from the pile of paper debris in my office, sit down with a cup of coffee, and scribble a note to brighten one of my friend's mail boxes.

People do still check their mail boxes, don't they?

#129 - This Mess We're In

2009-10-22T21:26:00.000-07:00

This Mess We're In

10/22/09 (#129)

"Sorry about the mess. We just, um…well, that's just how we live."

When I said that phrase to a friend who recently visited my house for the first time, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. Normally, I would have pretended that our normally immaculate home had recently served as temporary lodging for a band of Visigoths ("friends of friends," I would insist, "how could I turn them away?") or that my daughter's tornado experiment had proved surprisingly effective---and my guest would have politely insisted that her house was even worse or told the preposterous lie that the house didn't look messy at all. It's a common script, and most folks are dutiful in delivering their lines---and I'm tired of it.

Here's the truth: We use our dining room table as a horizontal filing cabinet, and our cat apparently believes that any semblance of order is the dog's doing and works diligently every night to make the entire table look like the world's least-organized yard sale table. The cat is wrong, of course, as the dog is a frequent contributor to the mess, be it paw prints, water dish drippings, and counter scraps snatched and absconded to other rooms. Then there's the seven-year old, who will dutifully put away anything we ask, but without that command, will leave anything, anywhere, at any time - resulting in a hallway table cluttered with band-aid wrappers, naked dolls, half-full water glasses, random crayons and a bike helmet.

Lest it seem I'm passing the buck, I am no better. The back of the rocking chair in the living room is a convenient repository for outerwear, and as the week goes on, the weight of the accumulated jackets and pullovers create a precarious imbalance that eventually has to be addressed as a safety measure - and then the vacant chair back becomes an irresistible magnet for the next jacket removed. My home office looks like the scene of a piling contest, and at any given moment, every contestant has a shot at winning.

And don't even get me started on dishes. My wife and I rarely do preemptive strikes on the mounting dish pile, and grudgingly begin washing only when silverware shortages make it a necessity. On the rare occasion they're all clean, we usually order takeout so that we can preserve the kitchen like a museum set.

But the fact is, we LIVE in our house. Live, an action verb, meaning to concentrate on the activity and not the aftermath. I would love for our house to resemble a page from Dwell magazine, studiously austere and symmetrically ordered, but the only way OUR house is going to look like that is if we hire an editor from Dwell to come in every other day and tidy it all up for us. We have animals and hobbies and jobs and junk mail and distractions, and worst of all, we have a television, which, when you look directly at it, allows us to avoid seeing anything else on our list of accumulations.

Yes, we have more "stuff" than we need. But we also have more sentiment than we need, so every tchotchke ever received is somewhere in the house, every painting made by our seven-year old amateur artist is tucked somewhere, every outgrown sweater is stacked in a cluttered closet in case one day we miraculously lose the five inches of height we've put on since these aging garments fit.

Yet I'm tired of being embarrassed by the fact that we have better things to do with our life than create the illusion of perfection. We take care of the essential stuff---the cat box is cleaned daily, the fridge rarely has outdated science experiments, and our neglect never escalates to a health concern. (When the dishes do get washed, they're spotless.) I recall Frank Zappa, in his autobiography, noting that he was attracted to musicians with strange odors and bad teeth because it indicated that they had more important things on their mind than showering and flossing. Well, Frank would be pretty comfortable at our place. (Though he'd likely be disappointed by the gaping hole in the Z section of my CD rack.) I don't believe that everyone who is tidy has nothing better to do with their time---I appreciate the sense of calm that comes with a clean house, and understand the pursuit of that feeling. I'm simply tired of pretending that I engage in that pursuit on every day except the one when you came to visit.

Giving up the obligatory apologies for a messy house will be a challenge---I've had a lifetime of training that incorrectly correlates neatness with virtuousness. Cleanliness is next to godliness? I'm calling bullshit on that adage. God isn't up there rating our home like a Zagat mystery shopper assessing hotel quality. God knows that I give up my bus seat for the elderly (and nearly anyone else who needs it), God knows my daughter is the first responder when one of her classmates falls on the playground, and God knows that my wife would severe her right arm if it meant her daughter would have a better life because of it. If God is up there giving demerits because the pasta pan sits on the stove for three days, then God needs to find a hobby.

Would I prefer a tidy home where finding scissors isn't a challenging treasure hunt that often ends in disappointment? Certainly. Should we have told the woman who sold us our house that we had no need for the dishwasher she offered to leave for us? The word "duh" appears somewhere in that answer. But would I trade any of the positives in my life for consistently vacant kitchen counters and a carefully cataloged basement? Absolutely not. And from now on, I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

#128 - Pressing Buttons

2009-09-18T06:46:00.000-07:00

Pressing Buttons

9/18/09 (#128)

Visiting with Nick and Lindsey recently, my pass through their living room was interrupted by a seismic jolt from the past: Sitting on their desk was a large jar filled with hundreds of random, colorful sewing buttons. The stash, I learned, had belonged to her mother, and Lindsey's fondly recalled memories of these buttons elicited pangs of nostalgia. Plunging my hand into the bowl felt like I was reaching into my memory, recalling my own mother's sizable collection of random buttons. While Lindsey spoke of her history with the buttons (they had only recently arrived at her house, and she was freshly excited about them), my head drifted miles and years away.

Of all the toys I remember from my youth, the tin full of buttons that resided on my mother's sewing machine ranks among my favorites. My mother sewed a lot when I was young---with four kids, the ability to make/modify/repair was surely a cost-effective skill---and had collected pounds of buttons over the years: extras from button-cards purchased for particular garments, odd buttons that had become detached from a shirt of unknown origin, others snipped from garments destined for discard. My mother had built the collection over years, the span of time revealed in the diverse button design.

Mom's collection was stored in a pale blue canister that once held some arcane brand of chewable caramels, dented and dinged but stalwart in its duty. Shaking the can produced a fantastic sonic as buttons of various sizes and weights clanged the walls, though it was an unwieldy maraca for a young boy. When that container was eventually outgrown, the buttons were transferred to a larger tin, this time a vessel produced for transporting hard candy. I missed the familiarity of the original tin, but I reveled in the extra space that I knew would one day be filled.

What's so fun about a big can of buttons? Quite simply, they were a sensual delight:

Sound: For a fan of everyday sonic experiences (the erratic symphony of traffic, the honking of geese flying overhead, the industrial rhythms of machines), dumping several pounds of buttons onto a tabletop is an aural delight. Swishing the pile, hearing the quiet friction of hundreds of bits of plastic, wood, and metal; the sharp, thin sound of tapping thin mother-of-pearl buttons together like castanets; later, the noisy chaos as I scooped them in handfuls and returned them to their metal container.

Touch: Diving my hand into the depths of the little discs offered a tactile splendor. I reveled in the soft resistance of the hard buttons, my fingers clearing a path that was immediately refilled by cascading clicks as they nestled into the disappearing gap. Plus, there were the textures of the individual buttons---old buttons weaved of hardened leather, the textured edges of newer buttons (this was the 70's, mind you), and the cool smoothness of jacket buttons that seemed to be made of stone.

Sight: Like hundreds of puzzle pieces that would never fit together, the buttons could be arranged in infinite number of creative patterns---a ring of small orange buttons around a large center button to make a button black-eyed susan; a sloppily arranged universe, each planet represented by a different color, size and style; vertical stacks, trying for maximum height with a tower of regularly smaller tiers; experiments in symmetry, shifting shapes and colors into familiar and fantastic patterns.

I recognized several of the buttons in Lindsey's jar as twins from my mother's collection, as if Lindsey's home had been a parallel universe to my own. (Fairly parallel to many of our friend's youths, I'm sure. Especially those homes with sewing machines.) Like our minds collect moments in a cluttered and disorderly manner, small handfuls from Lindsey's jar invoked random recollections: wooden dowel buttons like those snipped from a worn-thin camelhair coat; bright orange plastic discs that we had used when my mother made a tiny shirt for my stuffed chimpanzee Zip; even a couple of those large mother-of-pearl buttons, their original use a mystery but forever locked in my memory as playthings.

There's a parenting adage assuring that when you buy a toy for a child, the part they'll like best is the box. That's because the more particular and exacting a toy is, the more limited it is for use - a model of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise might be really cool, but it's fairly confined to being the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Yet the box in which it came can be a firehouse, a castle, a boat, anything that the imagination allows. That's what I recall about the buttons: they were colorful and tactile building blocks that could be used in myriad ways---not one of which included them being a button.

# 127 - Columbia House Rules

2009-02-13T10:48:00.000-08:00

Columbia House Rules

2/13/09 (#127)

If you’re as old as I am, you can probably wax nostalgic about Columbia House Records. If not, you will probably raise an eyebrow in disbelief to hear about it: “Let me get this straight, you had to tape a penny to a thin-cardboard postcard you found in the Sunday newspaper, transcribe into the card’s dozen little white boxes various six-digit numbers that corresponded to tiny images of the album art, and in return you’d get a dozen vinyl albums in the mail?” It’s true. Though sometimes, the Sunday paper insert included a sheet of little stamps, one for each record, so you’d lick and affix rather than writing in the numbers.

I loved Columbia House. Their newspaper inserts featured an improbably diverse list of albums, from Kris Kristofferson to Quiet Riot to The Captain and Tennille to The Fiddler on the Roof. I remember sitting with the multi-fold flyer at the kitchen table, circling the sure-things and putting little questions marks next to others, fifteen choices pared down to eleven, or ten, because Kiss Alive II was a double album choice and used up two of my picks. I loved it so much that I often went through the selection process even if I had no intention of placing the order. It was window shopping, but instead of staring at clothes through a storefront and imagining how I’d look if I could wear them, I imagined my burgeoning vinyl collection would allow me to segue from Billy Squire to the Talking Heads.

Of course, you didn’t really get a dozen albums for a penny. That was step one; steps two through seven involved buying six more club selections at regular price. The danger was the regular club updates that arrived every four weeks, each including a selection-of-the-month album that you would receive automatically if you didn’t return the enclosed postcard and check the box, “No, I do not wish to receive Donna Summer’s Bad Girls.” My negligence in returning these cards had me carting many an unopened album to my local used record store during my membership periods, but because Columbia House sent cheaply-made knock offs of the albums purchased in stores---thinner vinyl, plain-paper inner sleeves instead of glossy sleeves with lyrics and photos, double albums without the deliciously large fold-open centerfold---I was often rebuffed, ruefully carrying home my duplicate Cars album.

When my meager finances allowed, the card went off in the mail. The requisite “allow four to six weeks for delivery” was always brutal at that age, when a week was a significant portion of time (these days, they go so fast that my wall calendar is perpetually a month or more behind.) Eventually, the glorious day would come: I’d get home from school to find an oversize cardboard box leaning against the front door; heavy in the hands, I’d double-step the stairs up to my bedroom where I’d tear up the glued flaps and fill the room with the scent of cellophane.

I’d spread the albums across the bed, sifting through the titles, intoxicated with anticipation of sounds that would soon emanate from the turntable with the cracked plastic dust cover. No albums open yet, just laying the LPs side by side, admiring the artwork: Jimi Hendrix Smash Hits (the most ubiquitous album among my circle of friends---thanks Columbia House!); Led Zeppelin IV (or man carrying sticks, or Zoso, or whatever you wanted to call it), Some Girls by the Stones, the Pretenders, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and on and on. A thumbnail splitting the plastic protection of the first selection, the arm settling onto the album, and the comforting sound of the needle tracking nothing for a few moments before the music began.

I love that vinyl has become such a boutique medium these days, an indie badge of honor, at once modern and retro. I no longer own a record player (when it comes to new music, I rely on the kindness of friends, who dupe to disc) but along with the sonic warmth and particular audio characteristics of this analog medium, I appreciate the resurgence of cover art, where the operative word is art---I grew up seeing album cover thumb-tacked to bedroom walls; no one hangs puny little CD covers on their wall.

I miss that tactile interaction with my music, those extra sensual dimensions---the expanse of the 12” x 12” cover art, the whiff of the newly opened record, the physical ritual that preceded and accompanied the sonic experience. These days, we can consume massive amounts of music without ever holding the product in our hands ---along with radio, we have Pandora streaming from the PC, iTunes loading up the portable player, music delivered straight to the ears without your hands and eyes being involved at all.

There's no explaining it to young people who only know music as piped in on the Internet. Immediate gratification. Any title available in an instant. But to steal a line from AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, “Although Eating Honey is a very good thing to do, there is a moment before you begin to eat it which is better than when you are.” The LP is an interactive experience, more than a mere soundtrack to our day.

I doubt I’ll ever dive back into the vinyl realm (I confess, I have succumbed to the advantages of digital efficiency) but I like to imagine my daughter coming home one day with an record tucked under her arm, slicing the cellophane with her thumb nail and gingerly laying the album on the turntable, laying back on her bed, losing herself in the lyric sheet and liner notes as the music fills the room. Even if she doesn’t have the pleasure of opening a cardboard box packed tight with new records from The Shins, Rapids, Pure Country Gold and nine other artists, I hope she understands that things haven’t always been the way they are today. Once upon a time, “convenient” meant taping a penny to a little card and patiently waiting for the prize.

#126 - The Inequities of Santa

2009-01-11T12:08:00.000-08:00

The Inequities of Santa

1/11/09 (#126)

"Dad, do you believe in Santa?"

My daughter asked that question a couple of weeks ago as we watched a Christmas movie, her eyes glued to mine as she looked for parts of the answer that might not be contained in the words. (I have learned not to underestimate the ability of a kindergartener to interpret body language and verbal pauses.) Such inquiries come each Christmas now, last year's couched in logic rather than faith: How Santa could get into our house since we didn't have a fireplace? I dodged that one by explaining that Santa only uses fireplaces when they're available, asking her to consider all of the people who live in apartment buildings. Santa has more magic up his sleeve than just the ability to get down a chimney, I assured.

This year's question was so direct that it caught me off guard. She isn't old enough to understand the improbable physics that would allow a chubby old man and an octet of flying deer to traverse the entire globe in 24 hours, but since most Christmas movies feature a character wrestling with this very question, it was inevitable that she would ask the nearest adult authority. (And since I do pretty well when we play along with Cash Cab at home, she seems to think of me as a good source for knowledge.) I made a face like I was giving it serious thought, and replied, "You know Sage, I do." She nodded her head, looked back at the television, and after a similarly contemplative pause, replied, "I do, too."

Within a week, my effort to maintain the charming myth of the man whose belly jiggles like a bowl full of jelly would come back to bite me.

In every household, Santa plays by a different rule book. In some homes, Santa brings all the gifts; in others, he brings only one toy. (In ours, it's the latter.) In some houses, Santa brings the most expensive gift; elsewhere, the most special gift. (In ours, it's something special.) We are trying to raise our daughter to be reasonable about her materialism, so while Sage scores a respectable booty of books, art supplies, dolls and games from her parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, we try to keep the focus on the joy of getting gift surprises and enjoying the kindness of family rather than seeing the holiday as a chance for maximum ka-ching. This year, "Santa" brought her a lovely stuffed fairy doll that she had adored for most of the year, and she loved it. It looked like something Santa's elves could have made, which is a bonus for us with regard to keeping the myth intact. (I figure it's only a matter of time before Sage asks what kind of merchandising deal the North Pole has negotiated in order to build and distribute so many branded products. One of these years, the question will be, "Do elves make iPods, or does Santa hire contingent workers from Apple?")

Christmas was a wonderful day. The next day, Sage started seeing her friends again, and my wife heard the following conversation between Sage and one of her friends:

"What did Santa bring you?"
"A fairy doll," Sage replied. "It's so sweet, with beautiful glittery wings."
"No, I mean your BIG gift, what did Santa bring?"

My wife cringed. "Santa", she and Sage learned that day and again on days that followed, had delivered significantly larger and more expensive gifts to Sage's friends. Sage didn't say so, but she's a girl who is acutely aware if two glasses of milk are poured with microscopically different volumes---I'm certain these inequities did not escape her attention. Hadn't she been good all year? (She had, and then some. Her teachers regularly remark on her kindness and empathy, "the first child on the scene to help an injured classmate.") Santa had given her a sweet little doll, but her friends scored DVD players, video game systems, 10,000 piece Lego sets and other monstrosities. I expected her to report, "I do believe in Santa, dad---and I believe he's a bastard."

I don't begrudge anyone for giving gifts to their children, and I'm sure these gifts brought great joy to those kids. But as my wife asked, why does Santa have to bring the high-dollar gift? Santa has a workshop staffed by elves at the North Pole, not a factory in Taiwan that manufacturers Bluetooth-enable devices. It slays me to think of Sage feeling that Santa thinks less of her than other children. My wife felt it even more, coming home the day she heard that conversation and uttering urgently, "Forget this, I'm telling her the truth. I'd rather than be NO Santa than an unfair Santa."

It seems to me there are three options for us:

Up the ante on "Santa's" delivery. What the heck, this is America, what are with thinking with this "reasonable materialism" crap? We aren't going to save this economy with "reasonable materialism". When in Rome, consume like the Romans do.
Explain that Santa brings one gift to each child, but that some parents also give additional toys as "from Santa" because they want the child to feel like Santa loves them. But that defines Santa so strictly, and I don't want Sage to be explaining these rules to classmates whose families have Santa bring everything.
Kill the man completely. Yay, won't that be a fun conversation. I know she'll learn the truth someday, but I don't want that to be at age six. Yet is that worse than the smallness she must have felt to learn that Santa was far more generous to some friends than to her?

It amazes me how much baggage Santa left behind at our house. That was his gift to my wife and me. Thanks, Santa. I'd have been fine with a lump of coal.

I once attended a poetry slam where a performer from Washington DC spoke of when he learned that Santa wasn't real: He peeked into the bathroom one day before Christmas and saw his mom scrubbing toys, the Goodwill bag on the floor, steam and the smell of bleach rising from the tub as his mother washed off any evidence that the toy wasn't new. When he saw the toys under the tree on Christmas morning, "from Santa", he understood that Santa was a ruse.

Let me be clear, I feel very blessed: There are families where Santa doesn't visit (literally and figuratively) and I'm grateful for our good fortune. But honestly, it's tempting to toss out Kris Kringle and his ho, ho, hos as the benefactor of Christmas. I prefer the sentiment of Charlie Brown's pathetic Christmas tree thriving under Linus' attentive care; the people of Bedford Falls rallying to the rescue of George Bailey; I want "Santa" to be that mother from Washington DC, scrubbing used toys with hot water and bleach, providing a happy holiday with what money and effort she had available. That's the Christmas spirit that I want Sage to appreciate. That's a Santa I can believe in.

Though I don't know how I'll explain how a middle-aged woman from Anacostia who smells vaguely of Clorox was able to get down our non-existent chimney.

#125 - Another Father's Day

2008-12-26T21:54:00.000-08:00

Another Father's Day

12/26/08 (#125)

I could hear my daughter's hurried footsteps behind the creak of the front door as I came home from work, moments before her urgently blurted, "Dad, I'm learning to play Scrabble!!!" She's six, and has been watching mom and dad play the game for her entire life, and now that she is actively reading and spelling, Sage's mom decided to initiate her into the game. It was obvious that Sage saw the invitation as an acknowledgment of her maturity, a rite of passage into something closer to adulthood. (I was also delighted to hear her first phrase upon returning to the game, a lamentation to her mom: "I wish I had another 'O', I could make 'zoo'." Ahhh, The frustration of not having one crucial letter for a big score---she sounds like a veteran Scrabble player already.)

Before I became a father, no one mentioned to me how thrilling it would be hear that phrase exploding from my daughter's soul. It's one of myriad things that no one ever told me about, because these things are both frequent and fleeting, the day-to-day deliciousness that makes parenting a pleasure. When I was younger and asked people how they liked being parents, their responses rarely indicated that fatherhood was worthy of pursuit. The responses were enthusiastic, but they offered unconvincing moments of evidence because it was the language of their life, not mine. Ever hear someone say, "When you have kids, your whole life changes"? I got that impression, because parents described a life that was unfamiliar to me. No one ever mentioned, and I lacked the foresight to imagine, that my six-year old daughter would one day lay "gland" on the Scrabble board and immediately defend it with, "It's a word. It's in my body book." I've had many great days in my life, but none better than this one.

I've come to realize that parenting is impossible to accurately convey. Non-parents are inundated with too much information, accurate and inaccurate, to have any context for processing it all. It's like flying into Tokyo and 20 minutes before landing, every person on the plane starts simultaneously telling you where to go and what to do and what to beware of, most of the voices in broken English with foreign words. By the time you land, you've learned nothing, you've simply been overwhelmed with mostly irrelevant information. (At least that's how I felt when it was happening to me.) My advice to the curious is not to ask everyone; just look for folks on the plane who dress a bit like you, maybe read the magazines that you like, and quietly ask, "Any favorite places in Tokyo?"

My friend Doug was the first of my close friends to have a child in our adult life, and I recall asking him what it's like to be a father: "You never know how much love you have inside you until you're a dad." Doug seemed to understand that there was no way to put his feelings into a context I would understand: People can love their nieces and nephews, can adore their coworkers babies, can revel in a talkative toddler on the bus, but in the end, the age-old adage "it's different when their yours" is astoundingly profound. (Despite it's common use as explanation for how one could endure the crying of an infant or the tantrums of a toddler.)

To use another travel metaphor, imagine describing a trip along the Columbia Gorge to someone who has never taken the trip. If you're like me, you'll mention the expansive view from Vista House, the awesome magnificence of Multnomah Falls, the delightful collision of quaintness and cool that is Hood River. These are all wonderful stops on that journey, and shouldn't be missed, yet what makes that drive wonderful to me isn't those items: It's the little fruit stand just south of Hood River that offers samples of their ridiculously delicious jams (blueberry amaretto is a favorite) and serves improbably fresh-tasting huckleberry shakes; it's the moss-enveloped stone of the guide rail along the old scenic highway that offers a momentary feeling that I am driving through the past, a lifetime previous, when this two-lane road was enough and the six-lane freeway below would have been a farcical idea; it's the miles of conversation with my wife, who after sixteen years together is still my favorite companion for that (or any) drive. It's these personal things that make that drive a pleasure, just as you have your own secret stops that make that journey special for you.

The same is true for parenting: It's a road traveled by many, but there are uncountable numbers of rest areas and detours and travel rituals that make the journey yours alone.

I'm reminded of the art of Jan Vermeer, the Dutch artist whose paintings transcend mere realism and achieve an accuracy that so-called reality doesn't offer: The bricks of his buildings look more realistic than actual bricks; the light through the window is so true that if you look long enough, you expect it to change as the sun in the painting slowly sets. To describe the subject matter of a Vermeer work is meaningless: The joy is in the details, tiny brush strokes that reveal a secret that seems to have been spoken directly to you.

What's it like to be a father? For me, it has revealed that the world is made up of an infinite number of tiny brush strokes; has reminded me that the milestones are nice but happiness lays between them; that Doug was right about the capacity of love; and last but not least, life is sweet, with or without that second letter "O".

#124 - All in Stride

2008-12-01T21:36:00.000-08:00

All in Stride

9/27/08 (#123)

I take the same bus to work every day, at the same time, so despite my journey including splendid architecture, views of several bridges, even passing under the odd and intriguing Portland Tram, my reality is like that of everyone else who does the same commute each day: scenic redundancy is a fact of life. Sure, the National College of Natural Medicine is a great building, but except for variations in which windows are illuminated, it looks the same on Friday as it did on Tuesday. Since the physical landscape rarely changes, my eyes gravitate to more transient visual stimuli---namely, people. But not just people. Particularly, stride.

I read a factoid long ago that in all most cultures, all other things being equal, women are attracted to men who walk quickly. (A bit of information that briefly inspired me to adjust my gait to something closely resembling speed-walking.) The theory is based on primal survival instincts: Men who walk quickly have more energy, will get more done, and are more likely to be good providers.

This science came into my mind as I stared out the bus window one morning and watched a woman with a strong, confident stride navigating the morning crowds on Third Avenue. She easily outpaced everyone with whom she shared the sidewalk, yet she looked completely unhurried, as if her speed resulted not from effort but from efficiency, the sum of mechanical precision and natural grace. Our paths were parallel for a couple of blocks (a red light helping to keep the race close), and I was riveted: I could not see her face, her November clothing disguised her figure, yet my eyes followed every step. She turned the corner on Jefferson while my bus continued on Third, the rhythm of her stride resonating in my mind.

While I grant that, as that old factoid implied, I may possess a subconscious attraction for physical proficiency (if it’s true for women, it’s likely true for men), the lingering essence of this woman was her beat. Think of drumming as an art form: A good drummer can play in odd time signatures, cleverly massage the downbeat or perform complex polyrhythmic patterns, yet it’s usually a strong, simple beat that convinces people to tap their feet and wiggle their hips. Our bodies respond to certain rhythms, which goes a long way toward explaining why James Brown sold a lot more records than Frank Zappa. I think that’s why the graceful woman was so compelling to me: She demonstrated a simple, solid beat that perfectly accompanied the rhythm of the morning.

Such rhythms are uncommon in the people I see walking downtown. While the average American worker on the average workday walks with an obligatory sense of meter---without it, we would lurch and stumble like drunkards responding to the opening strains of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”---our walking, to continue the drum metaphor, tends to be full of flams and slippery downbeats, adhering to strict-time with the same accuracy that an all-audience clap-along follows the beat at a music concert. Our thoughts are diverted elsewhere, our eyes are diverted elsewhere, and our stride reverts to a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other autopilot, completely functional but with the time-keeping skill of the drummer in your junior high school orchestra.

In these pre-coffee hours, the downtown sidewalks feature a variety of walking styles: Shufflers, who seem as if they are not walking toward their destination so much as simply walking to the next spot on the sidewalk; Plodders, whose feet seem to be unfairly affected by gravity, their steps landing like magnets upon metal; Sherpas, whose gait is sullied by the collective weight of an inexplicably large load of shoulder bags and briefcases; and Tumbleweeds, whose inconsistent pacing results from being unwitting pawns to random neon signs and window displays, recognizable because the person walking behind them wears a fierce grimace as they try to find a comfortable pace of their own. At different times, I am each of these types (sometimes simultaneously) but I searched my muscle memory and could not recall the last time I had strode as fluently, as easily as that one woman did.

In high school, my friend Bernie confided his methodology for walking across a gymnasium or cafeteria floor when eyes are upon him: Recall the opening strains of U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and walk to that imaginary beat. Good advice---the song’s anthemic muscle and militaristic snare beat offers a perfect soundtrack to a strong, steady gate, and by keeping that song in one’s head, it naturally trickled down to the feet. As the years passed, the duties of that song as an imaginary metronome have been transferred to Young MC’s “Bust a Move”, which has a similar insistent rhythm but adds an element of shoulder-swaying strut. (Plus, you get to smile over lines like “every dark tunnel has a light of hope, so don’t hang yourself with a celibate rope.”)

I wonder if the woman I witnessed on Third Avenue has a song that she conjures to provide a soundtrack to her stride---perhaps silently singing Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” or The Roots’ “I Don’t Care”. Or maybe she is like any good drummer, so thoroughly practiced that she creates the illusion that it’s easy. I’ll likely never know, and that’s fine: I’m not interested in mimicking her method; I’m interested in achieving her results, in adding a little more funk and a little less function to the beat of my feet. I want to feel in my own stride the feeling I had when I watched her walk: That her gait was not in rhythm with the world, but that the world adjusted itself to follow her rhythm. From the confines of the bus, it looked like a wonderful way of walking.

#123 - Badminton Fever

2008-09-27T15:36:00.000-07:00

Badminton Fever

9/27/08 (#123)

Last month during the Olympics, I watched a ridiculously broad array of sporting events, including one particular day that featured water polo, soccer, badminton, basketball and diving, a mix so diverse that it felt like a marathon episode of ESPN's Sportscenter. The game that hooked me most? Badminton.

In the past decade, my only badminton experience involved an impromptu game at our neighborhood block party, an event that featured a level of play that looked less like Olympic sport and more like a YouTube video of a Blind Flyswatters convention: Birdies lost to house gutters and splashed into courtside beverages, racquets colliding with a disconcertingly brittle tone, and a tremendous amount of hilarity that fell short of "sport", or even "pastime", and landed squarely on "screwball comedy".

Frankly, it did nothing to prepare me for the spectacle of Xie Xingfang vs Zhang Ning, the glorious and fierce women who battled in the gold medal singles match. The back-story played like a scene lifted from a Sylvester Stallone script: Zhang, the aging defending gold medalist (an archaic 33 years old) who barely secured the last available spot on this year's Chinese team, versus Xie, the 27 year old Chinese phenom who entered the Olympics as a heavy favorite for the gold. The action was intense, the crowd roaring with delight on every volley, the two competitors leaving everything on the court as Zhang came for behind for a stunning 21-18 victory in a thrilling third set. (The only disappointment of the match was that it didn't conclude with the heroic "Gonna Fly Now" soundtrack that it so richly deserved.)

These women played with a strength and grace that enthralled me. Performing with improbably precision, the shuttlecock traveled upwards of 200 miles per hour yet rarely crossed the back line, the player's reaction time boggling my mind. It was like watching a game of tennis that had been spliced into alternating portions of double-speed and slo-motion action.

Of course, I wanted to drive to Target immediately and invest in my own badminton set. Neighbors would suspect I was training Sage to be a future champion, but the truth would be darker: I'd be training her to play so that I would have someone to play with, as my wife would be as unlikely to revel in the sport as she would if I asked her to---well, actually, there is no reasonable analogy; suffice to say badminton would be my hobby, not hers. Before rushing out to make the purchase, I decided to do a little research online, where I discovered a secret world of badminton thriving beneath the traditional sports radar.

First, I went to BadmintonInformation.com (of course!) who assure on their home page, "Looking for a Badminton Website that has everything? Then look no further!" It's hard to argue with that claim, especially if you've never seen another badminton site: news, tutorials, videos, glossaries, player interviews, even a badminton blog. (Posts are not dated, so I am unable to gauge frequency of posts.) One of the pages even introduced me to three badminton magazines.

I shouldn't be surprised that such magazines exist, since there are ample glossy mags devoted to cats, model airplanes, camping, space travel, and a thousand other topics with dubious need for a monthly chronicle. The site kindly gave a summary of the three magazines, ensuring that a novice like me didn't foolishly subscribe to the wrong badminton publication. My favorite quotation came in the description of Badminton Asia:

"...a relatively new badminton sports and lifestyle magazine"

A badminton lifestyle magazine? My head began to fill with images: Luxurious homes with posh foyers featuring marble inlays in the shape of a shuttlecock; badminton champions lounging by lagoon-esque pools flanked by a perfectly manicured grass playing court; champagne parties at trendy restaurants where elite players laughed and celebrated their fabulousness. In short, MTV's Cribs, but with Xie Xingfang replacing Beyonce in each photo. (Sadly, investigation of the magazine led me to their website, which currently offers a preview of their Jan-Feb 2007 issue; more sadly, the preview had no pictures of Zhang Ning leaning casually on a Rolls Royce.)

Next I visited BadmintonWarehouse.com, which doesn't claim to be the only badminton retailer you'll need, but should, since they offer more gear than I ever would have imagined: Over 80 rackets ranging in price from $9.95 for the Qiangli 5328 ("ideal for backyard play and beginners ") to an astounding $239.95 for the Yonex NanoSpeed 9000 ("realizes a player's dream--high elasticity and high strength in the same frame"), as well as birdies made with actual goose feathers and cork---for those who find the nylon-and-rubber versions too synthetic. (Though the folks at WhatsAllTheRaquet.com warn that goose feathers are brittle and often need to be replaced several times per game.) While I love the look of the real thing, the thought of fishing goose feathers out of the Bloody Mary that I left too close to the playing field is a bit unsettling---with the plastics, a quick shake and you're good to go, with no worry of contracting some bizarre strain of avian flu. (It would be just my luck to be the first-ever badminton-related fatality.)

As I continued to search, I became overwhelmed by the topic, imagining soccer-mom-style scenarios in which my selfish desire to teach Sage to play awakened in her an unknown passion that had to be fulfilled: Waking up at 5:00am to take her to doubles practice; driving her around the Pacific Northwest to compete in badminton tourneys; investing in a collection of $200 rackets because c'mon dad, you can't use a Yonex on an outdoor court if there's a breeze, you obviously need a Joobong for that circumstance, or a Winex if there breeze is coming cross-court (duh); PETA marching outside my house because she's sponsored by Golden Vulture real-feather birdies.

But then I imagined the pride I would feel to have her featured in a badminton lifestyle magazine, her growling face on the cover with the headline "Badassminton", and inside a smiling photo of her standing in her expansive living room beneath an enormous chandelier, each bulb ensconced in its own hand-blown glass shuttlecock.

Enough. I'm off to Target.

#122 - Hair Today

2008-09-13T19:28:00.000-07:00

Hair Today

9/13/08 (#122)

In North Portland, the paths of the various public buses overlap, including the #4 and the #44. They eventually service different sections of the fifth quadrant* but travel through similar neighborhoods for the early parts of their journey, allowing some residents to take either bus. I was riding the #44 last week when we pulled into the Rose Quarter Transit Center, a hub for bus and train transfers, and as we pulled up alongside a large group of African-American high school boys, one of them looked in the window and remarked, "Damn, it's all white people. Let's wait for the next one." And wait they did---our bus pulled away without picking up a single rider. (It's worth noting that I do see a broader racial mix on the #4, as I often take that one too---unlike that young man, I take whatever bus will get me home soonest.)

The decision of those boys stuck with me. It didn't feel like a "racial incident" (as the news would call it), as we all tend to gravitate to people who look like us: I'm a blue-collar man at heart, and if I had to choose to eat lunch with a table full of folks in three piece suits and a table full of folks in work shirts with embroidered names, I'd opt for the latter---I have nothing against suits (heck, I ear a tie to work every day), but my experience has been that the salt of the earth tend to be more welcoming and open. Is that any less (or more) of a judgment than what that rider said that day? I don't know, and frankly, I don't care. What stuck with me was the frankness of his statement: There was no lie told to disguise the truth, just a blunt exclamation of why he wanted to wait for the next bus.

Courtesy of the 2008 political race, America has supposedly been talking about race this year, still wrestling with an uncomfortable history and the enduring impact of that history. Yet most discussions offer theoreticals and hypotheticals in a language that seeks not to offend.

The blame for this non-discussion could be blamed on the censorship known as political correctness, which allows a racist to adjust his vocabulary to mask his motivations, but political correctness has done nothing to tighten our tongues on many matters: Most people have no compunction with mercilessly lambasting those who espouse a different political vision, making grand statements of damnation with no regard to sensitivity. (Just listen to a conservative talk about Liberals---if you substitutes "white" for conservative and "black" for liberal (or vice versa), and it would qualify as hate speech.) Race remains the proverbial elephant in the room, the topic most of us identify as a significant issue in America yet few of us (including me) will discuss with the passion we display for politics. Is it because ideologies tend to have unifying characteristics while people of a particular skin color can collectively possess a diverse array of opinions, and thus a blanket statement about liberals is simply more accurate than a blanket statement about Latinos? Is it that subscription to an ideology is a decision while our skin color is involuntary, and it's impolite to talk about something over which we have no control?

I think the discussion of skin color in America could learn a lot from the the discussion of hair color in America.

The discussion of hair color, you ask? Unsure where to find the forum that is hosting such a conversation? I'll end the suspense---there is no discussion of hair color in America. As a rule, nobody cares what color your hair is.

This puzzles me---have you noticed the incredible follicular diversity that exists in our country, with every camp daily flaunting their differences with casual nonchalance? Blond, black, brunette red---and those are just the catch-all adjectives. Within the category of blonde, there are strawberry blonds, golden blonds, platinum blonds, dirty blonds, honey blonds and more, and every other color has similar subcategories to further define the nest of threads on our respective heads.

Yet somehow, we all manage to live in peace. No one complains about certain jobs being primarily filled by redheads; there are no events downtown that attract disproportionate and disconcerting numbers of blonds; when you're looking for an apartment, no one points at a map and says confidentially, "Just so you know, there's a large brunette population in that neighborhood"; no brunettes accuse other brunettes of "acting redhead"; I've never heard a teenager assess the riders of a bus and say, "Yikes, look at all the black hair---let's wait for the next bus."

Yet hair color is just another genetically predetermined pigmentation, a chromosomal coincidence that has no impact on our intellectual and emotional abilities. Hair color is an irrelevance because we have, collectively, made it an irrelevance.
With the exception of blond jokes (which are usually inaccurate---and blond self-esteem gets balanced out with the perception that blonds have more fun), we don't pass judgment on hair color. Sure, we all have our preferences, but no one at the office goes to their boss and says, "It's just really hard working with people with chestnut brown hair. I mean, I'm not saying their any different than we are---some of my friends are chestnut browns---but when you get a bunch of them together, it's like they're talking a different language." No brown-haired man wonders if their wife was having an affair just because their baby has born blond.

I was blond as a child, and my hair gradually grew darker, and I'm convinced it has grown darker with each passing decade, a crayoned self-portrait once requiring tan, then raw umber, then brown, until now, burnt umber peppered with flecks of silver and white. No one has ever called attention to this fact, never accused me of "acting brunette". My hair color is a non-issue.

Perhaps we don't judge hair color be because we do not have to accept out hair's birth color. Hair dyes allow us to slip incognito into another sect, so brunettes can become black-haired and blonds can become redheads and the casual observer is generally unaware. Imagine if we had that much flexibility with our skin tones, greeting a long-lost friend on the street and saying, "Wow, you've gotten so much more caucasion---last time I saw you, you were more like a mocha, now you're a vanilla latte. It looks good with that outfit."

I don't have answers, just questions: Why do we make assumptions about people based on one inherited trait yet disregard the impact of another? Why is skin-color something we are uncomfortable discussing, yet hair-color is something that doesn't warrant discussion?

I can't figure it out. Maybe because I was born blond?

* The Fifth Quadrant is an increasingly common sobriquet for North that amuses me for its embrace of the annoying disregard our section receives in the city---for instance, the Willamette Week continues to categorize its eating sections as NW, SW, SE, and N/NE, despite N/NE comprising nearly 40% of the city real estate.

#121 - The Template

2008-07-12T19:16:00.000-07:00

With my daughter's impending ascent into kindergarten, my mother sent out a small spiral bound book called School Days, a chronicle of my academic years from Pre-School to graduation. It's a scrap book of sorts, featuring pocket pages stuffed with report cards and class pictures, each page printed with spaces to document the particular information that made that school grade the blockbuster year of life that it was---favorite subjects, lists of friends, and spaces for various other information that will surely prove embarrassing if I ever ran for public office. ("Mr. Reagan, I refer to the Additional Information section for 1974, fourth grade: Do you have any evidence or corroboration of your claim, ‘I am the Fonz’?”)

Perusing the material, I was fascinated to find that I was not at all the bright student I remember myself to be. In fact, the boy chronicled in those pages wasn't me at all---I never recalled myself as a stellar student, but as it turns out, my high school grades were awful: I would have had to put in slightly more effort to have achieved mediocrity. I have regularly asserted that Mrs. Murphy's senior year English class is what directed me to my later BA in English, but the report card indicates Cs and Ds with a note, "Bill is bright and very capable to do his work. However, Bill is lazy." I flipped to junior year, another English class that I remember distinctly (perhaps because Ms. Campbell could have stood in for Jaclyn Smith on Charlie's Angels), but more Cs and Ds. I was genuinely shocked to realize that reality and memory could be so divergent. (Perhaps I wasn't the Fonz after all?)

I was heartened by my strong junior high scores, but I attended three different junior highs and thus had no social activities to distract me from school work. Elementary school guidance reports were riddled with surprising comments: in fourth grade, a check mark under needs improvement for "practicing self control, open to criticism, gets along well with others, respects authority, accepts responsibility, ability to share with others, concentrates on work, works well with others, takes pride in work." Second grade, "a sunny disposition, but needs to improve work habits greatly," then three months later, "Has not shown any improvement in work habits---does not seem too concerned with school." (But I take solace in this comment on my language Arts performance for both second and third grades, I was praised for my ability to write an imaginative story. I'm just hoping that's not a scholastic euphemism for lying.

What must have been frustrating for my parents is the national testing scores. On every standardized test, from grade 4 to grade 11, I consistently scored over the 90^th percentile, often in the 98^th percentile. Apparently Mrs. Murphy was right: When it came to school, I was lazy.

I had begun the School Days book at my senior year and worked backward chronologically, savoring the trip down memory lane and boring my wife with my reminisces until I finally reached the first grade. I pulled the class photo from the pocket, and my laughter stopped mid-exhale. Had I been a cartoon character, I would have had to pick up my jaw with my hands and hold it to the bottom of my face.

The cause was the amazingly beautiful Amazon woman who stood in the picture. She wasn't an actual Amazon---in fact, she was probably 5'9"---but when you are the only adult in a photo of 5 year olds, the camera adds 30 inches. A moment before I'm not sure I could not have named my first grade teacher, but I found myself involuntarily saying her name aloud: "Ms. Ryan". In my mind, it sounded like "Rosebud".

What came rushing through me was a sense of puzzle pieces being rapidly assembled, bits of history linked where no logical connection was previously found. At that moment, I realized that despite having slipped from my radar for a few decades, Mrs. Ryan was the template, the model I had unknowingly used throughout my life to define what made a woman beautiful. I'm sure I had no idea at the time, but staring back my life, I knew this to be irrefutable truth.

Fissures immediately began to form in the foundation of my psyche. I have long insisted that my first definition of "sexy" was provided by the same woman who had informed many of my peer's fantasy world: Batgirl. Skin-tight leather, flowing red hair, a no-nonsense attitude----let's face it, Batgirl could have worked days fighting crime and nights as a dominatrix without having to change her clothes between shifts. (Lest Batgirl be offended that she could be ousted from the seat of sexual power by a mere first grade teacher, I feel confident that she still deserves credit for my affinity for knee-high leather boots on a woman--frankly, any woman.) Mrs. Ryan versus Batgirl---now that is a comic book I would like to see. (In the version I see in my mind, Mrs. Ryan would surely kick her ass. Her catch phrase? "Time for your lessons, Batgirl!") While DC Comics dreamed up a smart, provocative woman worthy of stirring strange prepubescent longings, at her best, she amused in two dimensions, a mere cartoon. Mrs. Ryan existed in---and thoroughly occupied---three dimensions. I once asked a woman who she thought was more beautiful, Lauren Bacall or Marilyn Monroe: "Lauren Bacall, of course. Marilyn Monroe is a kitten; Lauren Bacall is a thoroughbred." Insert Batgirl and Mrs. Ryan into that analogy.

Considering that I was five when I knew her, I'm aware that I might be revising history. But seeing her picture, it immediately felt like an ingrained truth, knowledge I had always had but simply hadn't accessed. Beautiful, yes, but what she defined is laughter and intelligence, two things far more attractive than skin tight leather clothes. The first-grade photo seemed to catch Mrs. Ryan mid-chuckle, probably responding to the corny humor of a flirtatious photographer who surely wanted to snap any old shot of the brats and say, "Okay, get lost kids, just a couple of the teacher now." I have always been partial to genuineness over affectation, kindness infused with honesty and directness, beauty as a state of mind rather than the state of one's face, and she embodies all of those things. (Of course, my mother is all of these things as well, so credit given where credit is certainly due, but I never pursued woman who looked like my mother; I can attest from that picture that the same cannot be said about Mrs. Ryan.)

It's funny to think back and imagine her having an adult life, with dates and rent payments and eagerly anticipated summer excursions to distant ports. For a first grader, the teacher has no life outside of the classroom---she is there as the children rush out to catch the bus at the final bell, she is there the next morning when they return to class. She is "the teacher", not "a person who teaches for a living." So maybe she was two dimensional to me then, too. But it’s clear to me today that the elements of the essential third dimension were under construction even at that early age, to be assembled years later from a forgotten blueprint long filed away in the pocket of a School Days album.

#120 - Idiot's Guide, Simplified

2008-05-08T08:10:00.000-07:00

Idiot's Guide, Simplified

5/8/08 (#120)

I like shopping at Barnes and Noble. I prefer buying my books at locally-owned shops (for the purely selfish reason of wanting them to remain in business), but the chains stores cater to that romantic notion that one should be able to curl up with a book for a few pages and get to know it, make sure it's the right book for you. Thus, they furnish their warehouse-size spaces with overstuffed chairs and Mission-style tables that put my living room to shame, and offer an attached coffee bar staffed with lovely hipsters gyrating to user-friendly indie rock. My punk rock friends would likely consider this a form of shopping hell, but for me, Barnes and Noble is the opposite of shopping: I spend no money (except on caffeine), I escape from any retail flurry behind kiosks of Yoga how-to guides and topical political non-fiction tomes (doesn't "political non-fiction" sound like an oxymoron?) and for an hour or so, I read gorgeous, glossy magazines that I can't afford.

On my last visit, as I muled my latest stack of free-preview mags back to the rack, I was distracted by a rack of color-coded laminated pamphlets glistening in a stylish metal rack. Since I enjoy jolts of random information I stopped to investigate.

I have previously written on the ridiculousness of the so-called (and self-called) Idiot's Guides, and of how sales indicate that self-proclaimed idiots were a burgeoning demographic among the American populace. I had no intention of broaching the subject again, but those plastic-coated instructionals, a new product line from Quamat.com, claim to provide "how-to guides for absolutely everything." Everything. Best of all, every how-to guide is exactly six pages in length.

The six-page tutorial isn't a new concept: Several companies have issued these tri-fold glossy pamphlets as quick-reference tutorials for various software programs, offering users a chance to grasp the basic functions of a program without having to tackle the daunting 300-page user guide. I have several of these guides, mostly because I am an eternal optimist and when I received my pirated copy of (insert most of my software titles here) I thought it would be so much easier to learn via a few spill-proof pages than to purchase a full-on, requires-reading book that will discuss the infinite minutia offered by Photoshop, Illustrator, or whatever. Invariably, I have put those mini-manuals aside because these are complex softwares, and their possibilities are rarely unlocked by a seven-point bullet list of basic commands.

With the success of the software volumes (perhaps "volume" is inappropriate for a document smaller than the menu at a nice Thai restaurant), next came similar-sized documents intended to demystify similarly beguiling topics: Algebra, Geometry, Physics, and other mysterious concepts you might have missed in high school.

That this fold-and-go format should conjoin with the Idiot's guide topic comprehensiveness was an inevitability.

The how-to guides offered by quamut span a comically large array of topics, color-coded by the categories "House & home", "Hobbies & Liesure", "Money & business", "Computers & Tech" and "Mind & Body".

Of course, Barnes and Noble carried a stock intended to reach the broadest demographic, displaying a wide range of titles from each of the categories. The result was a hilarious juxtaposition of how-to handbooks---in one row, you could choose "stain removal", "Baking Cookies", "Beading" and "Pregnancy."

I am not a medical professional, but I am a parent, and I assure you that pregnancy is a topic that warrants more understanding than can be offered on a laminated placemat, even if the placemat is printed on both sides. And while I confess to have never delved deeply into the art of beading, I find it hard to believe that "beading" and "pregnancy" are two topics that require exactly the same amount of advance knowledge.

Jumping down one row, the topics included "Dog Breeds", "Baby Names", "Knots", and "Stock Trading." All fascinating topics, to be sure, and a simple tutorial on knots would surely prepare me to impress my Coast Guarder brother when he asks me to tie up the canoe and I knock out a half-hitch or a...well, I can't name drop any other fancy knots, so clearly, that how-to guide is for me. But learning to tie knots is considerably more hobbie-esque than floating the family savings on the stock market, and if one has intentions of doubling their retirement nest egg on the stock market, perhaps they should consider a more thorough education than that which can be obtained from a leaflet that contains fewer words than the user manual of a low-end VCR.

Lest I seem judgmental, the example of the knots belies the uncomfortable truth that I fall somewhere into their target demographic---I'm definitely one of those people who enjoys satisfying my curiosity about obscure and irrelevant topics, but I have no time for extensive research. For example, I wish I could identify breeds of cows, so that when I'm driving through back roads I could tell my daughter whether we're seeing Guernseys or Jerseys or Herefords; I wish I could identify more trees by their leaf pattern---I know maples, oaks, chestnuts and the other biggies, but the finer nuances of coniferous needles are a mystery to me. There are so many of these topics that metaphorically speaking, I feel like my intellect is more chinks than armor, and Quamut wants to help, $5.95 per repair. Of course, in my case, acquiring the knowledge isn't the issue: retention is my albatross. I've learned about knots several times in my life, and yet today I can barely tether the dog to a signpost.

Somehow, my capacity for information that offers no value outside of a game of Trivial Pursuit 80's Edition is endless (Bass player for Aerosmith? Got that. Songwriters for Cyndi Lauper's hit "Time after time? Got that. Names of television's Facts of Life ensemble? I even have room for that.) But information that I would like to have available, like birthdays, exotic cheeses I have purchased, eaten and loathed, and stories I've told so that I don't repeat them too often, keeping these bits in my mind is like trying to store smoke in a net.

So the concept, I like. What concerns me is the misconception that six pages is sufficient to cover any topic. (I hear people speak of the "dumbing down" of the nation, but no one mentions that this is largely a voluntary transformation.) A basic tutorial on dog breeds may well be contained within the confines of six pages (though I doubt the Leonberger gets a mention), but shouldn't we be investing more time into "planning your retirement" than a how-to that can be read on a three-zone train ride? Just as a career in graphic design requires more training than the perusal of a 6-page cheat-sheet designed to appeal to the average reader of USA Today, "Domestic Adoption" (one of Quamut's "House & Home" offerings) should require a more thorough investigation as well.

8 pages, at least.

#119 - Hiawatha and Harry Potter

2008-04-12T11:52:00.000-07:00

Hiawatha and Harry Potter

4/12/08 (#119)

There were two essential lessons that the boys in my neighborhood learned from mid-20th-century American cinema:

First, villains make atrocious marksmen. You can put four of the antihero's henchmen in a hallway with semi-automatic rifles, 30 feet from the star, and the sum damage inflicted by 1,000 rounds of ammunition will be the shredding of every door jamb between the shooters. Apparently, villians are not allowed to go to the same practice ranges as the heroes, each of which possessed uncanny shooting abilities rivaling Natty Bumpo's improbably accurate musket shots in J.F. Cooper's The Deerslayer, able to deliver a head-shot in the dark while simultaneously ordering a pizza and balancing their check book.

Second, a villain being an atrocious marksmen is an irrelevancy, as heroes are not affected by bullets. You can disable a bad guy with grazing gun shot across the thigh or even with a hard-thrown walnut, but the hero can take four shots to the torso and still manage to kung-fu his way through a Shriner's parade of enemies and escape, leaving the room looking like the aftermath of an earthquake at the mannequin factory. Better still, each bullet exponentially increases the drama of the event, even if the event is eating breakfast: Will three caps popped into the belly of the star stop him from finishing his Denver omelet? Of course not---what kind of hero loses his appetite after ingesting a few tiny chunks of lead?

These lessons held true for war movies, westerns, spy movies, et al, so their accuracy was irrefutable. Thus, when we engaged in role-playing games, every boy wanted to be the hero, so every boy in my neighborhood considered himself a master at getting shot.* Even the most errant issue from a fictional rifle, shot from behind a bush and midway through a forward roll, offered the opportunity for an overly dramatic blow to the body that would make even the hammiest community theater hack scoff: Slow motion was never slower, the shroud of death never pulled so languidly as it was over the eyes of a victim of one (or fourteen) of our imaginary bullets. Of course, we lived to get shot---maybe in real life the combatants would find effective hiding spots and stay low for hours, but our backyard games featured Hollywood editing, the dull stretches conveniently removed.

In the early 1970's, our most common playtime adversaries were cowboys and indians. Being children, we were unaware of the nuances of the Vietnam war, but at least one of the "big kids" on our block had gone off to war, so it felt too close to home to be an enjoyable game. Cowboys and Indians offered a less ambiguous framework for a shoot 'em up, as the movies had clearly defined the roles: The cowboys were heroes, white-hatted and worthy of adoration; the indians (who were still years away from being called Native Americans) were villains, dangerous and untrustworthy and certain to lose any mock battle.

Since we all wanted to be heroes, almost every boy wanted to be a cowboy; fortunately, there were a couple of kids who regularly volunteered to be the Indians, children who likely grew up to be either liberals (whose early sense of racial justice encouraged them to offer the Indians a fair representation on the fictional playing field) or corporate barons (whose sensed early that much could be accomplished while attention was focused on the so-called hero.) Being an Indian offered the same advantage of volunteering as an outfielder in little League Baseball or opting to play bass when every teenage peer is playing guitar: Less limelight, but more consistent playing time. Indians could plan their attack, develop signals that impersonated sickly birds, sneak up and ambush the enemy; the cowboys, on the other hand, were just waiting for the opportunity to be shot. Not killed, mind you, as our fictional ammunition depots didn't hold enough firepower for the Indians to win. It just didn't happen that way---refer to any movie as evidence.

We didn't have any Native Americans in my neighborhood, so we were never concerned (or even cognizant) that the game was stacked against the Indians from the outset. (In that way, our play was likely an unfortunate reflection of what the Native Americans faced in everyday American life.) The cowboys were valiant and virtuous, saving the day from the heathen hordes who had the audacity to defy our pale-face manifest destiny. We never pondered how the Cowboys and Indians game was played amongst a large Native American population: Was each game a new reenactment of the Sioux and Cheyenne victory at Little Bighorn? Did some Iroquois children grudgingly play the cowboys, requisite roles that were necessary for the game but doomed from the start? I imagine so, as an intrinsic element of these childhood games was a sense of good defeating evil, no matter who you defined as the good guys. Evil needed to be vanquished---I've never heard of kids playing war games where one team was soldiers from Switzerland and the other from Sweden. ("We don't pretend to shoot each other, we just pretend to report on the wars being waged in the next neighborhood.")

The Indians were only one example of Hollywood's history of presenting a contemporaneous version of evil, with art reflecting life with regards to the vilified: In the middle of the 20th century, the Germans were cast as evildoers; during the cold war, Russians and communists received the choice arch-enemy roles; as the date odometer on the 20th century rolled over, the likely nemesis was someone of Middle Eastern persuasion. For a nation that prides itself on being a melting pot, we have a disconcerting history of defining our adversaries based on broad-stroke stereotypes, cultural inaccuracies and irrational fears. "C'mon, they're just movies," some insist, but repeated inaccurate representations establish equally inaccurate perceptions. (If you disagree, ask the nearest blond how they feel about blond jokes.)

Stating the obvious, defining an enemy by race and/or culture has the unfortunate impact of defining anyone of that race or culture as an enemy. In the battle of Us vs. Them, audiences are attracted to these simplified ideas of "them" because it allows for easier sorting; unfortunately, as Timothy McVeigh, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo, and the rash of teens who have dispatched their classmates over the last decade will confirm, the so-called "them" often looks just like us.

So what is the proper Good vs. Evil scenario today, when political correctness (a term I use here to describe racial sensitivity, not inaccurately euphemistic language) makes playing what would now be called Cowboys and Indigenous Americans offensive to more than just those folks who no longer want their high school team to be called the Braves, and war is once again a topic too close to home to allow for enjoyable role-playing activities? How can 21st century children explore the classic conflict without associating a real face with the fictional foe?

Enter Harry Potter. J. K. Rowling's incredibly creative books are worthy of all of the lauding they've received, masterfully imagined and cleverly penned, but they also allow children to take sides in the eternal struggle between good and evil without giving either side a particularly distinctive face. Rowling's characters, generally, look alike. (Okay, when I say "look alike", I'm referring to the characters in the movies, but my wife, whose enthusiasm for the books was such that each new release ensured a day or two of "Mom's busy right now", assures me that the casting was consistently satisfying.) Severus Snape and Mad-eye Moody are both suspicious characters, yet in the battle of Good vs. Evil, they play for opposing sides. (Though perhaps with limited team spirit.)

In Rowling's world, evil is revealed as arrogance, avarice and conceit---a choice of actions, not a color of skin or a cultural birthright. General Custer versus Geronimo involves real people whose successes and failures appear in historical records (though perhaps with limited accuracy); Harry Potter versus Draco Malfoy allows for a battle of apparent peers, even though we're obviously meant to hope that little Malfoy brat will soon be the victim of the Cruciatus curse.

My friend's son is having a Harry Potter themed birthday this week, and I'm eager to observe the role play at the party. Of course, what I really want to see is how many times these faux Potters and Weasleys can be hit by a spell and remain standing, ready for more battle against the fictional Lord Valdemort---if Harry absorbs half a dozen hits of a magic wand and then pause to wolf down a few bites of cake, I'll know the adage is true: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

* This is not a gender-biased statement, but an accurate reporting of facts: The girls on my block never showed any interest in dirt-diving for the sake of collecting fake lead pellets in the chest. Perhaps because they had no role models in the movies, or perhaps because the boys looked like buffoons.

#118 - Caesar's New Clothes

2008-03-15T12:02:00.000-07:00

Caesar's New Clothes

3/15/08 (#118)

I didn't discover the Caesar salad until I was in my 30's. We stood at the counter of Pizzacato, my wife eager to split the salad and assuring me that any horror stories I had heard about the dish were surely fabricated, or at the very least greatly exaggerated. I had heard no such stories, my only recollection of the salad being a query to my mother when I was a teenager, her reply being, "I don't think you'd like it." That was sufficient (as the primary curator of my simple palate, she was probably correct), and never gave them another thought. I saw them on menus for decades, but took my mother at her word until that day at Pizzacato. We ordered the salad, toted it back to the apartment, and I was smitten.

A good Caesar is to the garden salad what a big, juicy backyard barbecue burger is to a McDonald's "hamburger" (how they use that noun with a straight face is a mystery to me), or what a succulent seafood fajita at a gourmet Mexican restaurant is to 99 cent burrito from the 7-11 cooler. (And no, "gourmet Mexican restaurant" is not an oxymoron, despite Portland's spate of mediocre taquerias.) The Caesar is an explosion of flavor, the garden salad a tolerable penance eaten to atone for the sin of fried foods.

For those unfamiliar, there are a variety of salads that fall under the definition of Caesar: Some are spinach based, others feature romaine (I eat only the latter); most utilize a garlic-based dressing, but a few use an anchovy-based dressing (I enjoy both, but prefer a slightly creamy Caesar, not a garlic vinaigrette); some come with chicken, but that's usually an optional side. The key to the salad is the dressing---other than that, it's just lettuce, shaved parmesan cheese and a handful of croutons.

For aficionados, you will likely appreciate both my affection for the salad, and my one complaint with the dish: The Caesar is exorbitantly---and inexplicably---overpriced.

As a rule, restaurants set their prices based on cost of product: Take the cost of the ingredients, add other overhead expenses, multiply the sum by a house-standard percentage and you have your menu price. That's why shrimp costs more than chicken---because shrimp costs more than chicken. Yet the Caesar defies this process, apparently priced by flavor rather than cost of product: The romaine Caesar has no tomatoes (whose fickle value depends, literally, on the weather), no boiled eggs or bacon or strips of prosciutto, no labor-intensive chopping of carrots or celery or radishes or onions. Yet despite this simple list of ingredients, most restaurants have the audacity to charge $7 for a Caesar while selling the garden salad for $4.

It's true everywhere---in even the most paper-napkin of places, the Caesar has a white linen price tag. The Caesar appeals to discerning tastes, which restaurateurs seem to equate with financial liquidity, like it's some kind of fine wine rather than a bowl of lettuce with some cheese shavings and chopped up bread heels on top, as if anyone ordering the Caesar must be stopping for a bite to eat before going back to the yacht or needs nourishment before the polo match. Comparing the cost to make a Caesar to the cost to order a Caesar, you would swear these salads are being assembled by a government contractor.

I am not familiar with the internal machinations of the restaurant business, but I refuse to believe the occasional (and only) alibi that I've heard offered in defense of this obviously-colluded pricing scheme: "It's expense to make the dressing." Okay, maybe making a gallon of it requires a large initial investment, but considering it's then doled out by the tablespoon (and no, you can't have another tablespoon), the economy of scale contradicts that theory. Every dressing other than sour-cream-and-a-packet-of-spices Ranch takes time and effort to repair, but no one is trying to get rich on Raspberry Vinaigrette.

I suspect the reality of overpriced Caesar is this: The garden salad is commonly ordered as an additional item, a side to accompany an entree, so restaurants need to price it reasonably enough that the diner's tab doesn't resemble a premium-channels cable bill; the Caesar, on the other hand, is often ordered as a main dish, being so aggressive in flavor that ordering it to compliment your meal is like asking Don Rickles to compliment your wardrobe. ("Hey, why don't you order the garden salad, take the four bucks you save and replace the light bulb in your closet. Whose your tailor, P.T. Barnum?") A restaurant is never going to be successful if patrons can leave having spent only $4, so the Caesar gets promoted from mere salad to economic manipulation tool.

This blatant gastronomic discrimination has been festering the dark dining rooms of America's restaurants for too long, and only by exposing this Caesarian chicanery to the harsh light of public opinion can we make this stop. Diners need to put their collective feet down and say, "Hey, until this plate of leaves stops costing three bucks more than a burger and fries, I'm not supporting your anti-garlic-lovers agenda!"

I would start this revolution myself, but as I said, I'm smitten. Throughout this protest, I will have to order wilted piles of "mixed greens" (read: weeds), each with a couple of slippery tomato wedges, a lonely cucumber slice or a few shreds of carrot topped with a so-called Thousand Island dressing that ably doubles as a cheeseburger condiment. I know I should celebrate this battle, that I should imagine each boring bite of garden salad as possessing the sweet flavor of justice; but then I imagine iceberg lettuce with bland ranch dressing and...well, that may be too a high price to pay for reform.

#117 - Barbecued Pennies

2008-02-04T08:04:00.000-08:00

Barbecued Pennies

2/4/08 (#117)

"Don't mock him, Kas, he was just raised with a simple palate."

Prior to hearing that phrase, I had never considered that my palate required a modifier, let alone "simple". Sitting there at the white Formica table in Kassie's white Formica kitchen, I thought about the adjective, used in that pre-politically-correct era as a euphemism to describe a person who would repeatedly rotate a balloon in his hands in search of the elusive front. I winced at her easy summarization---after all, I was a teenager, and like all teenagers, my complexity was too vast to be detected by adult methods of measurement.

I can't recall what plated item I had been carefully avoiding to instigate the put-down, but it was probably something pungently unappealing like sauerkraut (which always seems either not yet done cooking or cooked for too long), gorgonzola (a flavor that offended even before I learned about the mold injections) or mushrooms (someone's practical joke that backfired into culinary acceptance.) Kassie's mom often cooked as if she were daring the family to eat it, and while access to Kassie meant spending enough time with her family to prove I wasn't a danger to her either her chastity or her future, I tried to schedule my visits around their appointed dinner hour.

If I had been asked to produce my own descriptive rather than having one assigned to me, I would have claimed to possess a discerning palate: I steadfastly refused to eat anything that a panel of judges would not unanimously define as "food." (Fish got all thumbs-up; potatoes made the cut; Brussels sprouts would have split the panel's votes between vegetable and vampire repellent, so they were off my personal menu.) I didn't subsist on peanut butter and jelly (good thing, as I only liked grape jelly) or grilled cheese (American cheese only, please), and I didn't deserve to be pigeonholed as some gastronomic imbecile just because saffron made me slightly nauseous.

I suspect the comment was an innocent jab at my mother as much as at me, since it would be my mother's fault for not introducing me to the finer nuances of cabbage and for treating Cheddar as an exotic cheese. But I would later learn that my mother's appetites included an array of flavors to which I had never been exposed, and that the lack of international flair in the Reagan household was not a failure of mom's dietary ambition. To illustrate, I present Barbequed Pennies.

It's unlikely that the 1970's will be remembered as a culinary renaissance (despite thorough representation in the Casserole Hall of Fame), a context that is essential to a discussion of Barbecued Pennies. I had three siblings, and while Kassie's mom saw the dinner table as a daily training exercise to prepare her three girls for a future that included snails, seas urchin and ham hocks, my mother wanted to find something that we'd all agree to eat in the present-tense. One of those items was barbecued pennies, a meal that consisted of hot dogs sliced the short way (hence pennies), sautéed in a barbecue-type sauce and served over mashed potatoes. Julia Child might have brushed it off as a meal invented by a cook who was snowed in by a blizzard with a near-empty fridge, but I didn't need Julia Child's approval: My review? "Delicious." 30 years later I still have clear mental images of the red-stained potatoes, the plate looking like the set of a claymation murder/dismemberment scene. ("Officer, the victim seems to have been stabbed repeatedly with a circular cookie cutter.") Barbecued pennies was one of my favorite meals, though at risk of supporting Kassie's Mom's assertion, I enjoyed almost any non-vegetable entrée over mashed potatoes. (Heck, even a few vegetables.)

I did not notice when Mom stopped serving barbecued pennies, and since our plates always had something else in its place (American chop suey, cowboy casserole, shepherds pie, etcetera) no one called attention to the missing entree. Time passed, years even, and one day Mom was making her grocery list and asked if there was anything I'd like for dinner. "Barbecued pennies", I enthusiastically replied, "We haven't had those in forever."

"Yeah, but Dad doesn't like them. Anything else?"

Dad doesn't like them? There were six of us in the house, and his vote alone was enough to make it law? Was this any way to teach one's children about democracy? I offered that Dad could just have the potatoes and vegetables, or Mom could cook his franks and remove them from the pan before adding the sauce. This did not seem to be a complex work-around.

"Well, he doesn't like the smell of them cooking, either. How about fish sticks?"

The smell? It was at that moment that I understood who wielded the scissors that had clipped my culinary wings. How many other entrees had been sacked by the delicate sensibilities of that nose? How many flavors had been forbidden from our refrigerator because they failed to pass muster with one set of Reagan taste buds? (Not that this gastronomic censorship offered no benefits, as I am still grateful for growing up at a dinner table that had never hosted either lutefisk or calamari.) I would have asked him to explain himself, to justify his totalitarian domination of our dinner table options, but I had eaten enough of my Grandmother's cooking to know why he was the way he was: Her cooking skills were culled from a volume apparently called "The Joy of Boiling", a book she likely inherited from her mother. My father and I were products---and victims---of the same meat-and-potatoes lineage. I resigned myself to accept that barbecued pennies were a treat to be enjoyed only when Dad was out of town.

The "simple palate" condemnation stayed with me longer than Kassie did. I became Dicken's Pip to Kassie's Mom's Miss Havisham, vowing to expose my sheltered taste buds to the vast array of flavors that the world had to offer: I embraced the full spectrum of offerings from the local cheese counter; I explored the cuisines of Thailand, India, Jamaica, Latin America and a dozen other pastel-colored nations on the family globe; saffron once made me queasy, now I count scallops and saffron rice among my favorite meals. I have benefited greatly from these explorations, and I sometimes marvel at the impact that one little comment had on my life. I'm sure Kassie's mom had no idea that I would be quoting her over a dinner table 20 years later as I stabbed a tiny fork into my third garlicky escargot.

Of course, while that offhand comment catalyzed a lifetime of expanded menu options, genetics has not completely relinquished its influence: I still wretch at wine vinegar (bleach and sulfar are air fresheners by comparison), sauerkraut (smells too much like vinegar) and mushrooms. (In my own defense, I have genuinely tried to develop a taste for the foul little spores, if only because eating at a vegetarian restaurant and not liking mushrooms eliminates more menu choices than eating at a steak house and not liking beef. Unfortunately, without success.)

These dietary decrees make dinner more enjoyable for me, but they have also instilled a fear of the inevitable, that my daughter will develop a love affair with shitakes, porcinis and morels (oh my!) and question the fairness of the democracy in our house. (I'm certain that my wife, whose courtesy of depriving herself of mushrooms for my benefit is sure to expire eventually, will not defend me with the stealth that my mother showed my dad. In fact, I'm sure she'll offer to script the prosecutorial opening statement.) Will I be forced to acquiesce to the will of the masses and allow the addition of that most-dreaded of pizza toppings? Perhaps---but on that day, I intend to broaden the lessons on democracy by demonstrating another element of the process: "Yes, you do have the votes, Sage. But before you make that victorious call to Nicola's, let's talk about a concept called gridlock."

And on that day, grilled cheese sandwiches it will be. (They can order that pizza when I'm out of town.)

#116 - A Ginormous Problem

2008-01-21T08:07:00.000-08:00

A Ginormous Problem

1/21/08 (#116)

Just as it is fascinating to live in a city on the cusp of exponential growth, the skyline growing more jagged by the week as each new junior-varsity skyscraper arises to hold another few hundred Portland couples and there .2 children, it is enjoyable to live in a language that perpetually expands and contracts with each passing fad. Sure, it's disconcerting to hear a fifty-something white man use the word "shiznit", but it's also disconcerting to see a fifty-something man in a bikini---and that's hardly the fault of the bikini. For the most part, I embrace such linguistic developments (even if don't adopt the new terminology into my daily vocabulary), but there is one word that I hear with growing regularity that causes me to lament that the English language has no bouncer at the door:

Ginormous.

This adjective is apparently a mash-up of gigantic and enormous, emerging to describe that specifically particular size that is slightly larger than gigantic but not quite enormous. Or perhaps enormous is the lesser adjective? Considering that they're nearly perfect synonyms, ranking them is like identifying the largest egg in a full carton of "large" eggs.

When I began contemplating the growing ubiquity of ginormous (both number of users and number of uses seem on the rise) I suspected the origin lay in each generation's desire to create a language of their own: The flappers of a century ago spawned an amazingly creative argot full of reinventions (Fire Extinguisher: The chaperone on a date; Smudger: A person who likes to dance closely) and creations (23 skidoo: To ask/order someone to leave), a manner of speech that surely sounded like a foreign language to the generation that preceded them. (Peruse the "Flapper" section of any slang dictionary and you'll see how extensive their reinventions were, and how influential their vernacular was to our modern English.) After that, the Beboppers arrived with another personalization of the available language, and the soldiers of World War II generated new phrases of their own. Then came Bobby Sockers, hippies, hip-hoppers, gen-Xers, skateboarders, ad infinitum---each generation modifying the language to suit its new tastes. Just as General Motors urged young drivers that "this is not your father's Oldsmobile", the latest generation doesn't want to be saddled with having to use their parent's vocabulary; just as Kerouac doesn't mirror the syntax of Shakespeare, modern generations want to redecorate the sentence to reflect their new personality.

While I thoroughly support the mashing of two unrelated words to create a new adjective (I've created many of my own, collected in my Ridictionary), the vocabulary mash-up requires the application of creative sensibilities: The new word should shine in a way that the old words no longer did. For instance, I coined the word "Spamphlet" (a mash of "spam" and "pamphlet") to refer to the unsolicited handouts one sometimes receives when accosted on the sidewalks downtown. I'm not bragging that the new word is brilliant, but it's a more modern and enjoyable way of describing those unwanted items versus "tract" or "handout".

But with ginormous, there is no creativity displayed at all: The mashed words have nearly identical meanings, and the word produced by their union is yet another synonym. That isn't expanding the language, but merely cluttering it, like a person who gets three copies of "Huck Finn" and then claims to have a collection of works by Mark Twain. Think of the $100 bill, which once garnered the nickname "the C-note" (based on the roman-numeral "C", meaning "100"), later re-dubbed the "Benjamin" (a reference to Mr. Franklin, whose visage adorns that denomination), and how both new descriptions bring more color and playfulness to the English language. But by the ginormous method of word manufacture, that currency would become a "hundobill"---sure, life is short, but not so short that we need to save the time of two syllables with that clunky term.

It's the lack of newness that makes the use ginormous inexplicable: Why would one use the wrong word---or in this case, a non-word---if it sounds similar to and means the same thing as an existing English word? But perhaps its value lies not in what it is, but in what it is not.

Many of us have an gnawing suspicion that some of the people with whom we talk are marking our conversations with a red pen as the words come out of our mouths. We are all subject to the fear of appearing uneducated, and if we use a word with a real meaning, we can also misuse it---for instance, "that enormous matchbook" or "the gigantic cotton swab." Both of these are likely inaccurate (unless you're at a Ripley's Believe it or Not museum), and may expose the speaker as dictionary-challenged. But by using a non-word, the speaker has tossed Strunk & White out the window at the start---there's no misusing the word because the word has no actual meaning.

Think of diction as table manners: Attend a formal dinner and with each course you'll have to decide whether to use the salad fork, or the dessert fork, or the dinner fork; as the flatware inventory increases, the diner is faced with the awful prospect of exposing themselves as incapable of dining with the queen. But add a curling iron along side the plate and even the most snobbish will refrain from saying, "Did you see the barbaric manner with which he used that curling iron?" The curling iron has no correct or incorrect use as the dinner table, and thus all use of it is correct. (Though plugging the curling iron in before eating is universally frowned upon.) Obviously, ginormous is the curling iron in that analogy.

My adviser in college once told me, "It takes a great deal of courage to use the English language properly", his assertion based on the reality that our language suffers from so much widely accepted and regularly perpetuated misuses that wielding it correctly may cause the speaker to look foolish, supported by the style manuals but mocked by a group of people who think that stating "I'm not averse to it" demonstrates a hilarious lack of knowledge of the word "adverse." I suspect ginormous is a manifestation of that fear, a linguistic Golgotham conjured by speakers who seek protection from those judgmental coworkers and dinner guests who mistakenly believe that vocabulary is the hallmark of intelligence. (While it does reflect the attention paid in secondary school and/or a voracious reading habit, vocabulary is unlikely to help you compute the interest on your mortgage, solve a leak in your bathroom sink, or help you escape unscathed if you accidentally fall into the tiger cage at the zoo, so its value should be kept in perspective.)

Whatever the origin of this unnecessary etymological redundancy, I hope its life span will be worthy of measure by the Macarena standard. I fully support the continuing evolution of the English language, to the point where I'm even willing to let "shiznit" sneak through the door. But ginormous? 23 skiddoo.

#115 - Santa's Secret Service

2008-01-07T15:30:00.000-08:00

Santa's Secret Service

1/7/08 (#115)

Watch any movie that involves a fairy tale ending and you will surely see some straight-laced, overly-sober "realist" chastise the hopeful hero with a variation on, "you want everything to be like a fairy tale, but that's not how things work in the real world." (Usually delivered one implausible-plot-twist prior to the ensuing fairy tale ending.)

The problem with the fairy tale is not its incongruity with our so-called reality---after all, all the world's a stage, and for the duration of our show, we are the primary scriptwriters for our own stories: Penning a fairy tale isn't a lot harder than writing a drama about family conflict. (Though on the latter, you'd have the advantage of collaborators.) Unfortunately, the curtain rises on our play at the same time is rises on a thousand other plays, and they're all being acted out on the same stage---if can be hard to concentrate on the Princess' soliloquy if Blanche Dubois keeps interrupting the scene.

The key to staging a successful fairy tale is also the key to planning an elaborate surprise marriage proposal in a crowded restaurant: Getting the bit players to cooperate with your script. And just as the future groom must contend with some members of the impromptu cast caring more about their poached salmon than the ceremonial ruse concocted for his fiancée, there are more than a few bit players who will volunteer to improvise the role of the ogre in your fairy tale.

Santa Claus is a central character in the most perpetuated of our common fairy tales, and over this past Christmas season, I began to realize how difficult it is to protect Santa, to maintain the illusion that he is the real deal. Frankly, even the logistics of that fairy tale are a bit preposterous to maintain in the 21st century: One man with one sleigh delivers a billion toys in 24 hours? Heck, even our UPS driver had a helper with him for most of December, and they worked five days a week. And they could deliver to the front door.

My daughter is five, and while she started the Christmas season as a true believer, there were several incidents that led me to lament the previous year's tutelage in the value of analytical thinking, occasions when this production of the fairy tale seemed genuinely threatened:

Previous Scripts for the Same Story: We watched a lot of Christmas movies this year, and I was flummoxed to find so many tackling the question of "believing" in Santa Claus. From Charlie Brown to a pint-sized Natalie Wood, children are presented with an array of variations on faith and frustration. The trouble is, even though Natalie Wood eventually believes in Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street, the damage was done with the initial expression of disbelief: Midway through, Sage turned to me and asked, "Why wouldn't she believe in Santa?", as if she had heard someone refuse to believe the ocean is blue. Any explanation I could offer was irrelevant, because the seed of doubt had been planted. (Hollywood is the most difficult bit-player to urge into cooperation.)

Casting Overlap: Santa came to Sage's school, a larger-than-life man in a flawless costume (complete with a bushy, real beard) who distributed presents (supplied by the parents) to the students and told trie little elf stories with perfunctory Kringlese. (Though after he asked the children, "Does anyone know who Jesus was?" I suspected he was going to refer to his reindeer as "Peter, Paul, John, Matthew...".) Afterward, Sage asked if that was the real Santa. "It sure looked like Santa", I assured her. "Yeah, but he looked different than the one at the mall downtown." (We had not "visited" that Santa, but he had come into view when we breached the border of the Pioneer North Pole when looking for something for Sage's mom.) It's tough to keep up a fairy tale in which the hero continually changes their physical appearance---it's like trying to believe "Darren" was actually Darren when he seemed to be a completely different person in random reruns of Bewitched. (Worse, imagine Bewitched with dozens of different Darrens.)

Prop Problems: Sage and I sat watching one of the holiday cartoon movies when she asked, "If Santa comes down the chimney and out the fireplace, where does he get out at our house?" Her curiosity was genuine: Our 1924 bungalow has no fire place, no wood stove, no possible portal between the rooftop and the living room. It was one of those moments that you see in an advertisement, the dad speechless to such a simple yet complicated question, except there was no voice-over narration to mask the awkward silence that followed. I goggled my brain for something...anything...plausible. "There's a little door in the base of the chimney", I explained, then immediately recalled that the little door I was picturing was actually located on my parent's chimney, in a house they sold 20 years ago. I don't like fibbing to Sage (though when necessary, I will obfuscate the truth verbal gymnastics that would leave even the Dad in Calvin and Hobbes dizzy), and this was a lie that she could fact-check during a commercial break. A man shouldn't be subjected to such dilemmas---parenting is expansive enough without an additional section of the test featuring logic puzzles.

Too Many Writers: In our family, Santa brings one gift; Mom and Dad supply the rest. (Santa already has a billion toys in his sled, he can't be bringing the whole Smurf village to every little girl who asks.) But in Sage's cousin's house, Santa brings most of the gifts. Thus, when the kids got together that night, Sage's cousin rattled off a long list of gifts delivered by jolly old St. Nick, while she stood by with her single Santa-supplied toy in her hand, a puzzled expression on her face: Why is Santa so disproportionate in his generosity? Was her letter to Santa too specific in its request? Or had she deceived herself into thinking she would be on the "nice" side of Santa's ledger, and in fact had a line reserved for her name under "naughty"? I watched from across the room as she wrestled with these puzzles, knowing that my involvement would only exacerbate the problem because it would give her a forum for articulating her uncertainties, each question (and its noncommittal answer) begetting another question. She shrugged it off as they got down to the serious business of playing with their new toys, but at that moment I felt Dickens' ghost of Christmas Future creep onto the stage.

He looked like an ogre in a fairy tale.

What surprised me this season is that I had not anticipated any of these spoilers, yet they were hammering me on a near-daily basis, making the holiday season feel less like reveling and more like spin control. I think we managed to keep the ruse in tact, and next year she will again be excited to believe that this particular fairy tale will come true again. I just have to remember: First, don't let Santa tell any Jesus stories; Second, keep a keen eye out for rogue Santas lurking behind department-store snow drifts; Third, investigate financing on the installation of a fireplace, and finally....well, sorry Sage, Santa's going to stick to the one-gift-only rule. More than one gift for each child and, well...then the story just wouldn't work in the real world.

#114 - Brindle (Eulogy for a band)

2007-12-04T11:58:00.000-08:00

Brindle (Eulogy for a band)

12/4/07 (#114)

Every day in America, somebody's favorite band breaks up. On November 18th, it was my turn.

The dissolution of a band is a common tale, the rate of successful longevity so pathetically low that it makes even the most volatile marriage seem like a sure thing. As musicians often say, being in a band is like being married, except your married to two or three or four other people, and for "date night", you attend drunken bar scenes, display yourselves on a cramped stage and hope nobody boos your romantic bliss.

A band is susceptible to myriad intrusions upon its creativity: The quiet or clamorous clash of egos as members jockey for navigational control, the constant allure of new and potentially more satisfying projects that form on the periphery of one's circle of friends, and/or the tedium of playing songs you no longer wish to play, to name just a few. Even simple logistics outside of the musical realm can inflict a fatal blow: The bass player gets a job working nights, or the drummer gets an opportunity to move back to his home state and rediscover family, friends and familiarity.

It is the latter that brought down Brindle, a modest little duo that played sporadically in the Portland area over the last half decade, always to appreciative crowds that understood they were witness to something precious. Watching them play, you just knew Brindle wasn't going to "make it big", because "big" would have been cosmically (and comically) incongruous: They were intimate, and the rooms where they sounded best were ramshackle little places that scoffers would dismissively refer to as dives and regulars would proudly refer to as dives. When Brindle played, these rooms became a sonic geode: A gritty, unimpressive exterior disguising the gorgeous, colorful, multi-faceted beauty that existed within.

Their audience was heavy with friends and fellow musicians, most wearing a smile like they were getting away with something, privy to a secret spoken in a language that couldn't be understand beyond the walls of the room. When the band began its set, the crowd inevitably encroached Tim McMurrin (and his uniquely detuned guitar) and Josh Gambrell (and his uniquely arranged left-handed drum kit) because the music had irresistible gravity---all fleshy excess and muscular poses had been been boiled off, leaving a sonic skeleton that revealed the genuine grace and power of rock and roll. As my friend Paul Bryant noted on a web site upon hearing the news of their demise, "Brindle is some of the most satisfying live music I've ever heard. Their music is somehow secretly formulated in its simplicity to move me and choke me up while totally rocking me out."

Corralling their sound into a small collection of adjectives is a pointless procedure, as the contradictory modifiers "simple" and "complex" were immediately appropriate and simultaneously accurate. Their music bounced as if it was navigating a hopscotch game that stopped at 5 ½, often beginning with an irregular gait before revealing a strange yet lissome cadence. Such revelations had to be quick: Most Brindle songs clocked in around 120-seconds, with a rare few stretching toward the 3-minute mark and others stopping half-way to that point. Where most bands find a catchy riff and try to maximize the utility of the hook by repeatedly returning to it in the same song (verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/verse/chorus), Brindle allowed the hook to shine brightly then disappear, a formula written as "verse/chorus/next song". This could be heartbreaking, as it was disappointing if they never went back to a particular cool part, but that ache was soothed by the next song, which was always just as good as the one that preceded it. Two minutes later, fresh heartbreak ensued, a cycle that repeated throughout their set. The most accurate description of the band's sound involves no adjectives at all: "Rock smarter, not harder" was their unofficial motto (everything about Brindle seemed unofficial), and a more apt summation could not be written.

There are some bands that flash with stunning brilliance, but whose passing is accepted with little more than a shrug of regret. This is not a commentary on quality, but is instead essential to the natural order: Music is constantly evolving, and a particular bloom can be thoroughly enjoyed and then allowed to fall from the vine, to be replaced by a new bud. But there are some bands that urge us to break this order, that possess something inexplicable in their biology that makes us want to pluck the flower and press it, preserve it, prevent time from taking it from us.

Brindle was one of the latter bands. They will be dearly missed by many.

#113 - Aquatic Engineering

2007-11-14T16:19:00.000-08:00

Aquatic Engineering

11/14/07 (#113)

There are several small lakes that form at this time of year in North Portland, waterways that rise and engulf vast tracts of land to form landmarks such as Lake Chautauqua (occupying the same general coordinates of N Chautauqua Blvd) and Halleck Pond (located where N Halleck St. was known to have existed in September.) These recreational areas abut the curbs of my neighborhood, formed by the confluence of rainy rivulets that flow along the gutter toward the city block's topographical low point, the storm drain, carrying on their waves the thousands of horse chestnut leaves that have spent an unhurried season papering the neighborhood in a veined, pale-yellow wrapper.

The chestnut leaf is enormous, shaped like a droplet of water if a droplet of water was the size of an adult's gym sneaker, and usually falls in the same cluster in which they grow, five leaves fanning out from a single point of connection with the branch, together large enough to form a plausible placemat for a formal dinner on Gilligan's Island. On a day with legitimate rain (not that ubiquitous Portland drizzle that is often referred to as rain), these enormous leaves are hurried to the sewer inlet where they are promptly splayed across the iron grate: In a matter of minutes, the drain is clogged and a pool begins to form. It's not uncommon for the pool to swallow the pavement completely, as the storm drain on the other side of the street is usually clogged with leaves as well.

Growing up in New England, I learned to regard standing water as the enemy: As one old-timer in my town told me years ago, "If it doesn't go where I want it to go, then it'll go where I don't want it to go." In Maine, water that backs up at a street drain will seek the next available low spot, which is most likely our or our neighbor's basement---it's a civic duty to make sure that the drains are flowing freely, as no one wants to hear the sound of their sump-pump turning on every four minutes throughout the night. (Plus, standing water breeds mosquitoes, and the battle against the mosquito never rests: I don't care if it's a puddle forming underneath a slowly melting icicle, sop that slosh up with a towel or it will soon look like the pool at a Las Vegas hotel, with bug larvae taking the place of uncouth brats on spring break.)

Armed with this history, I could mount a nurture-based defense for the behavior that, when seen through the plate-glass window of a cozy living room, must look like madness: A grown man teetering on the edge of the curb, stabbing at the water with a felled maple branch, too foolish to come in from the rain. I could argue that I deserve their thanks more than their ridicule, saving their basements from certain flooding by allowing the city's drainage network to perform as designed, but honestly, I don't do it for them. Benefit to others is simply an ancillary bonus: Mine is a primarily selfish act, aquatic engineering for fun and adventure.

If you're thinking that standing outside on a rainy day poking blindly at a puddle in order to find a storm drain doesn't sound like fun, then you have a stunted definition of fun. (And you can count my wife among your allies, as she invariably delivers her standard "So I'll see you at home?" whenever we approach one of these spontaneous lagoons.) The evacuation of these impromptu ponds provides a three-point fulfillment that is not readily available within the confines of our hectic and overfull days, especially not readily available on the average 35-minute dog walk through the city, including (but not limited to) these pleasures:

An opportunity to reconnect with the simple joys of childhood: The neighborhood where I grew up was bordered on one side by Chartley Brook, a stream that originated somewhere in a Norman Rockwell painting. In this stream I learned about pollywogs, frogs, turtles, crayfish, and a guidebook's worth of other small water life. During summer vacations, or even after school on sunny days, I loved to visit that stream and play for hours: Standing in the water with old sneakers on, I arranged rocks to make breakwaters and harbors, created tree bark boats that sought refuge in the harbors (or missed the harbor and fell victim to the "whitewater" that percolated under the dense copse of birches downstream), and assembled a world where my imagination could spend unfettered hours. Frankly, my adult life doesn't have enough of that type of recreation, so the clogged storm drain is like a portal---as the Chestnut leaf seal is broken, small whirlpools form and gain velocity, sucking nearby flotsam into their inverted cone, and I suddenly have the enthusiasm of a boy standing at the bank of Chartley Brook, unaware of anything except the manipulation of the flow. This is more than mere nostalgia; it's just short of time travel.

Negotiating peace between nature and man-made infrastructure: The clogged storm drain is a microcosm of the battle between earth and industry (don't fool yourself, industry and the environment rarely meet with a genuinely cooperative spirit, even when the best intentions are present), one of Mother Nature's myriad miniscule retaliations for the Hoover Dam, the Manhattan Project, Love Canal, etc. (The earth can certainly justify a grudge.) Yes, I'm aggrandizing, but this small lubrication of the friction between nature and technology provides a palpable sense of harmonic restoration.

The satisfaction of a job well done: My life is cluttered with tasks in various states of completion: Some of these projects require me to conform to someone else's schedule (which can prevent them from getting done punctually), others allow me to work at my own pace (which also can prevent them from getting done punctually.) As such, my brain is constantly being tickled by the loose ends of these endeavors, each of which distracts from the other until I feel like a man populating six crossword puzzles simultaneously. ("Where was that 8-letters down for 'overstimulated'?") But when I chance upon a flooded street, I can enjoy the satisfaction of overseeing a project from start to finish: When I arrive, there is an impasse; through my efforts, there is resolution; when I depart, fishing season is over.

This season I have enjoyed having an apprentice, as my five-year-old daughter precociously recognizes the enjoyment of this seasonal pastime, exercising her body and brain with an improvised deployment of strength and strategy. (Either that, or she simply relishes the opportunity to splash about in an ankle-deep puddle with parental approval.) This companionship does more than provide a semi-plausible alibi for my playing in puddles---aquatic engineering offers a bundle of teaching opportunities: Choosing a suitable poking stick (we discuss the tensile strength of different woods, how to identify hardwoods versus softwoods, what happens to wood when it rots), identifying different leaves (we examine the various shapes of the leaves, searching out as many variations as we can find), and observing the water flow (what makes a whirlpool, why more holes makes for faster draining, how the city's drainage system works.) In fact, I could pitch the whole process as an unscripted biology and physics seminar, a chance to reinforce that the world is a giant science lab and that class is always in session.

That it also looks like two kids and a dog playing in a puddle is purely coincidental.

#112 - Missed

2007-10-11T06:47:00.000-07:00

Missed

10/11/07 (#112)

"Dogs' lives are too short. Their only fault, really." -- Agnes Sligh Turnbull

I don't understand people who don't have pets. I do understand people who enjoy animals but whose household is ill-suited for pets---small apartments, erratic and/or busy schedules, allergies, whatever---but folks who have the time/space/finances to have animals and don't, that mindset is a complete mystery to me.

I once discussed this concept with a friend whose house resembles a start-up zoo (two dogs, three cats, five birds, and a turtle---and that was just the welcoming committee) who had observed over the years that people who don't have pets tend to be selfish in most areas of their lives because they are the center of their own universe. I don't know how accurate that is as a blanket statement, but it struck a chord with me: Pets require our attention and our care, and indeed, some people seem to reserve their attention and their care for self-indulgent expenditure.

That type of attitude simply doesn't work if you're a pet owner, or at least a conscientious pet owner. Stephanie and I once had a cat with diabetes, a condition that required us to administer insulin shots twice a day, 12 hours apart, at the same time every day. The cat's medical condition had a profound impact on our lives: Someone had to be there for the medication, so if we went to dinner, we had to be back by 8:00; If we went out of town for a night, we had to have someone handle the shot in our absence; if Steph wanted to see the early evening movie, I would stay home to tend to the cat. (I always enjoyed attending events with a mix of friends and strangers and announcing at 7:30, "Sorry, we need to run---time to shoot the cat." The look of concern on the faces of those unaware of Djama's condition was thoroughly enjoyable.) These days, my friend Nick has the same restraints on his schedule as a result of his dog having diabetes; I know that if I want to make plans for us, they have to work around punctual injections. No problem---his wonderful dog is worthy of our accommodations, just as the value of our cat made our adjustments irrelevant.

Many pet-free people use stories like these as validation for their anthropocentric lifestyles, reveling in the fact that they don't have to vacuum up dog hair, don't have to yank the stove away from the wall every month to sweep up the errant kibble, don't have to plan their lives around some creature who offers slobbery kisses with a tongue that drinks from the toilet bowl.

And that is exactly what I don't understand about them, because these were always minor inconveniences when it came to Boo Radley, the Chow/Golden Retriever who, until recently, brought eight years of joy into our house. (Fortunately, we learned early on that Boo would drink from the toilet bowl if he had the chance, so we quickly converted to a strictly enforced close-the-cover ritual.) Sure, he had accumulated an invoice file at the vet that grew to the thickness of a 19th-century Russian novel; sure, he broke more than the average number of car windows with his territorial exuberance*; sure, his joy of digging left our front lawn looking like the aftermath of the famous climax of Caddyshack. But I would gladly endure all of the above many times over if I could have him back for one more long walk through the neighborhood.

We lost Boo to cancer, with an alarmingly short time between his exhibiting of symptoms and the obvious need to ease his grief. Since this happened, I have heard many stories from friends who had similar canine cancer experiences: The dogs resist and persevere for as long as they can (thus hiding their symptoms) until it overwhelms them and it's too late to help. Among the many disappointments that I felt was the frustration that he was only 10 years old. When the vet referred to him as "geriatric", I wondered if she had misread his chart: Boo didn't have a gray hair on his face; up to a week before he was still playing like a puppy. Geriatric?

My confusion was derived from Winnie, the Labrador/Weimaraner mix with whom I grew up**. Winnie came to my parent's home when I was an infant, and lived to be 16 years old. While I remain grateful that she lived such a long and happy life, the combination of her longevity and her being the only dog I had ever known from proverbial start-to-finish left me with a mistaken notion: Dogs live to be 16 years old. In the 24 years between Winnie's death and now, I had never received any information to contradict this non-scientific data, as I regularly saw dogs who were 12 and 14 years old tugging their owners through the park.

Turns out my understanding of lifespan was terribly wrong, and I should have been paying more attention to the one-human-year equals seven-dog-years equation: I never imagined that the point of that math was to make clear that a 10-year old dog was a senior citizen.

Boo was a fabulous dog, a poster child for successful adoption from the Humane Society, and a testament to enduring bonds that can develop between people and pets. While I tend to remember Boo as he was in his last years (mellow, loving, peaceful), reminiscing with friends has reminded me that when we got him, Boo was a wild-man, a 70-pound bundle of muscle, enthusiasm, and intermittent brain activity. (We referred to the latter as "the switch": He was an extremely bright dog when he wanted to be, but let him see a squirrel from 30 yards and he left logic and obedience behind. Fortunately for the squirrels, his hunting prowess resembled that of Elmer Fudd.) As a younger man, he snapped at least three retractable leashes in his efforts to tussle with other dogs (the bigger, the better), he refused to sleep on any soft surface (if we could coax him onto the couch, he humored us, then hopped right off), and once the switch turned off, our only concern was limiting the mayhem. (As an older man, he overcame his aversion to couches---in fact, he often positioned himself so that he could prop his head on a pillow. "You've gotten soft, Boo", we'd chide, and he wouldn't even raise his head to protest.)

One of my favorite Boo stories occurred at the pond in Laurelhurst Park, home to several dozen resident mallards. There was a brief stint in Boo's life when his behavior warranted a short experiment with off-leash walking. (You've seen those dogs who walk along with their owners, untethered and well behaved? That I thought Boo could be one of those dogs is a testament to my foolish optimism.) To set the stage, the duck pond is probably an acre in size, with an island in the middle that the ducks call home; the ducks spend most of the day investigating whether any of the humans on the shore are throwing bread into the pond. We were walking the path that circumscribes the pond when Boo saw the ducks: Off went the switch, and off went Boo, leaping from the concrete beach and splashing into the pond in hot pursuit.

Actually, "hot pursuit" is an overstatement. While Boo's bloodline included noble water-dog lineage, his swimming could be described with the same phrase used by my Pee-Wee hockey coach when describing my playing: "He's certainly not the most talented guy out there, but no one plays with more heart." Watching him swim after those ducks was like watching a UPS truck chase after a handful of high-performance motorcycles: It was obvious to spectators, and to the ducks, and to everyone except Boo, that he was not going to be having mallard for lunch. (I doubt he would have known what to do if he had caught one---as I said, his expertise as a hunter was such that catching the prey was a purely theoretical concept.)

As Stephanie and I futilely yelled his name from the bank, Boo swam like a fat man running for a bus that was already pulling away from the curb; his resolve shone in his eyes as he pursued his quarry, his head barely above water as he dog-paddled after a small subset of ducks. The ducks were fully aware of his presence (alerted by the enormous splash of his belly-flop) and casually retreated around the island. I cannot over emphasize their disregard for his threat: If ducks smoked cigarettes, several would have paused to light up before continuing their evasion.

As Boo's efforts led him further from his point of entry, I moved along the bank yelling, "Boo! Boo! Get over here right now!" but whether by insolence or obliviousness, he clearly had no intention of giving up. He chased a cluster of six ducks as they rounded the west end of the island, the sound of his huffing breath so audible across the water that Stephanie and I independently worried from opposing sides of the island that he would frantically dog-paddle himself into heart failure. (I'm sure he'd have deemed that a glorious way to go, like Keith Richards surely will when he eventually (inevitably?) succumbs to a heart attack onstage.)

When one of the ducks broke from the flock and veered toward the shore, Boo gave it a quick glance but kept his focus on the numeric advantage of the remaining five; ditto when another drifted off as he puffed his way around the south side of the island, still ignoring my bellows from shore; soon after another duck split away…and then there were three.

By this time they had almost circled the island, the ducks looking over their shoulders now and then to see if Boo had displayed a shred of intelligence and given up the pursuit: Nope. Boo struggled on, as if at any moment the ducks would simultaneously collapse from exhaustion. As if tired of mocking him, the three remaining ducks suddenly increased their speed and diverged in various directions, leaving the hilarious sight of a 70-pound dog bobbing alone in the middle of the pond while children and parents laughed and pointed from the edges. Admitting defeat, Boo swam back to the bank where Stephanie was waiting.

I know it's wrong to anthropomorphize our pets and assign them human emotions, but when Boo emerged from the water, he bore a smile that unmistakably said, "I know, bad, but did you see that?! I chased those ducks all the way around the island! That was awesome!" In cases like this, it was pointless to punish him because he didn't care about punishment---there was no scolding, no repercussion that could ever be bad enough to negate the joy he felt for what he had done, and it seemed disrespectful to chastise a dog for….well, for doing what dog's do. While Boo sometimes misbehaved, our motto had always been, "We wanted a dog, not a robot", and we knew that his heart was pure, even if his spirit---and his swimming---was weak.

As I write this story, I worry about justly representing Boo, as if he might read this from the great beyond and woofing to the German shepherd next to him, "No way! I was within inches on those ducks!" But I will fail, in the same way that any eulogy fails to capture the eulogized: It's as futile as trying to capture the Grand Canyon in a single photograph---the more we try to include, the more the detail is lost. And Boo's life was nothing if not a series of joyous details, 10,000 vignettes strung together to make a story. It was my privilege to share so many of them, 10,000 bits of happiness that I will remember long after forgetting about hairy floors and food under the stove and any other so-called inconveniences.

Boo, you will always be missed. I hope there is an afterlife for dogs, and in that world, the couches are cushy and the ducks are slow.

* Boo's window-breaking incident appeared in Torrential #70, A Day in a Dog's Life

** Winnie was featured in Torrential #18, Involuntary Time Travel

#111 - In Praise of the Dibble

2007-09-20T13:25:00.000-07:00

In Praise of the Dibble

9/20/07 (#111)

My daughter's cousin* Owen was over one day and we all decided to mix up a round of Nesquik, the world's most fabulous chocolate milk. The powder, mind you, because my pint-size posse and I roll old school: I have tried a host of challengers to the "best chocolate milk" crown, from the so-called gourmet Scharffen Berger sludge that seems to defy the milk to at-least-it's-better-on-ice-cream Hershey's and most of the options between, but nothing hits the spot like Nesquik. (Though I still have trouble calling it that, as it went by the trade name Nestle Quik when I was a young chocolate-and-calcium-speedball fiend.)

When out of the scrutinizing watch (and frustratingly flawless memory) of adolescents, my powder-to-milk ratio tends toward the exorbitant, ensuring that many gulps feature that sweet, gritty texture I love; but with the impressionable eyes of two five-and-unders watching, I am invariably the responsible adult, heeding the directions on the package in hopes that they will grow up with a taste for moderation that I don't possess. The kids were going to mix their own, and before we started, I said, "Remember, two spoons, that's all."

Of course, one would expect them to try to maximize each scoop by balancing a ridiculously tall tower of powder on the end of their jittering spoons, to gingerly move the payload across the deceptively vast terrain between Nesquik container and milk glass without that disappointing twitch that causes a minor avalanche of chocolate to be lost upon the counter top. (At least I would expect that, because that remains my standard Nesquik modus operandi.) But the kids each took one reasonable scoop, then another. As I moved to put a cap on the mix, Owen quickly jabbed his spoon into the shrinking gap between yellow container and plastic top and protested, "We didn't do the dibble!"

The dibble? I didn't want to sound concerned, but I didn't like the sound of a young boy dibbling in my Nesquik. "How does one 'do the dibble', Owen?"

He pushed the lid aside, dipped the tip of his spoon into the cocoa and retrieved a tiny portion of the Quik, an amount so small it could be hidden behind a shelled peanut. "Two scoops, plus a little dibble," he chirped brightly.

Ahhh, that dibble. I didn't know it had a name, but I am quite familiar with the dibble; in fact, I am a great fan of the dibble; furthermore, I would venture that the dibble often possesses as much value as either of the immeasurably larger scoops.

The dibble is that little something extra that separates a satisfactory experience from a sensational one. Of course, the most essential element of the dibble is its visibility---the inconsequential bit of cocoa dust that Owen added into his glass of milk did nothing to increase the chocolaty flavor of his beverage, but he knew it was there, and he reveled in his victory over the two-scoop limit. He might have started with two larger scoops, and thus had more chocolate even without the dibble---but then, that method didn't include the dibble.

Young and old, we can all be swayed by a little dibble. When I worked as an auto station attendant (a.k.a. gas huffer) my station had a commitment to washing the windshield of every car that purchased gas. There was a time long ago when that service was the norm at a good filling station, but the bean counters discovered you could have less staff if you only washed the windows on request, not on principle, and these days you can usually expect some high school kid to stand at the rear quarter panel of your car staring into space until the pump automatically clicks off. Our station charged more per gallon than those no-service stations, yet we regularly dispensed 300,000 gallons a month---washing nearly every windshield as we did. People didn't mind paying our price, because they got the dibble: Pardon the pun, but when they left our station, they could easily see the difference.

Many businesses have exceeded expectations as a direct result of the dibble, and many others have failed for lack of the dibble. For example, I cite my last two experiences with the oft-maligned (and oft-deserved) airline industry.

My brother summed up the state of modern airlines this way: Customers have lost all loyalty to a brand, and brands have lost all loyalty to their customers. We might prefer one airline over another, but airline seats are a commodity and few will spend $700 for a favored carrier if they can reach the same destination for $500 with a competitor. Because of that, airlines scrape to keep their seats as cheap as possible. Corporate budgets have no room for dibbles.

I flew US Airways in July, my first time flying that carrier. It was a red-eye flight departing at 11:00pm, and while waiting to board, I heard a customer ask the ticket agent for a blanket and pillow. "You can get those on the plane," she cheerfully assured. Seated in Zone 2, I boarded early in the process, and after stowing my bag I looked for the promised blankets and pillows. There were none to be found. I asked a stewardess where they kept these items, and she explained that they didn't have any. None? "None." Well, we're still at the gate, let's solve that problem before we leave. "Portland isn't one of our hubs, we aren't provisioned for that here." A full-capacity, four-hour overnight flight and US Airways decided that the t-shirt-thin blanket was too much of an expense in exchange for the $600 airfare. (Bonus points: Upon arrival, as the exhausted coach peasants trudged wearily off the plane, we were treated to the sight of a wrinkled blanket and pillow on each of the first-class seats. Apparently, US Air now considers the t-shirt-thin blanket and no-cushion doll pillow to be first-class items.) Forget the dibble---this was 1 ½ scoops of chocolate being passed off as a two-scoop glass of Quik.

Compare that to my last experience with Delta. Same journey (though not a red-eye), and a typical airline experience: Standard free-for-all jostling to get everyone aboard**; 25 minutes on the tarmac waiting for takeoff; ample room to slide several sheets of paper between my knees and the seat in front of me. 3 hours and 30 minutes later, one of the stewardesses got onto the intercom and encouraged us to join her in some "post-flight yoga", a simple bit of stretching that would get us ready for the mile-long trek through the airport to our next connection.

"It's easy," she began, "let's start with our necks----let your head gently fall forward, then slowly rotate in a clockwise position. Since we traveled from the West coast, we've lost three hours, so to help you adjust, maybe start with your head dropped to the right." She continued on in this whimsical way, coaxing us to rotate our shoulders, chastising some passengers for not participating, demonstrating how to rotate the ankles…"Good job, everyone. I bet you're feeling better already. Now gently put your left foot behind your head". Many eyebrows shot up in disbelief before the cabin filled with laughter. Her routine lasted 10 minutes, and at the end, I felt a strange sensation: I felt good. Everyone seemed to feel good. Where most flights end with exhaustion and silent competition to escape the fuselage, that plane was full of smiles and cheerful conversation. And how was this miracle of air travel achieved? One exuberant woman provided one simple service that we didn't expect. There was no extra cost to Delta, but the extra value was immeasurable.

Such is the value of the dibble. Her dibble didn't even include a metaphorical mini-dip into chocolate powder; instead, she provided something intangible, a contagious enthusiasm that spread throughout the plane. (Admittedly, the airline-hostess-enthusiasm-bar has been set rather low by those hosts who continue to deliver the cartoonish string of perfunctory "buh-byes" to the bleary-eyed masses as they eject them into the terminal.) Her enthusiasm managed to defy the state of modern air travel and win my loyalty for Delta: That brief interlude of faux-yoga and a funny monologue convinced me that Delta has a much better understanding of how it feels be a traveler than the yes-we-have-no-blankets attitude of US Air, and I appreciate a company who understands what it feels like to be a customer.

Now if only they'd just include Nesquik among their complimentary beverages. But then, the yoga was Delta's dibble---Nesquik would be a double-dibble. I dare not be so greedy. (At least not while the kids are watching.)

* Why not say "nephew"? Because Sage and Owen aren't technically cousins; their moms are cousins, which probably makes them second-cousins, or first-cousins-once-removed, or some other impersonal and irrelevant modifier that I refuse to embrace or even tolerate. Family is family, and "cousin" is the furthest semantic extension I will abide. My wife's cousins are my cousins, not my cousins-in-law; my wife's cousin's spouses are my cousins, and not some hyphen-riddled sub-set of my life. Family is not an org chart, it's a tree, and no matter how far out a particular branch any of us might be, our roots are shared.

** Tangential mystery I would love to have explained: When they call passengers for boarding, they start at the front of the plan and work back. This means that the first group of people are filling up the first set of seats, standing in the aisles forcing their over-size carry-ons into the overhead bins and looking for non-existent blankets while everyone else waits in the unheated/uncooled tunnel that connects the airport to the plane. Then the next group of people start filling the next group of seats, followed by the next, and the next, etc. All the while, the back of the plane is empty, and the people who will sit in those seats are standing in the hallway. It seems that if they loaded the back of the plane first, then you could get everyone on board simultaneously. There must be a reason---perhaps with weight in the back and not the front, the plane might do an inadvertent wheelie---but I wish such things were explained during the pre-flight informational session. That, and how an 80-ton bus with wings can get airborne in the first place.

#110 - Firecrackers

2007-08-03T14:30:00.000-07:00

Firecrackers

8/3/07 (#110)

I grew up in a house of sparklers. With four kids of varying ages, I think my parents had visions of three-fingered children and a future of tedious "no, he wasn't born blind" explanations and opted against any Independence Day explosives.

For us, fireworks weren't an item designed for backyard enjoyment---that product was called badminton. (Or later, Jarts, enormous weighted lawn darts for a game that fused the sharp-object danger of darts with the unrestrained hurling of horseshoes; while I don't recall any of us being injured by the Jarts (save the occasional accidental drop on one's own foot) I'm still astonished that my parents drew the line at firecrackers with the firepower of a shaken pop can yet allowed a set of one-pound sharpened metal projectiles into the toy box.) Fireworks were an event to be attended, not hosted; a spectacle presented by professionals for the entertainment of the entire community.

Yet I remember the mysterious longing I felt when the neighbors across the street would drag out their minor-league pyrotechnics on the afternoon of July 4, smuggled up from South of the Border, a southeastern institution whose interior looked like a grocery store's produce department except in place of apples and cantaloupe they had bottle rockets and M-80s. Fireworks were illegal in my state (at least that's what I was told), so when Mr. Comey ignited the rocket that launched a tiny plastic soldier into the sky to have him parachute gently back to earth (with obvious charring to his face and extremities) it seemed like an irrationally bold defiance of the local ordinances---not to mention insanely dangerous considering that the Comey kids were essentially the same age as my brothers and sisters. Was he unaware of the danger he faced? Mom never hesitated to give us unsought safety advice---had she thought to offer some to this madman across the avenue?

By today's standards their arsenal would likely seem juvenile at best, as the home fireworks market has changed massively in the last 10 years. Where once the neighborhood kids vibrated with excitement at the zzzzzzzzip-pap of a bottle rocket shot from an empty Coke bottle, there are now folks two streets over who launch massive charges that rival a respectably-sized small town's civic presentation: these displays easily reach an altitude of 150 feet, their multi-colored bursts 30 to 40 feet across, an astonishing form of recreation for a man who grew up writing his name in the dark night with an incendiary device that could be hidden behind a pencil. These neighbors even have what I call "cannon blasts", those incredibly loud non-visual fireworks that seem to reset your heartbeat upon demolition. Had the Comeys unleashed such so-called entertainment back in 1972, the cramped area behind the couch would have been crowded with both the family dog and me.

My frustration with 21st century home fireworks aficionados is not the size of the displays or the volume of the bangs. What annoys me is the disregard they have for neighbors, exhibited in three significant ways:

No adherence to any acceptable curfew: 10:00pm to midnight, that's fine, blow yourselves up for all I care. But if you purchased so many fireworks that it takes you until 4:00am to ignite them all, you are not celebrating independence, you're celebrating being an ass. No one wants to come to that party.
No adherence to the calendar: In our neighborhood, they start around June 27. I suppose we have Christmas light to blame for this, as those lights are enjoyed for weeks before the holiday, not just on Christmas day; but then, Spiderman and Jack Sparrow don't show up at my house on October 29 expecting me to feed them. They also last well past the July 4---in fact, we suffered though six or eight late-night cannon blasts on August 1 this year. (Unfortunately, folks who don't obey this second complaint seem to be the same folks who disregard the first.)
No concern for cleaning up: On the morning of July 5, our neighboring blocks are littered with the charred cardboard and melted plastic remains of seemingly hundreds of explosive devices. If I thought it was kids leaving the crap to blow away I would knock on doors and report it to their parents---but these days, parents are as bad as the kids. (But that's an issue that transcends this particular holiday.)

Living in Portland, we have a variety of options for great public fireworks displays, and most years we attend the big city-sponsored display downtown. Launched from a barge in the river that divides the city, there are plenty of places on both banks that offer a fabulous view, so we pack a knapsack with a blanket, beverages, and (of course) sparklers and head down to find a nice vantage point. This year, it was a grassy area near the south end of Waterfront Park where we had room stretch out and watch the crowd while we waited for the festivities to begin. As darkness slowly claimed the daylight, I was forced to confront two realizations.

First, the line between a public fireworks display and a home fireworks display has regrettably blurred: the very public and very busy walking path in front of us was constantly blocked by children---actual children, six to ten years old---igniting fountains of colored sparks from tubes with names like "Towering Inferno" and "Geyser of Fire" and tossing spastically gyrating sparking devices toward a vaguely defined no-cross zone with only the slightest regard for accuracy. (Meanwhile, their parents sat gabbing in closed clusters, apparently confident that if none of the children were screaming, "Argh! My hand!" then all was well.) We saw kids toting boxes they could barely heft, crates so large that had they been filled with dog food would have fed our dog for a month. (And ours is no small dog.) It was noisy, odorous, annoying, and frankly, quite unsettling.

The second realization was my daughter's reaction to it all.

Genetics never fails to astound me, and her body language screamed familiarities at me: I recognized myself in her obvious mix of fascination and fear of the spectacle, and felt anew the bittersweet enjoyment of the simple sparkler, at once innocently fun and embarrassingly inadequate. As her eyes soaked up the scene, I ached for her, wanting to snatch her up in my arms and run until it was July 5 and those confusing, contradictory emotions had faded like the resonant echoes of a cannon blast.

But of course, that would be trying to save her from life, and I don't want to save her from that. If not then, she would face that disquieting clash of emotions on the next day or the next, and if it didn't involve fireworks, it would be about bicycles or best friends or even badminton. In fact, it will probably be all of those, as that seems to be the human condition: It's not that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, but simply that there is another side of the fence, and things are different there, whether the grass is greener or it's blackened by the burn of department store fireworks.

As darkness settled further, I stood and snatched her up in my arms and said, "Let's write our names in the darkness," which we did with laughter and delight. The sparklers have long burned out, but I can still see her name scribbled in the dusk.

Try that with a firecracker.

#109 - Rabbit Test

2007-07-10T11:52:00.000-07:00

Rabbit Test

7/10/07 (#109)

I was walking through a local mall last week, cursing myself for forgetting that the myopic decision to visit a particular store within the mall also requires navigating the mall itself: Even if I'm spared the complete Sears-to-Nordstrom retail Iditarod, the mall offers too much of its special hospitality (strangers in ill-fitting tank tops, bath shops reeking of synthetic tropical fruits, ill-mannered kids whose parents have mistaken the building as a playground) in even the most direct route. I scurried through the brightly lit nave that divides one wall of stores from the other, noting the uncanny similarities between a mall and a prison (each wing of the mall as cell block, each store a cell, the multiple tiers packed with prisoners of the retail justice system, security guards patrolling the perimeter, the various social factions staking out their respective areas) when a young woman approached and discreetly informed me that a certain cosmetics company conducted research on rabbits.

My initial reaction was shock: Was this girl implying that I needed to use make-up? Sure, in the boxing match of life, Time has landed some notable blows, but I was unaware that my face had so wizened that strangers felt compelled to intervene. Up to that point, I had never contemplated wearing make-up, fully expecting that even the latest advances in face-paint technology would make me look like either the bearded Celine Dion impersonator at Darcelle's (whose beard might have ruined the illusion had her melonesque beer gut not killed it first) or the wake-ready corpse of a 40-year-old man who too often sought the answers to life's questions in the bottom of an ice cream bowl. (Of course, where else are you going to look if you think the answer to most questions is, "cookie dough"?)

But before I could slip into the mild depression that should accompany a man's realization that young women now see him as a candidate for age-defying chemicals, I thought about her message: Testing their cosmetics on rabbits? What can humans possibly learn from how a rabbit looks wearing make-up? Their faces are covered with fur---true, I've known a couple of people about whom that modifier might apply, but they hardly constitute a viable target demographic. And aren't bunny eyes usually pink? Any eye shadow that compliments pink is unlikely to look good on a woman with hazel eyes. And what about the lips---I'm not sure what can be done with collagen these days, but I've never seen a rabbit whose mouth warranted adjectives such as "luscious" or "pouty." Judging a cosmetic's effectiveness by seeing how pretty a rabbit looks while wearing it is like deciding if a woman's sweater is properly designed by having it modeled by a Golden Retriever.

I imagine that cosmetics companies have chosen rabbits for purely financial reasons: With humans having those vast expanses of flesh between the eyes and lips, I'm sure the bean counters visited the test kitchens one day and were aghast to see so much product expended for zero-revenue quality control and immediately asked, "Do you have any smaller faces?" Thus began the search for a properly small face: Parrots (application would probably be easy, but there would be feather-flapping mayhem every time they had the birds look at themselves in the mirror); Turtles (nice face size, but the shell-retraction would be a nuisance, having to reassure the turtle that yes, Tsunami Blue eye shadow accentuates her shell); Mice surely made the list of contenders, but with so many rodents gainfully employed in the pharmaceutical industry, only the ugliest and laziest mice would be available for cosmetics, and every issue of Cosmopolitan reaffirms the industry credo that ugly faces do not sell cosmetics.

Or perhaps the researchers went straight for the rabbit, the seed for the beautified bunny planted decades previous as the then-adolescent researchers lay supine on the floor, chins propped up on hands, staring into the Technicolor haze watching Bugs Bunny transform himself from rascally rabbit to can-can dancer, geisha, southern belle, pink-aproned maid or any of the dozens of other drag cameos that Bugs made in his cartoon oeuvre, all donned to deceive the standard roster of inattentive Looney Tune villains. (C'mon, Elmer, why would there be a shower in the middle of the forest? Think, man, think!) Maybe it's the fact that I'm a Marianne man (as opposed to Gilligan's Island's Ginger---apologies to Mrs. Howell for being snubbed in the dichotomy) but I never found the cross-dressing Bugs to be particularly attractive. Yosemite Sam might fall for a few flaps of those false eyelashes, but I know a cross-dressing rabbit when I see one, and it simply isn't sexy. But hey, there's no accounting for taste.

Whatever precipitated the decision to test rouge and eyeliner on rabbits, I feel safe in ridiculing it as a business decision. Frankly, I'm surprised the girl at the mall felt a need to be discreet---when a company expects a person to believe that a product will look good on them because it looked good on a cuddly quadruped named Mr. Wiggles, that company needs to be called out to the light of day.

But before I could slip into the self-righteous indignation that should accompany a man's realization that rabbits are being tarted up like 8-year old beauty contest contenders in order to pedal eye-liner, I began thinking about those rabbits that have benefited from this method of testing.

I know nothing of rabbit culture, but my casual observations during elementary school field trips gleaned this much: Rabbits have no source of income. They don't work, they don't invest, they don't even have grandma bunnies sending a birthday fiver every year. Consequently, rabbits can't afford to buy their own cosmetics. Yet let's face it, some rabbits need them. Not just because of the elaborate web of competition that exists within leporine rabbit communities (true fact: rabbits can see behind themselves without turning their heads; what else could explain this evolutionary development except that they are chronically concerned with what other rabbits are doing behind their backs?) but because for some rabbits, make-up is a means to help them feel better about themselves, a proactive method of empowerment. Sure, the beautiful rabbits who can look perfectly Easterish without "putting on their face" will twitch their noses at this reliance on external devices, but until I've hopped a mile on their feet, I refuse to pass judgment on those bunnies who feel a bit safer when hiding behind a dab of mascara.

I doubt the girl at the mall was thinking about those rabbits. I decided I would double-back to share these insights with her, perhaps enlighten her to the fact that we sometimes let our personal biases influence our impression of situations. But when I turned around, there stood an unusually damp man who loomed like a T-Mobile kiosk in a sleeveless shirt, his child banging on the metal waste can as if composing a tuneless, arrhythmic steel drum concerto.

My apologies to self-esteem challenged rabbits everywhere, but that was all I could take. I ran from the cell block doors.

#108 - Cracks in my Memory

2007-05-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

Cracks in my Memory

5/30/07 (#108)

I am a chronic counter. Dump a bag of M&Ms on the table, I will involuntarily compare the quantity of each color, forming various alliances of primary and tertiary arrays; when filling the coffee pot, I tick off sequential numbers in my head while it fills as if I might one day need to fill it without looking; when I see a phone number, I habitually examine it for its value as a cribbage score. A psychologist would likely refer to this as Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder, but I've learned from my job searches that it's better to pitch it as "exceptional attention to detail."

Worst of all is walking---while my brain wrestles with whatever concerns the day has offered, there's one little corner of the gray matter that devotes itself to counting my foot steps. It's as if my brain is a small office, with various synapses in various cubicles devoting themselves to the glorious and mundane tasks that get me through my daily life; the bean counter who sits in the "steps taken" department is relentless, whether I ask him to be or not: it's not uncommon for me to become aware of this counting mid-stride, and finding myself on number 96 or 148 or some other number that indicates I have been doing it for a long time without bringing it to consciousness' attention. (Not that it would matter---Consciousness has long given up trying to wrangle that particular cube dweller.)

While the step counting goes on, another synapse in an adjacent cubicle concentrates on the placement of those footsteps---on checkerboard linoleum, I subconsciously try to step on only one color; in the autumn, I try to walk the dog through the park without stepping on any leaves. (A task that gets exponentially more difficult with each passing October day.) Most commonly, it involves sidewalks, finding a gait that allows me to move at a smooth, normal pace without stepping on one of the lines that divides a sidewalk into sections. I do this not because of OCD, but for a practical and obvious reason: Fear of breaking my mother's back.

I am fairly certain that these seemingly incongruous items---the location of my footsteps in Oregon and the integrity of my mother's spine in New England---have no official connection, as I confess that in my 40 years, I have inadvertently tramped upon a sidewalk crack or two and my mother has never had to wear a back brace. (None the less, please forgive my irreverence to your skeletal health, mom.) Yet despite 40 years of evidence that my feet possess no ability to injure her, the children's chant "Step on a crack, break your mother's back" reverberates in my ears three decades after I last heard it uttered. It is absurd superstition that I know to be absurd, yet I am helpless to defy it. Even if I walked to lunch today and thought, "I'm going to step on every crack", I would do so until I got distracted by tulips or a song in my head or the anticipation of Black Pepper Chicken and then the brain cell in charge of crack avoidance would sneak back to work. (If only the brain cell in charge of dieting was so diligent.)

My particular feet and my particular Mom aside, I have been pondering the origins of this ruthless phrase, curious how innocent mothers came to be the victims of their children's errant footsteps. Much to my surprise, I found no satisfaction for my curiosity. Extensive web searching have resulted in nothing more than either vague (and mostly implausible) speculations or evidence of others searching for this same elusive information. I am baffled that a nation that copiously documents the most mundane details of every episode of Star Trek and compiles baseball stats as if Saint Peter is going to stand at the gates of heaven and demand, "How many 9th inning triples did the 1968 White Sox have against American League opponents while playing at Comiskey Park?" would allow this strange near-matricidal phrase to slip into the lexicon without documentation. I'd like to know the origins of, "Step on a crack, break your mother's back" because I have a few issues with the directive.

The two-syllable "mother" is awkward within the rhyme---say it aloud, then say "Step on a crack, break your friend's back." The latter has a 4-4 symmetry that gives the rhyme a more natural flow, and barring the rare misanthropic soul, everyone who has a mom probably has a friend. (If not, who would utter the phrase to the crack stomper? What kind of nut would walk down the street by himself, worrying about stepping on a particular 1 percent of the pavement?)(Wait, I take that back.)

Obviously "mother" wasn't chosen for the poetic grace of the word. And even if it was, "Father" could be subbed without further breaking either the meter or the familial bond. The phrase is rumored to have appeared in our culture in the mid-20th century---so why is it that some June Cleaver-esque woman at home ironing a crease into her son's Tuffskins is suddenly doomed to collapse like a rag doll, immobilized by pain on the laundry room floor, while the Ward of the family is free to traipse about the office walking erect? Perhaps the office is the clue: in that era, dads spent most of the day away from home, so their value as recipients of this bizarre concrete voodoo was limited; What good is the threat of a broken back if the person afflicted isn't of essential value of the stepper? "Step on a crack, break your uncle's back" is likely to be of impact to the nephew or niece only at annual family reunions, where uncle John or Jerry will be resigned to sitting outside the improvised flattened-six-pack-box base lines with a gin and tonic tinkling in his hand rather than standing on first base with a mitt and a gin and tonic tinkling in his hand.

Focusing away from the victim for a moment, I wonder about the brutality of the phrase. A broken spine---short of a crushed skull, that seems like the most heinous thing you could inflict upon a person. There are myriad other rhymes available for "crack", any one of which would greatly upset a mom without condemning her to a month in traction and the rest of the year having to maneuver like a waddling penguin just to see over her shoulder:

"Step on a crack, kill your mom's lilac" would quite certainly get my wife's attention---and not at all the kind of attention one would normally seek.

"Step on a crack, make your mom fat" is an imperfect rhyme, but at least it's a kinder fate to foist upon an unsuspecting mom. (Actually, that isn't necessarily true: I've had acquaintances in my life who would consider that outcome far more cruel than a surprise spinal collapse---sure, recovering from surgery would be a lengthy, painful process, but at least you would recover; dieting can go on for years, often with no evidence of results.)

"Step on a crack, tear your mom's anorak" would probably never catch on in the south, but anyone who has priced these winter jackets at LL Bean knows that it's not an investment you want to make every year---I'm still making payments on mine, and I purchased it before moving west in the early 1990s. (True story: My friend Jamie purchased a 1966 Cadillac Convertible for less than my fleece-lined, Teflon-coated, hex-resistent jacket cost me. Of course, my jacket has never broken down on a remote section of Stillwater Avenue, so maybe you get what you pay for.)

I suppose the brutality shouldn't be such a surprise---Jack fell down and cracked open his skull (at least that's how I always interpreted "broke his crown", considering he wasn't "Prince Jack"), Humpty Dumpty wound up scrambled on the sidewalk, and as one cheerful little ditty advises, "ashes to ashes, we all fall down". Frankly, while much is made of kids exposure to violence on television, they've already been exposed to a multitude of violent images well before they learn to use the TV remote. (Just ask the wolves of "Little Red Riding Hood" or "The Three Little Pigs", or the rock-a-bye baby who plummets from the tree top.)

While I still don't understand why mothers are the victims of this senseless rhyme/senseless crime, I recently had the opportunity to break the cycle of violence. My daughter has never heard me speak of these issues, but has previously exited the Laurelthirst making a point to step only on the black floor tiles, urging me to walk only on the white; then last night, we were walking through Target (where the linoleum is only one color) and she insisted we both try to avoid stepping on the lines between the tiles. I played along, and as we neared the escalators (surely looking like father-daughter drunkards with our inexplicably uneven steps), she pivoted and asked, "Dad, what happens if we step on the lines?" I think she was trying to establish some sort of consequence---if I stepped on a line first, we'd have to buy popcorn; if she stepped on a line first, we'd have to buy popcorn. (Such are the rules when the game is invented by a 4-year old.) While I enjoy sharing bits of history at any opportunity, I had no intention of saddling her with a lifetime of that little cubicle worker in her head, that sub-conscious toiler who will exhaust her with an erratic gait in a vain attempt to spare her mom's vertebrae:

"Nothing happens, Sage. Nothing at all. Want to get some popcorn?"

#107 - The Bad Photograph

2007-04-18T07:41:00.000-07:00

The Bad Photograph

4/18/07 (#107)

It's rare to see a bad photograph at an art gallery. Each piece tends to be a study of ideal proportions, colors meticulously balanced, the subject carefully cropped in order to direct the eye to the intended focal point. In fact, some photographs are so captivating that they seem less a "perfect photograph" than a "photograph of perfection", creating the illusion that the perfection continues beneath the matte, beyond the frame, and into the physical world. I'm always astonished when a photograph can captivate me that way, like the picture of cows taken by my friend Ben Gustafson, an image as beautiful as any photograph I have seen. Cows. When I look at it, I barely acknowledge the bovine subject matter, because it isn't the cows that are compelling, it's the photograph itself: the light, the mood, some intangible element that draws me in and holds me there. In fact, it's misleading to say that it's a photograph of cows at all, because I rarely look at the cows, I look at the photograph.

While that image is worthy of a gallery wall, a great photograph doesn't have to qualify as "art". I saw a Polaroid snapshot on a friend's fridge that featured a woman I don't know, and I was entranced; I wanted to slip it into my pocket and take it home, I wanted to stare at it for hours and unlock the mystery of its allure. I'm sure there was a story behind it, but I didn't care; explanations could be made about the activities documented, but such details were irrelevant to me: I was entranced by what it was now, and how the subject seemed to be looking not at the camera, but directly at me, as if she'd been waiting for me to arrive in front of the refrigerator.

That's the wonderful aspect of a fabulous photograph: they take on a life of their own, independent of the event they document. But that is also a failure of the same photograph: by taking on a life of their own, they lose the life that was taking place in front of the lens. For example, next to my desk I have a black and white photograph of my daughter and me clowning, a moment of unrestrained childhood joy coinciding with the click of the shutter, her grin so ebullient that I defy anyone to look at it and not smile in response. It's one of my most cherished photographs---yet when I see it, I have no recollection of the day it was taken, or of what we were clowning about, or even how old she was when the photo was taken. When I see it, I remember today, laughing about the things we laughed about this morning. It is not a photograph of Sage and me on that particular day, but a photograph of Sage and me now. It captures something seemingly intangible, something other than mere visual facts. It is a photograph that remains perpetually in the present tense.

The bad photograph, on the other hand, is purely temporal---without the art, without the compelling imagery, all that's left is the visual evidence. While our various of levels of vanity cause many of us to moan when a photograph is unflattering ("unflattering" often being a synonym for "accurate" when it comes to photos of me), such reactions say more about the viewer than the photo itself. I'm not defending mistakes---a family photo that captures six scalps and the sky or blurs of movement that wouldn't get you convicted if it was a snapshot of a crime scene---I'm speaking of the photo which seemed like a good idea but which failed to capture the image as it appeared in our mind, that captures an awkward transition just prior to or after a moment of purity. It is "bad" because it is not what we intended; it contains every bit as much information as the perfect photograph, it simply isn't the information we wanted to document.

I have such a picture of me, taken on the first day that we owned our first home. I asked my wife to take a photo of me walking up the steps of our first house, a silly idea that my wife agreed to only because she knew I couldn't be dissuaded. It looks ridiculously posed, my gait unnatural, my sheepish smile giving away any sense of it being a snapshot, the whole composition purely fabricated---quite simply, it is a bad photograph. Had we owned a digital camera at that time, I'm sure it would have been deleted immediately, since at a glance, it's an image that wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on. But it was printed with the rest of that roll, and somehow it slipped past quality control and made it into the family album where it remains as evidence to be presented in case my wife ever has to produce proof that I am the dork she sometimes accuses me of being.

Yet when I look at that photo now, I am transported back to that day---I hear the laughter that preceded Stephanie's shutter click; I feel the starched polyester scrape of my Chevron uniform against my bare neck and the odd sponginess of the requisite oil-resistant soles; I recall the moment we pulled up at the house in Connie McDowell's white Toyota, arriving just in time to see a minor fistfight in front of the neighbor's house (which proved to be a telling moment about those neighbors); I remember the awesome blend of euphoria and fear that comes with the phrase "30-year mortgage", and the dozen times in 20 minutes that I rolled the phrase "our house" off my tongue. It is a bad photograph by any measure, yet I am grateful for every one of its flaws.

You might think that because this was a momentous event in my life, I would have remembered all of these details with the visual cue of any photograph. Perhaps, but knowing myself as well as I do, that seems unlikely. My memory is like a file cabinet crammed with unlabeled folders: Each folder is full of details, but I have great difficulty finding the folder for which I'm searching. If someone asked me to write a story about playing YMCA basketball, I'd be hard-pressed to find a compelling anecdote; yet if I hear the name "Roger Gray", I immediately recall standing on the YMCA's hardwood court in my purple "Bullets" shirt, the echoing squeaks of Nikes and Adidas against the varnished floor, turning to find my face interrupting the trajectory of a basketball kicked full-force by Roger's enormous leg, my body feeling like a Bugs Bunny cartoon as it became parallel to the floor, the sting in my cheek and eye socket that overshadowed the thump of my head hitting the foul line. I'm sure there are many YMCA stories in my mental filing cabinet, but I'm not going to remember them until something triggers those memories.

Had Stephanie and I managed to capture the campy, timeless "first house" photograph I had imagined, we would have perfect documentation of front-yard euphoria, but the particulars might have been lost: Was this the day we bought the house? The day I quit the Chevron? (I certainly smiled that day, too.) The day we got the dog? (Probably not the latter if there was no dog in the picture.) But there is so much information stored in that picture's goofiness that there is no doubt about the day, no doubt about the details, and no doubt that it allows me to mine a cache of memory that might be inaccessible without it.

I wonder how much the digital camera will impact the photo collections of the average American family. In the film days, you snapped your 24 shots and hoped for the best, but with digitals, we have so many opportunities for deleting: As we're snapping shots, we can immediately view the images on the postage-stamp-sized window and deem a photograph unworthy; when we download them to the computer, we can compare and contrast and save only the best images to the hard-drive; then when it's time to populate an actual photo album, the images are sifted again to see which merit the printing process. It is a great way to eliminate everything except the perfect pictures, but what else are we eliminating from our memory when we save only the perfect pictures?

It's tempting to save only the best photos, as we will one day look back and remember only those perfect, timeless days. But in essence, the decision to edit those photographs is a decision to edit our past, sculpting a slide show of a life that is only partially represented in the pictures; we are deciding now what we will want to remember later, and by deleting the "bad" photographs, perhaps deleting some of our own memory. My memory is spotty enough that I don't want to do any more culling than is necessary---I want to remember everything that I can, and in some cases, these various bad photographs that populate the boxes on the closet shelves offer access to more obscure data. These pictures aren't perfect; but something doesn't need to be perfect to be valuable.

#106 - Wired

2007-03-16T16:03:00.000-07:00

Wired

3/16/07 (#106)

I have been assimilated.

Last night when I got home from work, I plugged my cell phone into the charger by the door, went to the computer and plugged in my iPod and Palm PDA to sync and recharge, and suddenly felt like the character in a Sci-Fi movie who had been replaced by a perfect replica of himself---his wife had never noticed, his daughter had no reason for suspicion, even the family dog had missed the moment the subterfuge began. Heck, even I didn't notice the change---but there I was, tethered to the world with a trio of electronic umbilical cords.

While I have long had an appreciation for electronic devices (as a home music studio owner, gear catalogs cause enough excitement that they ought to arrive in plain brown wrappers), I am also my mother's son, my mother who refers to each of the high-tech features on my father's car as "one more thing to break." It is not a matter of thrift (though a pinch of that ingredient certainly exists in the mix), but a combination of Emersonian self-reliance and quiet anti-consumerism. The former is merely a New England birthright; the latter developed as corporate marketing departments began out-sizing Research and Development teams, an org-chart revolution that pursues success not by filling a need, but by convincing the customer to buy things they do not need at all.

Need---now there's a verb rarely heard at the electronics counter. (At least not as Mr. Webster intended--- a video gamer's chair with built-in joysticks, sound and vibration would surely be fun, but it's hardly a need.) I observed the proliferation of cell phones over the last decade, but I don't live a life that requires urgent contact; I watched as PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant for anyone more oblivious to gadgets than I am---surveys say there are two of you out there) became the must-have accessory for the digirati, but I already carried a small notebook that easily handled all of my mobile documentation needs; I witnessed the rising ubiquity of digital music devices, but had no interest in purchasing an over-priced, glorified Walkman. I wasn't taking a political stand against technological advances, nor was I defying trendiness---these were simply items for which I had no need.

So how does a man who has no need for electronic gadgets---and for that matter, no desire---come into possession of a collection of microchip-laden widgets?

I was not dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century (or would that be 20th?), but was coaxed to it, the way a cat is lured to your side my gently flicking your finger under a blanket. In this case, the hand under the blanket belonged to my brother Tim. While we are related, Tim and I would not be referred to as "two peas in a pod"---in fact, if we played brothers in a movie, you'd probably complain about the poor casting. He pedals hard, I like to coast; he reads voraciously, I get a swelling of pride when I finish a long article in the New Yorker; he is single, I'm married with a child; he probably has a savings account, I raid my change jar so frequently that if I ever find it with more than three quarters, I feel flush. But as most brothers know, a brother's love has nothing to do with all of those details---like war veterans, our bond is built on our shared experiences; our differences are irrelevant. But the technology gap was a difference that Tim apparently couldn't tolerate, and thus he dispatched the digital asp into my analog garden.

It started with a surplus Palm M500, rumored not to sync properly with his upgraded PC---though at the time of this upgrade, PDA architecture was making great leaps forward (color screens, web connectivity, built in qwerty keypads, cell-phone capability), so I suspect his efforts to make this generations-old monochrome Palm M500 work were akin to the driver of a 1977 Toyota Corolla failing his DEQ emissions test one time and using that to justify the purchase of a new Honda Accord. When the M500 arrived in the mail, I had no idea what to do with it. Literally. It had a calendar, but I have one of those on the fridge at home; it had a place to store contacts, but I hardly need an electronic device to remember the names of my friends; it featured a to-do list, but my "events" would read, "eat breakfast" and "find fresh excuse to procrastinate on writing childrens books", things I always manage to get done without an electronic reminder; the only feature that intrigued me was the memo pad, but the thought of inputting anything substantial using pokes from a stylus seemed as difficult as writing The Lord's Prayer on a grain of rice---sure, it could be done, but it doesn't seem like an effective use of time. As near as I could tell, Tim was simply using the postal service to take out his trash. But I did a bit of research and found a full-size fold-away qwerty keyboard online---I often joke that the combination of Palm and keyboard provides me "the least powerful laptop computer on the planet", but all jokes aside, the Palm quickly became a constant companion. (I'm typing this column on it right now.) I don't know the exact timeline, but in roughly a year, I went from ignorance about even the basic functions of a PDA to complete dependence on it; if it broke today, I would be devastated. (Though I must admit---perhaps this is genetics---if it did break down, I'd be setting my sights on the PDA equivalent of a Honda Accord.)

The iPod was Tim's birthday gift later that year, a sleek silver Nano that captured my fascination as soon as I turned it on. (Which was about 4 weeks after my birthday, because I was still convinced I didn't need it.) My daily dog walks were completely invigorated by the easy access to 25 hours of diverse music, and I'm sure my neighbors enjoyed the transition, each day concocting new explanations for the awkward body movements that resulted from the thumping beats I was piping directly to my brain. ("I think he's trying to impersonate the gait of an ostrich"; "Today he's evading an invisible bee.") 25 hours allows me to anticipate a variety of sonic responses to a dozen different moods---let's see the Walkman do that.

The cell phone resulted from Tim's visit to Portland---he had cajoled me many times about getting a cell phone, and seemed to view my refusal as tantamount to saying, "Yeah, I've heard good things about cars, but my horse is healthy, so I'm holding off." He came out to visit for a few days, and we made plans to shoot pool at Rialto ("shoot pool" being a euphemism for drinking) and 10 feet from the entrance he spied a wireless store and insisted I get a phone---a dirty trick, making a cell phone the only obstacle between me and a string of tequila-based libations. (But a generous offer, as I was then unemployed and he was the benefactor of both the phone and the tequila.) Now that I have this little Star-Trek-communicator-looking device, I can't believe I ever left the Enterprise without one.

So it's 2007, and my copper-wire connection to culture is nearly complete. I still have to upgrade from dial-up on the home computer before I can get my digirati decoder ring, but I have taken great strides in making my creature comforts entirely portable. I recall hearing about this kind of life in advertisements from Apple or Dell, I just never thought it was my life they were describing.

But what fascinates me is not that I am now a junior varsity Inspector Gadget---indeed, my electronic utility belt is bested by the contents of the average 6th grader's backpack. What fascinates me is how my conversion to the electronic mindset occurred so seamlessly---I went from zero interest to completely enamored without even noticing. I experienced a similar transformation regarding parenting, recalling many times in my 20's when I said, "I don't care if I ever have children" yet being certain at 40 that no one loves being a Dad more than I do. Even the little things---I once mocked fans of Mark Ruffalo's so-called "acting", yet have recently found him incredibly charming. These quiet metamorphoses force me to ponder the other items in my life in which I claim to have no interest---as I age, will I find talk radio intriguing and informative rather than self-righteous and annoying? Will I one day feel a need to apologize for my years spent dismissing the supposed comedic genius of Martin Short? Will time eventually alter me so significantly that I might one day enter a restaurant and utter that most unfathomable of phrases, "Can I get that with mushrooms?"

Perhaps. Except the mushrooms----science has yet to discover a health regimen that will allow me to live that long.

PS Many thanks, Tim.

#105 - Strainz from the Stereo

2007-02-19T07:54:00.000-08:00

Strainz from the Stereo

2/18/07 (#105)

For those of you who don't watch children's television, you likely live in what must be a blissful paradise of ignorance, unaware that music---that broad and beautiful art form that offers both uncanny solace to the soul and impromptu defibrillation to the adrenal glands---has been contorted into an improbably disdainful affront called "Kidz Bop". This heinous "product" ("music" seems an overstatement) was apparently shoplifted from the CD player in Hell's waiting room, repackaged in colors so garish they would make a box of laundry soap blush, and distributed as part of a fiendish plot to make drunken karaoke seem like high art. I dream of the time when I knew nothing of this chalkboard scratching, the way a man allergic to carbon monoxide must dream of life before Henry Ford.

Kidz Bop is an ingenious idea, if you consider making armloads of money by producing cheap, inane crap to be an exhibition of genius. The premise behind this series ("Kidz Bop 11" comes out this month) is to herd a dozen or so kids into the studio and have them sing along, simultaneously and in almost-unison, with the previous year's radio hits and misses. While it's difficult to sift through the drench of pubescence to determine the sonic particulars, it seems they simply record a synthesized version of the original song and have the "talent" sing along with that---literally a recorded karaoke session. Kidz Bop is the bastard offspring of that annoying children's chorus from An Affair to Remember* and Casey Kasem's American Top 20, a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party burned directly to compact disc. Do you own a minivan but just can't find eight or nine little brats to populate the seats and sing with slippery tonal accuracy those insipid pop songs that, even when sung by the original artists, climb uninvited into your ears and spend the rest of the day devouring your sanity? Now you can have all of the sonic annoyance without the spilled juice boxes.

The Z in "Kidz" should already have signaled the dubiousness of this item. Divide the world into two subcategories---things that have benefited humanity, and things that have contributed to the downfall of the species---and you will find any item that mutates the grammatically correct S to the faux-hip Z in the latter category, along with "nu" in place of "new" and "Kool" in place of "cool." The Z says to the consumer, "My son the Phys. Ed. major is the head of Marketing"; the Z says, "Next year I will be the most populous item at your local landfill."

While I have not actually listened to a CD (for the same reason I have not stared at the sun), the television ads flaunt the major attributes of the discs with enough accuracy to make it clear what is being offered: 15 or so songs vocalized by Oz's Lollipop Kids along with which a child can gleefully caterwaul while their parents try to recall why child rearing seemed a better alternative than seminary school. (The answer will most certainly not come to them while the "play" button is depressed.) I once sat at a cacophonous Cecil Taylor concert and my friend leaned over and said, "This is the music they would use to torture my mother"; Kidz Bop would be employed in the event that Cecil wasn't able to do the job.

Kidz Bop would not fail.

As a parent, I live in mortal fear of this type of product. People joke about hell being populated by lawyers, but I'm certain the marketers of children's toys get the seats closest to the fire. I've acquiesced to Barbie, and Walt Disney has been granted more access to my daughter's imagination than a child psychologist would condone, but I've got to pick my battles: When the store aisles and internet links feature a dog that both eats and shits (and it's the same little brown plastic pellet involved with each activity---isn't that charming?), the Bratz dolls (note the Z) that seem to be small children with caked-on eye shadow, bare midrifts and conspicuous "bling", and discs of multiple soprano-and-higher kids caroling like Alvin and the Chipmunks sans sense of humor, Barbie can park her convertible anywhere she likes.

I've known of Kidz Bop for several years, but have avoided acknowledging its existence in hopes that it would not acknowledge mine. Because we don't listen to schlock radio, my daughter doesn't recognize the songs, so it's been easy enough to change the channel to anything when that helium-sucking choir comes on the screen. ("Look Sage, that man is filling out a 1040 form...can you say, 'itemized deduction'?") But the pitch for Kidz Bop 11 demonstrated that even the most cringe-worthy concept can be made more loathsome: the disc includes the kids singing "Irreplaceable", a song originally performed by Beyonce Knowles.

Let me be clear, I have no issues with Beyonce Knowles. I don't seek out her music (too much package, not enough content), but I like that she's fine with her body image (which doesn't match the waifish American media image, though considering she has only one accentuated proportion to her otherwise enviable body, that doesn't seem like a hard pill to swallow) and she seems charming in interviews. But Beyonce sings songs about being an adult, in adult situations, and "Irreplaceable" is hardly a template for how the average 8-year old should run her life. Take this example from the song:

So go ahead and get gone, and call up on that chick and see if she is home
Oops, I bet ya thought that I didn't know, what did you think I was putting you out for?
Cause you was untrue, rolling her around in the car that I bought you

Awwww, isn't that a sweet sentiment for your elementary school daughter to mimic? And what junior-high boy can't relate to having his girlfriend provide him with a new car? I acknowledge that kids are growing up fast these days, but with my own daughter, I was hoping to broach the subject of infidelity and materialistic leeches a little later in her life, perhaps after long division. And in case your impressionable child doesn't catch those references, they can't miss the saccharine soaked melody that professes (half a dozen times):

I could have another you in a minute, matter fact he'll be here in a minute

Gee, it almost sounds empowering, except the lyrics indicate that the narrator has been exploring her options with only slightly less ardor than her tramping beau. (No wonder, she had less opportunity---it's clear from the verse that the boyfriend always had the car.)

Razor & Tie, the label making the money on Kidz Bop, informs us that the series is "the best-selling children's audio series in the country with over 8 million CDs sold in the past 5 years....Kidz Bop 9 entered the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart at the incredible #2 position, the highest charting non-soundtrack children's release in Billboard history. Billboard named the Kidz Bop KIDZ^TM the #1 Children's Music Artist for the fourth year in a row. ...Kidz Bop is now a certifiable phenomenon, with a number of brand extensions in the works."** I think about those disheartening figures, and the mercenary taunt implicit in the phrase "a number of brand extensions," and a horrible thought runs through my mind, a once-unimaginable contemplation that, every time I startle the pets with my urgent lunge for the television remote, inches closer to the tip of my tongue:

Barney, come back. All is forgiven.

* I love the verbal repartee in that movie, but I twitch in my chair when those tone-deaf little cherubs come on the screen, knowing that their contract apparently requires them to sing in every scene. I haven't done the math, but I think their repertoire is strictly limited to 9-minute songs, and they perform six or eight of them during the movie. We're supposed to believe that Deborah Kerr is charmed by the cloying "sweetness" of these kids, but every time I watch the movie, I ache for Deborah to scream, "Stop! Stop! Fercrissakes, why couldn't it have been you punks in front of that cab?!"

** http://www.razorandtie.com/kidsmusic.html

#104 - Ruining the Polish Joke

2007-02-11T10:34:00.000-08:00

How many Polacks does it take
to ruin the Polish joke?

2/11/07 (#104)

Adolph Hitler had the worst looking mustache in history. Just a 1-inch-wide vertical stripe of hair on his upper lip, it could easily be mistaken as over-ambitious nostril hair, yet the man managed to make it his signature look. (A fact that must make Charlie Chaplin roll in his grave.) Not surprisingly, that so-called mustache died along with him---it is so distinctly a "Hitler mustache" that outside of adult Halloween costumes and an occasional TV sight gag, it has never been seen again. (I doubt anyone wants to repeatedly explain to every chatty sales clerk, "No, I am actually not sympathetic to the mastermind of the world's most infamous genocide---I just think it looks sharp.")

As facial hair goes, there are limits to a man's available fashion statements. Beard, mustache, goatee, side burns---excepting a few varieties of each of those styles, there's nothing more that can be done with the bristly thatch that grows on our faces. Folks like Salvador Dali and Fu Manchu may push the tonsorial envelope to the limits of its tensile strength, but even those fashion deviants fit under the primary categories with the simple addition of an extra adjective: Dali's is not technically a "handlebar mustache", but it's close enough to call it a "zany handlebar mustache"; Fu Manchu managed to get a minor beard-and-mustache modification named in his honor, but it's little more than a "pimped-out goatee." Yet as small as the list of options is, Hitler single-handedly managed to make it shorter, scratching one off for perpetuity.

This is no small feat for a single person---to permanently close one avenue of the cultural road map. I'm not recommending Hitler get a round of applause for his inadvertent efforts, but the elimination of that miscarriage of facial fashion is a noteworthy feat. Yet such is the life of extremely notable individuals, becoming two-dimensional caricatures of their most newsworthy achievements while their lesser items of note are left out of the picture---in Hitler's case, it's no wonder that his heinous facial grooming habits got less attention than his more-heinous national grooming campaign. A similar thing happens when a person's positive accomplishments dwarf their minor victories---Lech Walesa's resume, cluttered with bullet points about leading a shipyard strike that precipitated the demise of Poland's communist government, becoming Time Magazine's "Man of the Year", and eventually winning the Polish Presidency, has little room for noting his essential role in the near-elimination of the Polish joke.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, the Poles were the consistent brunt of jokes involving stupidity:

"How do you get a one-armed Polack out of a tree? Wave to him."
"How many Polacks does it take to screw in a light bulb? Four---one to hold the bulb and three to turn the ladder."

In fact, most of these jokes are hardly "Polish" at all---they are generic jokes into which the user installs their victim of choice, versatile put-downs that allow any demographic to be ridiculed. Regional biases personalized these all-purpose put-downs for whatever ethnic group was amassing a sizable regional population---I recall visiting cousins in Fall River and hearing Portuguese jokes; in Massachusetts I heard more Irish zingers; and in Maine the victim of choice was anyone who wasn't from Maine. (The natives used to half-joke that there are two types of people: Mainers, and people "from away"; doesn't matter if it's London, England or New London, Connecticut, you're just from away.*) Yet somehow, there was a consensus that the Polish were the punch-line champions for such humor, the most fitting fools for a one-liner like, "Did you hear they had to close the Polish National Library? Someone stole the book."

Because these jokes is so universally malleable, there are some who argue that it's "just a joke", that someone needs to be the brunt and it's not a commentary on a particular people or culture to star in such chestnuts. But if that's true, why the dearth of Brazilian jokes? And why have the Dutch been historically spared from such barbs? (Ironic that the Poles may have become the de facto brunt of the "dumb" one-liner because Americans weren't smart enough to learn geography.) Imagine a joke that begins, "An American, a Russian, and an Icelander walk into a bar"---it's up in the air as to what could happen, the punch line a mystery until the listener gets more information.** But change the preface to, "An American, a Russian, and a Pole walk into a bar" and you know right away who is going to play the fool. (The Russian might be mimed with a cartoon Kremlin accent, but he'll be free and clear when the wisecrack detonates.)

Whatever the cause of the Poles rise to punch line prominence, Lech Walesa, with help from Polish-bonn Pope John Paul II (elected to head the Roman Catholic church in 1978,) put an end to that. Walesa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, having proved himself as a courageous David to the Communist Goliath, a tireless champion of the underdog who more than spoke of freedom---he risked all to earn it. Walesa provided the world with a positive, powerful icon of the Polish people----hardly the image that come to mind when you think, "Have you heard about the Polish cocktail? It's Perrier and water." After Walesa, if you cracked a knee-slapper about Polish schools, in place of guffaws you'd get an indignant comment like, "Well you try learning when the Soviet Block is breathing down your neck." Lech did more to protect the Polish people from ridicule than anyone in history ever has. It's time he got the credit he deserves. (Consider that no matter how talented and influential, no blond in history has ever been able to stifle the ever-popular blond joke.)

The shift in the international humor balance that Walesa initiated begs the question, "Who has stepped up to fill the ethnic joke vacuum?" The French make semi-regular appearances in the American one-liner vernacular, but it's a starring role usually cast as retribution for their refusal to capitulate to America's political will, making such flare-ups wreak of pettiness, not jocularity. Frankly, political correctness of the 1990's and globalization of the 2000's has been very bad for the ethnic joke---such so-called humor is simply a hard sell in the 21st century. And while the dearth of ethnic jokes is certainly a positive step in the progress of humanity, it has been nothing but bad news for politicians, those perennial bloomers on the American humor landscape that garnered no protection from either political correctness or globalization. In fact, about the only solace many politicians can find is that at least they're not blond.

* "From away" is a phrase with far-reaching comprehensiveness---even if you were born in Maine, if your folks were from away, then you are still from away. As the an old Maine adage goes, "If a cat has kittens in the oven, you don't call 'em biscuits."

** I admit, in jokes such as these, we all know that the third character will be the fool, just as we know that if Captain Kirk, Doctor McCoy and a red-shirted ensign named "Smith" beam down from the Enterprise, Smith's career path in Starfleet Command is about to come to a gruesome halt.

Thanks to my friend Bruce Morritt, who spoke the wry observation that inspired this column.

#103 - Sassing The Man

2007-01-30T08:00:00.000-08:00

Sassing The Man

1/25/07 (#103)

In Bangor, Maine, it was an autumn tradition for high school boys to woo the object of their affection by leaving a monographed pumpkin on the doorstep of her home.* While the most ambitious boys would scribe a poem of their own creation (usually some not-quite-clever twist on a familiar phrase, such as "Violets are blue, roses are red....", though it was ill-advised to use the most obvious rhyme for "red", lest her father be the first to find the pumpkin), most of us scoured the record sleeves of albums from The Baby's or Duran Duran in hopes of finding just the right words to capture the romance inherent in cluttering a stoop with an oversize squash. (An acquaintance of mine once scribbled the lyrics of a Blue Oyster Cult song onto his pumpkin---I didn't have the heart to tell him that if BOC can properly express your amorous inclinations, your love is suspect.)

It was just such an errand that brought my friend Bernie and I to Veazie one cold evening, a tiny burg immediately north of Bangor. Veazie is hardly a town at all---it was easy to drive through without realizing that you had, one of those hamlets whose budget allowed for only one police cruiser; as such, if you passed a Veazie cop as you crossed into their district, you knew you had carte blanche with the speed limits until you got to Orono, the next town north on Route 2. Most of their cops were probably from Veazie, as it was hardly the kind of assignment an academy graduate would seek out, and as such the cops knew everyone. I have no doubt that speeding tickets were strictly reserved for interlopers, with one or two issued to neighbors as retribution for adolescent offenses unrelated to the traffic infraction.

The goal of our journey was to leave a pumpkin on the doorstep of Donna Wampler, a girl I had recently dated but who had more recently realized that she was just too much for me. (To her credit, she was right about that.) But she was brainy and beautiful, and I was young and stupid, so I held out hope that a well-penned pumpkin might give her pause about her unceremonious dismissal of my affections. We stopped at Doug's Shop 'n Save en route to get the pumpkins, picked up a small pepperoni pizza at Papa Gambino's, and parked Bernie's Mom's orange 1976 Chevy Malibu in the parking lot of a darkened building around the corner from Donna's house. There, we ate dinner, laughing about which Blue Oyster Cult song not to use ("So I suppose 'Godzilla' is out?"), and got to work with our black sharpies. (Bernie was enamored with a Bangor girl, and we'd be dropping his pumpkin on our way home.)

Part of the allure of the secret pumpkin serenade was the danger of transporting it to the front porch, an often-precarious passage that underscored the impressive effort of the deed. Rumors and reality were replete with mock horror stories: pumpkins accidentally smashed on front walks when delivery coincided with the release of the family hound; orange orbs so large that a drop-and-run caused an unnaturally loud thud, the residents looking out the picture window to see a clumsy fool tripping through the hedge in fevered retreat; one poor sap even managed to bowl over and break a line of porcelain figurines, requiring him to ring the doorbell and sheepishly face the girl and her mom, embarrassed for his error but suddenly more embarrassed for having chosen the lyrics of Def Leppard as his poetic ambassador.

We anticipated no such drama during my delivery, as Donna and her family were out of town for several days. The mostly-eaten pizza sat on the dash and our pumpkins rested in our laps while the ink dried (heaven forbid one prematurely tuck the rotund messenger under their arm and smear the word "love" into something unrecognizable) when we were startled by a knock on the window, a sound generated by the doughy hand of a Veazie policeman.

Bernie rolled down the window to greet the man. The first thing we both noticed---the first thing anyone would have noticed---was the enormity of the man's belly. This gut had left the modifier "beer belly" behind many years ago; this was the kind of stomach to which your immediate thought addresses practicalities: "How does he find shirts that fit?!" Even your thought would have a tone of incredulity. If Veazie was Hazzard County, this man was Boss Hogg.

The bulk of the conversation is hardly worth reporting. In response to "Whacha doin'?", we explained exactly what we were doing: penning a pumpkin to drop on Donna Wampler's doorstep. (Fortunately, we were doing nothing wrong---for the first time in years, we hadn't even snatched the pumpkins from some innocent's porch.) According to the officer, the building in front of which we sat had issued a silent alarm---had we seen anything suspicious? We looked at the building---an old concrete box with a single metal door, with neither a sign nor a sign of life---and recognized his "good cop" methodology of making the suspect an ally. (We could see his partner walking the perimeter of the building, curious if there really was an alarm or if the Veazie police simply had enough time on their hands to enact an elaborate charade in an effort to convince us of the veracity of their claim.) We hadn't seen a thing, officer (we hadn't), and we'd be leaving momentarily. He smiled, wished us well, then issued the strangest non-sequitor I have ever heard from a policeman:
"What kind of pizza did you get?"
"Papa Gambino's."
"No, the toppings."
"Pepperoni", Bernie replied cheerfully. "Want a slice?"
He gave a bit of a chuckle. "No thanks. You boys have a nice night."

Bernie rolled up the window as the officer went back to his car. The ink now dry, we began donning our hats and gloves to prepare for the sprint to/from Donna's house, still marveling at the apparent tensile strength of the officer's belt, and were just about ready when the police car suddenly lurched up next to us.

It seems that in the car, the officer had relayed our alibi to his partner, a Veazie native who knew Donna---and knew she was out of town. Bernie and I later joked that it must have felt like a real Colombo moment in that cruiser, the cover story of two smooth-talking city boys blown by the keen observational skills of the Veazie police department. Poems on pumpkins? Bullshit, Roscoe, we got ourselves some criminals. The big man came to the car as fast as his waddle could take him while Bernie rolled down the window, and as the officer arrived, Bernie delivered the perfect line, straight-faced and serious, his voice so rich with generosity and sympathy that it perfectly disguised his insolence:

"Change your mind about that pizza?"

The cop didn't laugh, but I sure did. In fact, I still do.

* While this was a yearly ritual for my friends and I, my friend Zeth comes from Orono (8 miles north) and had never heard of it. I would love to hear from anyone who is familiar with this tradition.

#102 - Algebra and Aloo Mutter

2007-01-30T07:59:00.000-08:00

Algebra and Aloo Mutter

12/31/06 (#102)

Hailing from New England, I was raised on a diet of casseroles, shepherds pie and various one-pan assemblages that fit squarely under the heading, "Comfort food"---a culinary category that, despite its simplicity, is rarely mastered by restaurant chefs. Some try to dress it up, others make too much effort to dress it down, and usually, I leave such dining experiences missing Maine, my Mom in particular.

I've found that the best way to satisfy a craving for comfort food is not to visit some faux-New England eatery, but instead stop at an Indian restaurant. Almost every item on an Indian restaurant menu is a saucy, curried variation of my gastronomic heritage. (With one notable exception: Indian food is unspoiled by that spongy, dirt-flavored filler known as the mushroom. Any cuisine that recognizes the true value of the mushroom---and consequently leaves it out completely---is good eating in my eyes.) If I had to limit my dietary intake to a single region of the world, India would get the contract. (Of course, I base this on the Indian food available here in the States. Before I commit to this nutritional hypothetical, I would want to be certain that the dinner scene featured in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was fabricated---"Monkey brain" and "live snakes" are two of only a few dishes in the world that could have me asking, "Um, do you have any mushrooms?")

I like the vegetarian meals most, primarily because chicken---when presented in a sauce---can be a dicey entree. Not only must one gamble with white meat vs. dark meat (both enjoyable, though hardly interchangeable), but depending on the chef there may be tendons and cartilage and who knows what else. I know that in some countries tendons are considered edible---they're actually on the menu at a Thai restaurant near my office---but if I bite into a meal that includes even a tiny chunk of unexpected rubbery resistance, I inevitably chew the rest of the meal with slow-motion suspicion, not so much enjoying it as enduring it. (Texture issues have a significantly larger impact on my diet than my taste buds: there is no flavor delectable enough to make adjectives like "slippery", "rubbery" or "sea urchin-esque" tolerable.) Vegetables remove these variables from the eating experience---since there is no part of the pea or the potato that is better than another, it is a much more relaxing meal.

That's why I like aloo mutter. Like most of the dishes offered at my local Indian restaurant, it's a soupy stew of deliciousness, free of textural surprises, consisting mostly of peas, potatoes, and whatever it is that makes up the soupy stew. (Since it's blended, and doesn't contain mushrooms, I really don't care what it is as long as it's delicious.)

Were it not so delicious, I would never order aloo mutter. While my northeast accent will sometimes slip into remission, certain words cause inevitable flare-ups: Pop Tarts (pop rhymes with yup, and tarts seems to contain several h's but no r's), quarter (the syllable that follows the percussive K is like a culvert catching the tire of a car, and the word crashes headlong into a sludge of south Boston unintelligibility), and, I self-consciously notice every time I order it, aloo mutter, which inevitably sounds like I'm about to break into a round of Allen Sherman's "Hello Mudda! Hello Fadda!" I asked the woman behind the counter if I was pronouncing it correctly, and she looked back at me like a clerk at a porn store would respond to the question, "To which food group do those edible panties belong?" Realizing I was earnest in my inquiry, she grumpily mumbled, "I knew what you meant." Great news, but it didn't answer my question---I was asking in hopes that I could come here regularly without being known to the staff as 'that funny-sounding white guy.' Either she didn't understand, or she didn't want to be known to the staff as 'that one who made the funny-sounding white guy not funny.' I took my food and thanked her for her help.

Back at my desk at work, I popped the plastic top on my gourmet $4.35 meal and stabbed in a spoon---Delicious. But when I looked at the divot left by the utensil, I realized that I had a horribly disproportionate meal---if you imagine a bowl of aloo mutter and rice as the earth, and cut it in half, the rice occupied all of the area of the cross-cut labeled as "core", "mantle", and "crust"; the aloo mutter occupied the thin layer of the illustration labeled "grass". The skimpiest chocolate sundae you have ever eaten had a more even distribution of elements. If I wasn't careful, I'd wind up halfway through my meal with nothing left but half a bowl of rice.

I suddenly flashed back a few decades, sitting in sophomore Algebra thinking, "When will I ever use this is my life?" This bowl of food was the answer to my question. Algebra, geometry, statistics----some sort of ratio-based mathematics would be required to optimize the enjoyment of this lunch, ensuring that I didn't run out of aloo mutter before I was sated. I had hacked through the mathematical weeds of Mrs. Brann's algebra class, and later endured a year of doodling with a compass and protractor with Mr. Beuhler---I was ready for this challenge. (Plus, I was famished.)

First, I decided to calculate the ideal consumption pattern using Algebraic methods: If A represents the aloo mutter, and B represents the rice, then the ratio of A to B as a whole should be represented in each bite of lunch; estimating the bowl held approximately 30 bites, then each bite would be three percent of the meal, and would be represented by the equation "Bite=(Ax3%)+(Bx3%)", or "Bite=(A:B)/30". (I'm glad this was aloo mutter, because the plethora of As and Bs would have made for a boring bowl of alphabet soup.)

Unfortunately, This would require constant adjustment on bites 2 through 29 if I wanted to ensure bite 30 was the same ratio of flavors as bite 1, as any variation from the formula on one bite would require compensation on the next bite. I surmised that this was simply too much work to try to fit into a too-brief lunch break, and algebra was discarded.

Next I endeavored to divide the meal geometrically: The bowl was approximately 6 inches across, and since area is derived from Pi-R-Squared, and the radius is 3 the surface area of the bowl is approximately 28 square inches. I had estimated there were approximately 30 bites of lunch in the bowl, so as long as I removed 1 square inch of surface area---all the way to the bottom---with each bit, I would have essentially equal bites of food each time, and I would not run out of entrée while still having a unappetizing pile of starch.

Trouble was, the thickness of the aloo mutter was inconsistent, as pools of sauce had filled gaps in the rice, so while the surface of the meal was essentially flat, there was no way to determine from above if a particular bite would feature more aloo mutter than rice. As such, each bite would be essentially random in its ratio. Was there a forgotten formula for identifying a pattern in the inconsistencies? Was there some postulate yet unpostulated or theorem unthought that would ensure even distribution of flavors among bites, thus maximizing the enjoyment of this culinary delight? And while we're at it, why struggle to impose a rigid pattern upon chaos if the results of the efforts will be chaos?

Why indeed. This is a chaotic world, and possessing a growling appetite, I felt qualified to step back in time and answer the younger version of myself who had asked, "When will I ever use this is my life?"

You won't, kid. By the time you need algebra---or at least what you dimly recall as algebra---your knowledge of math will have sat dormant for so long that your vaguely-remembered glossary terms will only further confuse your misunderstanding of those complex concepts. No amount of study of "sines" and "cosines" today will help you when, two decades later, some pompous buffoon at a cocktail party asserts that cosines are an essential metaphor for the city's ongoing public transportation issue. (You will sense it's bullshit, but you will be helpless to demonstrate this to your fellow cosine-illiterate party-goers.) At 40 you'll be balancing your checkbook and momentarily forget where the 2 gets carried off to when you carry the 2, and you'll suddenly imagine a dark, numberless future that includes carrying an oversized Texas Instruments calculator in your pocket so that you can figure the tip on a check.

But then I'll cheerfully remind the child that the moment when all of this comes crashing down upon you, when time and space and public education noisily collide in your head, a more satisfying realization will arrive with it: Life is like a bowl of aloo mutter---sometimes it's heavy on the rice, other times heavy on the sauce, but every time, its mostly delicious. Stop trying make it as dull as Mrs. Brann's Algebra class and dig in! No one is going to ask to see your math.

#101 - Dispatch from the War

2007-01-30T07:57:00.000-08:00

Dispatch from the War

12/22/06 (#101)

The fighting has been lighter this year, with everyone in the nation except Bill O'Reilly and his elves grateful for the reprieve, but the relative calm belies the chilling truth: The War on Christmas wages on. Anywhere you see a simple star where a complex nativity once stood, know that one more manger has fallen to the enemy. (Unless the owner of the house is simply trying to save electricity, then it's technically not a war casualty, but a guy who dies of a heart attack while his plane is crashing is still considered a victim of a plane crash, right?) Anywhere a bell-ringer stands outside a mall punctuating the metallic din with comments like, "Policy prevents me from talking to you because I might inadvertently make a reference to egg nog, thus offending your holiday traditions and causing the mall to lose the $28 you had planned to spend on that Disney-character cheese-knife set", know that this war is far from over.

This confusing conflict over who is most worthy to drive the final float in the Macy's Parade might seem unworthy of a War, but such an attitude fails to take into account that America has a history of declaring war without concern for whether the war can be won. We declare war because people tend to rally around a war---even when there is no strategy for how we will achieve victory, even when there are no provisos for how to respond if the enemy refuses to adhere to our singular, narrowly focused vision of how events will transpire, and even when we have no clear sense of who we are actually declaring the war against.

I'm not talking about an actual war being fought by our armed forces (though the shoes described above seem to be a disappointingly good fit for recent events), but the metaphorical and ideological wars that allow leaders to name an enemy, then utter trite war-time analogies in hopes of co-opting genuine patriotic spirit for a task that is doomed by a terrible marketing concept.

Ever heard of The War on Poverty? It began in the 1960's, though I'm not really sure who the enemy is in that war---it seems that we declared war on a noun. (Of course, wouldn't it be just like our government to declare a victory in the War on Poverty, a triumph achieved by committing to future use of phrases such as "base economic strata" instead of "poverty level", and people who once suffered from poverty would instead be "unburdened by materialistic trappings.") I haven't researched the tensions that preceded the War on Poverty, but I am compelled to ask: If war is considered a last resort after all diplomatic efforts have failed, what diplomatic solutions were brought to the table when negotiating with Poverty: Sanctions? (I doubt it, because what had we ever given to poverty that we could later take away?) Economic incentives? (Poverty is unlikely to have believed our good intentions if it knew we were simultaneously negotiating AND preparing for war.) We've spent billions of dollars in this War, and all we've managed to do is fund a series of reports that read like vacation postcards from Poverty: "Enjoying myself here in downtown Los Angeles, where Tom Hanks makes $25 million per movie but 'skid row' has grown to be six-blocks square. Wish you were here!" I researched the status of the War on Poverty with two guys who were foraging though my recycling bin on Wednesday night---I can't confirm their credentials as analysts, but they assure me that Poverty is winning.

The 1980's brought us The War on Drugs, which sounds more like the title of a book of war essays by Hunter S. Thompson than it does a public policy measure. I regularly hear news stories about people dying of heroin overdose or losing their lives (literally or figuratively) to meth addiction, yet I never hear about any drugs suffering casualties from that war---I'm sure I'd remember if The Oregonian had run the headline, "Hashish found dead in Southeast Apartment." Sure, we've had some successes in the War on Drugs---pharmaceutical companies have valiantly labored to replace the scourge of dangerous, cheap street drugs (the kind that ruin your life) with a vast arsenal of dangerous, over-priced prescription drugs (the kind that make your life wonderful), and the fact that you have to knock on the bullet-proof glass that surrounds the pharmacy section of you neighborhood drug store and ask to fill out the paperwork that will allow you almost enough Sudafed to declare war on your sniffles shows how we've got crystal meth on the run---but all in all, drugs seem completely unconcerned about the war that we've declared on them. (Frankly, I think it's only the government that declared war on drugs; several of my glassy-eyed friends have obviously negotiated a peaceful detente.)

The significant difference between these wars and the War on Christmas is that in the earlier examples, America is the aggressor, the defender of morality and justice and government appropriations. The War on Christmas is a civil war, pitting neighbor against unwitting neighbor, a resolute defense of the right to put an enormous flood-lit manger scene on your front lawn without the neighborhood infidels (commonly referred to by the political left as "children") stealing the baby Jesus and replacing it with a brown-skinned Cabbage Patch Kid. It's about the right to self-righteously chastise anyone who devalues one of our most sacred traditions by referring to it in print as "X-mas". It's about the right to have someone say "Merry Christmas" to you and your wallet when you arrive at the door of your local electronics behemoth in early November instead of that offensive phrase being perpetrated upon the nation by the Hollywood liberals who hate America enough so much that they are shredding the very fabric from which this great nation was sewn. That phrase?

Happy Holidays.

What seems to have been lost in the debate over this phrase---along with all logical sense of proportion for the various issues that are facing us individually and collectively---is that "Happy Holidays" is not a covert political action being perpetrated by the ruthless KGDF (Kwanzaa Global Domination Front), but is in fact a phrase born from the unlikely marriage of mid-December cheer (when, suspiciously, all of the "holidays" in question occur) and unabashed anti-social laziness. Radio pundits like to talk as if "Happy Holidays" was first uttered by Michael Dukakis in his so-called presidential campaign, but the origins date back decades before, to the first person working the register at Woolworth's department store who mistakenly said "Merry Christmas!" to a Jewish customer and had to endure a dull, droning explanation of the menorah and Passover and why the yamaka doesn't cover the ears. On that day, a more efficient phrase was born, one that was not intended to represent a blurring pluralism that would one day take down Jesus (already weakened by his yearly wrestling match with that fat bastard capitalist Santa Claus), but which was designed to be as inoffensive as possible so that each retail-addled lemming might quickly exit with their bag of future return items and make room for the next surly chump who has spent 90 minutes scouring the aisles of the K-Mart for a useful, tasteful, and beautiful gift that costs less than ten bucks.

I have said "Happy Holidays" for years, and have never considered myself a pawn to the anti-Christmas forces. I said it because I'm really bad at guessing who is Jewish, and I get embarrassed when I constantly have to say, "I'm sorry, Mister Rodriguez" and "My mistake, Mister Murphy." Concerned I might have inadvertently contributed to the salvation of several 6-foot Noble Firs, I recently poured over the statistics on national trends in holiday participation (published annually in "Holidays Monthly" magazine---ironically not a true monthly since they have no August issue) and have noted that Hanukah has not grown in popularity since I began using the phrase. (There was a brief spike in the early 70's that coincided with Woody Allen's early film success, but it faded in 1978 with the release of Interiors.) If Hanukah is making no gains, and Kwanzaa remains a mysterious vagueness worthy of being named in the axis-of-holiday-evil (but not worthy of reading even the brief Wikipedia posting in order to understand what it is), then it seems Christmas is doing just fine.

It amuses me that some blustering egocentric media boob thinks he should to come to Jesus' defense regarding which party the flock attends on his birthday. O'Reilly seems to think that if we can push aside the man who founded America (Christopher Columbus, whose "discovery" of a nation is less celebrated since we collectively realized he "discovered" a fully-populated continent and brutally vanquished its residents) then, apparently, the founder of Christianity is sure to be next. But Jesus has weathered two millennia---including crusades, plagues, inquisitions, even Scientology---with what can only be described as incredible staying power. I think it's going to take more than a cheerful two-word salutation to bring him down.

Happy Holidays!

#100 - An Uncomfortable Level of Comfort

2007-01-30T07:56:00.000-08:00

An Uncomfortable Level of Comfort

12/7/06 (#100)

"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
---John F. Kennedy, 1961

I have been thinking about those famous words lately, impressed that a leader would speak to individuals so directly: There is no collective "we" in his exhortation, a word too easily interpreted as "everyone except me"---it is a personal address from the President of the United States to each of our nation's citizens. Kennedy recognized that "the nation" is not an enormous abstract, some political assemblage to which we can choose to belong as our favor suits---a nation is the sum of its people, and if we expect the nation to achieve greatness, we should expect a contribution to that goal from its populace. The problems that faced us as a nation in 1960 required a collective effort to confront, and Kennedy was asking for our help.

Our leaders today never ask me to do anything---we don't have that kind of relationship. Our dynamic, oversimplified, involves the government taking money from my paycheck and, if I'm lucky, telling me how they spent it. I've come to accept this arrangement because this is the relationship the government has defined, and I love the nation more than I loathe the government. (Not this party or that party---the whole money-fueled machine that has mutated out of the mostly-noble designs of our nation's founders.) A politician claiming to solve our problems without asking for our help is like a person assuring us that they can make the bed without asking the person in it to get up, so I endured an entire election season of news-hour commuting waiting to hear a candidate dare to use a word rarely heard in political speeches, one little word that would have enlightened me to the existence of a leader I could support, who didn't pretend that she or he could solve our problems for us instead of with us. That one word? Conserve.

When I think of my youth, I recall a much stronger sense of social nationalism (as opposed to belligerent nationalism), when despite our differences, people seemed to recognize that we were all in the same proverbial boat, and it would float or sink depending on our mutual efforts. There were national campaigns that stick in my memory, efforts to galvanize the nation behind a cause---not huge political issues (like civil rights, ERA or Roe v. Wade), but housekeeping items that concerned every American. While the most famous is likely the pollution ad featuring the Native American in traditional dress, surveying various environmental offenses before turning to the camera to reveal a tear running down his cheek, the example that illustrates my point came in the wake of the oil crisis, when Americans found themselves sitting in their 8-cylider muscle cars while queued up at the gas station. At that time, the Advertising Council promoted the tag line "Don't Be Fuelish", with newspapers running full-page advertisements that featured cut-outs which could be attached to light switches emblazoned with the slogan "Last Out, Lights Out: Don't Be Fuelish".* Conserving fuel (a finite resource) was a national concern, and efforts were made to raise the national consciousness to the merits of conservation. It wasn't a change for the government to make, it was a change for us all to make. (Easy for me to say---I was about eight at the time, and my banana-seat bicycle used the oldest form of bio-fuel: pedal power.)

30 years later, with worldwide oil reserves further depleted, we are in a boat of regrettably similar design, yet our leaders seem less interested in keeping the boat afloat than in making sure that their opponents are blamed for the water rushing over the gunwales. Public debates over Global Warming regularly devolve into charges of political posturing that dismiss years of research by scores of scientists as nothing more than Al Gore's shameless effort to make a political comeback, and too often the quest for solutions is impeded by obsessive effort to assess blame for the cause. (I have seen statistics that make a fair argument for both sides of the Global Warming debate, but to use an inverted analogy, imagine the earth as a house---as it gets cold in the winter, one could argue that it's merely the season, and the season will change. But until then, isn't it wise to take action---close the storm windows, caulk the foundation, etcetera--- rather than sitting around waiting to see if Spring will solve December's cold?)

I was looking for a candidate to use the word "conserve" because it seems like a taboo among national leaders. Over the summer, fuel prices were among the highest rates in history, yet the 8-cylinder SUVs still lined up at the pumps, some requiring over $150.00 to fill the vehicle in a single stop. President Bush called attention to our energy reliance in his 2006 SOTU address, saying, "here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology."**

Technology? The best way? Amazing---imagine someone proposing that the best way to beat addiction to heroin is through technology: Perhaps, but first, you have to stop using the drug. With a national audience watching, why not throw a bone to the concept of conservation? Why not urge Americans to take advantage of public transportation and carpooling? I will bypass the cynicism that says Bush, an oil man, has vested interests in not conserving oil, because I think the bigger reason is that politicians do not want to require anything of their voters---for decades, our so-called leaders have consistently promised to do this and that and anything at all as long as we elected or reelected them, and no one wants to have the reputation as "that candidate who expects something of me." They are afraid to making us uncomfortable; uncomfortable people tend to adjust their circumstances until they are comfortable again, and a politician doesn't want to be mistaken for something that can be adjusted. Thus, the policy of "give the people what they want" (or at least tell them that you will, even if you can't deliver) becomes the status quo, like parents who find it easier to placate their children with acquiescence (and toys) rather than saying, "No." Because saying no is difficult---it requires confrontation, and in the case of politics, opens the candidate up for attack by an opponent who finds it politically profitable to keep promising the toys. So rather than standing firm, the candidate simply promises toys before the other candidate can. And if their opponent promises better toys, tell the children that those toys won't work. To continue that metaphor, I'm personally fed up with being treated like a child.

However, while politicians are an easy target, it's not a simple matter that most are (to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen) no Jack Kennedy. Kennedy's quotation involves two parties, and when was the last time any of us asked what we could do for our country? (In most elections, nearly half of eligible citizens don't even make the effort to cast a vote.) The current political culture has caused many of us to mistake "the nation" as synonymous with "the government"; we might be willing to make personal sacrifices for the nation (at risk of sounding obsequious, our soldiers do that every day), but not for this or that administration, as if our concern over whether the ship sinks or floats is dependent on who is sitting in the captain's chair.

Kennedy seemed to be trying to shift the onus back to the American people---solving issues is OUR responsibility, not the government's. I didn't feel that under Clinton, and I certainly don't under Bush. So if they're not going to ask for our help, what can we do in the meantime?

We can try to ease our dependence on oil ourselves. I love driving as much as anyone (in fact, more than many) but we sold one of our cars two years ago, and while we occasionally curse the single-car lifestyle, it's been a mostly-painless process: Portland is well serviced by buses and trains (we promote the bus to our daughter as a fun adventure, rather than a frustrating necessity, which on the coldest days it can sometimes be), and we're investigating Flex-car in case a second vehicle is ever needed; I carpool to music shows with neighbors, saving the waste of three or four vehicles making the same journey; the family wear sweaters and slippers at home rather than heating the house to faux-summer environs. Please don't mistake this for bragging---it's a simple matter of fact: We (and by "we" I mean "everyone including me") need to stop using so much oil, and these are adjustments that could be made without significantly changing my lifestyle. Beating an addiction is not a battle fought in the future---it's completely present tense, finding a way to not take the drugs at this particular moment. Hopefully, with each successful moment, the next one becomes a bit easier. It doesn't require technology---it requires the will to make a change, and the strength to endure a discomfort until, incrementally, it is no longer uncomfortable. It necessitates effort, but I've opted to conserve because my so-called leaders won't, and every evening I'm greeted at the door by a little girl who reminds me that I'm not conserving for myself, but for future generations who may one day ask why we didn't act when circumstances clearly called for some type of action.

And if nothing else, one of those actions is voting---yes, politics is saturated with pointless posturing, and yes, it's a money-driven machine that sometimes seems irredeemable; but it's the only system we've got, and any change in the system that you want to see will not be achieved by sitting out of the process.

Thinking back to Kennedy's quotation, voting doesn't seem like too much too ask.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis
** http://www.whitehouse.gov/stateoftheunion/2006/

#99 - Fuse Box Repair Made Simple

2007-01-30T07:53:00.000-08:00

Fuse Box Repair Made Simple

11/3/06 (#99)

My wife called me at work, telling me that the lights had suddenly gone out on the main floor of the house---upstairs was fine, the basement was fully powered, but the ground floor was in the dark. She called hoping that I might shed some light on the subject, probably hopeful that on some past lazy Sunday afternoon I had lacked the ambition to change the channel and instead watched an episode of This Old House that covered the intricacies of the fuse box.

Normally I relish the opportunity to be a phone-in hero, to put minds at ease with a quick dispensation of some obscure factoid that saves the day---but normally, these queries involve the intricacies of Lionel Ritchie's lyrics or arcane references made in Owen Wilson movies. My collected knowledge of fuse boxes could easily be printed on a postage stamp. Even the two-cent size.

"Have you tried flicking the breakers back and forth?" I asked, hoping my wife had somehow regressed to a Dick-Van-Dyke-era Mary Tyler Moore-ish character whose idea of trouble-shooting was to make a cartoonish face and then call her husband at work. I was disappointed to learn that she had already tried jiggling the various switches.

"Maybe try them again," I recommended, feeling a need to contribute something, and since I had only one solution to every possible fuse box issue, my only option was to repeat the one thing I did know. She had already done them all, three times. (Three times? She was quickly becoming a fuse box repair specialist.) I pondered for a moment, hoping some obscure episode of Tool Time had lodged itself in my brain, then recalled the outcome of most of the "repairs" done on Tool Time---she needed to get the lights on, not blow up the stove. I sensed the opportunity for heroism was slipping away, and I resigned myself to failure.

Steph called the electric company, and it turned out to be an issue outside the house. A crew arrived with a cherry picker, a man was lifted to the top of the pole, and a few minutes later, the lights came on. One might think I would be jealous that someone else had snuck into the hero costume that I had hoped was fitted for me, but I could live with that---after all, this guy was restoring power to the refrigerator, where a fresh half-gallon of Dreyer's Caramel Delight ice cream awaited my return. He was my hero, too. And whatever he did up there on the pole, I doubt I could have done the same thing with repeated toggling of the breakers.

When I arrived home, all was well, except the clothes dryer didn't work. Steph had to go out, so I assured her that I would see what I could do about fixing it. (Not telling her that I had already dispensed the full breadth of my fuse box knowledge with my "jiggle the switches" recommendation earlier that day.) She went out, and I went down to the basement to have a look at the fuse box.

Popping the metal cover, I saw an efficient adhesive sheet on the inside of the cabinet door, numbered in the same pattern as the fuse box, perfect for finding and solving a fuse problem in a matter of seconds. Or would be perfect if it was used as it was designed---it was less effective in our case because only five of the 16 spaces had any writing, including the not-quite-reassuring posting of "Garage???" beside #14. Next to each of the switches was a small white label, an even more convenient spot to clearly identify each switch---here, 11 of the 16 spaces had writing in them, including three that were clearly marked, "dryer". (It seemed to have been written in a fourth spot as well, but like everything that had ever been written in that spot, it was lost to oblivion under the fevered scratchings of a ball point pen.)

I wondered how anyone who had ever owned the house had been able to survive with such horrible documentation. But seen from another angle, it was a fuse box perfectly designed for someone with exactly my level of electrical expertise: perfect documentation would mean only one fuse could solve the problem, but the vagueness of our breaker database justified the cover-my-bases tripping and resetting of every switch, an activity that at least offered the illusion of proactive intervention, though the only tangible result of my actions was to remotely restart my daughter's Little Mermaid DVD a few times.

As I stared at the box (unofficially known as "step 2" in my fuse box repair regimen), I noticed a slight bulge in the adhesive label on the back of the cabinet door, and was delighted to pull out three scraps of paper with hand written notes, crib sheets from previous outage adventures, numbers and scribbles that promised to reveal the actual powers of each switch. I was certain these brittle sheets contained the primer for decoding the fuse box puzzle, and flipped one to reveal the first clue:

7 = ???

This was a clue? Why was this sheet even deemed worthy of storage? It was opposite of information---it was the written evidence of acquiescence to a more formidable foe. I wondered why there wasn't a similar note for all of the other numbers---what was so special about not knowing what was on seven? I flipped the next document, penned in a scrawl I recognized as my own:

10=
11 =
12 = bedroom outlets, back hall, front porch

I was encouraged to have at least one of the fuses accurately identified, but the particulars of that documentation were suspect: The three regions attributed to this one switch were as distant from each other as any three areas of the house could be. The back hall and the front porch on a single fuse? Either my previous investigation had resulted in bad data, or my house had been wired by a madman.

The third note was the crucial piece---or would have been, had I extracted it 20 years ago, before age left the ink faded and barely legible. It was written in an ancient, grandmotherly cursive, full of graceful swoops and sharp angles, with a pen that was apparently sharper than a surgical scalpel. (My grandmother used to write her birthday cards to me in this same script, often leading me to believe she was wishing me a "Koppy Birdday" and that she "haped I libe the nnittens.") I scoured the note, looking for clues---there was the dryer, next to "5", disheartening because 5 was not one of the three switches in the box with "dryer" written next to it; there was nothing written next to 10 or 11, confirming the accurate uncertainty of my other note; next to 3, the only listing was "dishwasher"---an appliance we do not own, and considering our kitchen is smaller than a good walk-in closet, I don't know where the previous owner ever put it. We can't even find counter space for a juicer.

I examined the available materials and saw only one option---and began clicking everything off and on again. (When I flipped #9, I heard "Dad!" bellowed from upstairs---and quickly etched "TV/DVD outlet" onto the tag, optimistic that we would never move the television, lest "TV" one day overtake "dryer" as the item with the most redundant power supply in the house.) When I had completed flipping the two columns of switches, I went over to the dryer and pushed start---it obediently complied. Problem solved.

When my wife got home, she immediately asked for status on the dryer, and I nonchalantly responded that it was fixed. "How did you do it?" she asked, incredulous.

"I flipped all of the breakers again, and it worked."

"I did that, too. It didn't help when I did it."

I shrugged, unable to explain my success.

"Well...thanks," she said begrudgingly, her tone much less enthusiastic than it had been when she talked about PGE fixing the problem at the pole. I was no hero---I was the janitor who cleaned up the glass after the hero crashed through the window to save the day.

Oh well. As I sank the scoop into the Caramel Delight ice cream, I took solace in the fact that the world needs janitors as much as it needs heroes. I'll just keep my cape in the closet until Steph has a question about a Commodores lyric from 1979---suffice to say, there will be no calls to the electric company that day.

#98 - The Ache, and the Salve

2007-01-30T07:52:00.000-08:00

The Ache, and the Salve

10/11/06 (#98)

I moved away from my childhood home at age eleven, and of all of the things I left behind, Stephanie Antosca was the most dearly missed. She lived on the next street, though by every measure except geographical location, she was my Girl Next Door.

The Girl Next Door is a mythic role in the American experience, fodder for ten thousand novels and ten million daydreams, the psychic imprint that defines so many men's female ideal. She is the mystery of the opposite sex embodied in a single physical being, and if flaws exist, they are lost amidst the swirl of inscrutable allure. She is often the yardstick used to measure any future partners, a cruel reality considering the misperceptions of the adolescent mind: I recall my first neighbor's yard to be a vast expanse of real estate that required a map and ample provisions to navigate---though I would later learn it was actually the size of a modern double lot; similarly, the measure of Stephanie in my 11-year-old eyes would later lead me to believe she was, metaphorically, nine feet tall and flawless. Who could possibly measure up?

No one, I felt certain, except her. That was my mindset when we returned to Attleboro half a decade later, my emotions having simmered on a back burner for years, a stock thickened with strange new ingredients like lust, self-consciousness, confusion and everything else that puberty had added to the pot without my approval. I had enjoyed silent crushes and occasional dates in the intervening years, but each had in some way felt foreign and unfamiliar. The problem was not what these other girls were, but what they were not, and could never be. My family was returning to Attleboro for other events, a schedule that left only one evening to spend with Stephanie, so I was swimming in anticipation for the six hour drive to Massachusetts and for every minute there. My parents let me use the family car (a large and cumbersome 1974 Plymouth Fury) to drive to from our weekend lodging at my uncle's house to the Antosca's, and it's a wonder that, considering my eagerness, I didn't leave the imprint of the Fury's bumper on half the cars between.

My heart leaped when she opened the door, then plummeted as I realized she was clearly not feeling well. She had contracted some strain of stomach virus and had spent much of the day vomiting, trying any concoction to help her feel better, but no remedy could stay in her stomach long enough to be effective. She soldiered valiantly against the disease, putting on a brave face as we went for a drive and listened to a song I had written for her (poignantly, and ironically, titled "This Close to Heaven"), hoping to overcome her illness by sheer force of will, but the virus proved too strong. Logic told us both that she should be home resting, and while she tried to be a gracious host at her house, it was clear she was in no condition to entertain. I hugged her goodbye, and drove the loneliest ride home I had ever known. While teenagers have a tendency toward the dramatic, the sadness that enveloped me was no pose---quite simply, I felt as low as I could be. Any effort to console me would have been futile and unwelcome, as there was no source of light that could have penetrated that darkness.

I arrived at my Uncle's to find the mood completely contradictory to my own. Massachusetts was on storm alert, and a hurricane over the Atlantic still had an opportunity to change course and blow right into Attleboro. Should the storm become inevitable, my uncle would have to go to his floral shop and raise all of the stock to counter level to avoid flood damage, so the large living room was cluttered with cousins and friends and family abuzz with anticipation, watching the news as if it were a sporting event---berating the storm when it gained momentum and cheering when its path seemed to veer toward any city that wasn't their own.

My folks expressed surprise to see me back so early, and offered their sympathy for my one-line description of the disappointment. I thanked them, then walked though the crowd to the furtherest corner of the room, sat down against the wall between an arm chair and an end table, and tried my best not to display the sadness that had overtaken me. Fortunately, everyone's attention was focused on the television, so amidst the raucous atmosphere I was able to settle into my personal silence and lament the cruel circumstances of the night.

Some minutes later, another arrival appeared in the doorway---the family's oversize beagle. (I had just met him earlier that day, and while he seemed like a charming pooch, I had my mind on other things and didn't take time to bond.) The dog took a couple of steps into the room and seemed to assess the excited scene, mouth slightly agape in an apparent smile, tail wagging gently in response to the room's energy. I stared at him across the room, aching for him to come without my calling, certain that he was uniquely capable of soothing at least some of the night's sting.

The dog stayed near the door, but starting at the couch on his left, seemed to take inventory of everyone present---I could see his head making incremental movements as he logged the familiar faces and unfamiliar voices that populated his usually-quiet living room. His tail continued to swing lazily as his eyes spent a few moments on each subject, eventually settling his gaze on me for the same duration before moving on to the next guest, and the next.

What happened next astounds me to this day, and always will. The dog literally did a double-take, looking back at me urgently as if there was something he had missed on first glance. He didn't bother with eying the rest of the room, instead setting out determinedly through an obstacle course of extended hands offering soft greetings and playful scratches, past a chorus of coaxing "hi boy"s and "hey big fella"s, stepping over bowls of chips and around ottomans until he arrived at my side. Without looking up, he plopped his full weight on the floor beside me and against my outstretched legs, laid his head softly across my thighs and audibly sighed. Tears ran down my cheeks as I rubbed his neck, feeling helpless to express how much his gesture meant to me, though I'm sure he knew. He obviously sensed my need, and I'm sure my gratitude was telegraphed just as clearly. We didn't budge for the rest of the night.

I've heard that some scientists insist that dogs do not feel emotion, that we merely assign meaning to their coincidental actions. But to anyone who has ever known dogs, the assertion is preposterous. Perhaps the existence of a dog's emotions is akin to the question about the existence of God---one might claim science as an exclusive ally for their position, but once you have felt the hand of God personally, science is simply not relevant to the debate. I think the same is true of canine emotions---forgive the turn of phrase, but I have felt the hand of dog in my life, and it made me a believer.

#97 - Is the Sphinx to Blame?

2007-01-30T07:51:00.000-08:00

Is the Sphinx to Blame for This?

9/24/06 (#97)

I'm going to take a controversial stand, despite the knowledge that some of you will be offended by my position. This nation's success was fueled by bold people who made bold statements, and I am obligated to speak up now because I care about the world that our children are going to inherit. It is a message that America---no, the world---needs to hear, so I will say what has to be said without regard to consequences:

The time has come to retire the riddle.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to think this, though it's a topic I rarely hear discussed. The riddle exists in that rarefied air shared with the pun, types of wordplay that could never withstand a popular election, yet continue to appear in conversations at every strata of American life with an inexplicable immunity from prosecution. The riddle is a pathogen too innocuous to concern cultural health care officials, so it goes untreated, often existing as a latent strain until you get a few beers into a salesman and suddenly the pub is faced with an outbreak.

What do you call a boomerang that doesn't work? A stick.

You might be surprised to hear about my distaste for these little puzzlers---I enjoy word problems, and I like jokes, so it would seem logical that I would enjoy the combination of the two. Except a riddle combines the worst aspects of both: painstaking amounts of deduction, and bad punchlines. In fact, there is nothing "logical" when it comes to the consideration of the riddle.

The riddle offends because the ratio between work required to figure it out and satisfaction when the answer is revealed is horribly skewed toward the tedious. I know that the answer will be a trick, that all of my amassed knowledge will not be sufficient to deduce an answer, and yet the teller of the riddle stands there grinning, waiting to see how I will respond. Had my parents not raised me well, I might respond appropriately---with a punch in the riddler's nose. (In fact, that I hesitate in such situations to do just that makes me wonder if my parents might have failed in that one aspect of the nurture process. I'm sure even Gandhi wanted to pop someone when they nudged him with an elbow and said, "Hey, how many Hindus does it take to screw in a light bulb?") Instead, I smile politely while mentally removing that person from my Christmas card list.

Where do you get virgin wool from? Ugly sheep.

One cannot intuit the answer to a riddle because the riddle does not WANT to be answered. It is smug and arrogant, self-satisfied that it possesses a knowledge that you lack, even if that knowledge is of the urban traveling plans of a nameless poultry item---hardly information that makes you invaluable to your employer. Riddles too often involve some sort of play on words, or an overly cute punchline that makes me feel that the effort spent in figuring it out (or failing to) was more than a mere waste of time, but a palpable diminishing of my will to live. The riddle makes life feel futile: so much effort, and the payoff is at best a minor chuckle or feigned guffaw. (Or more likely, pained groans or threats to end the friendship if another supposed "funny one" is contributed to the conversation.) The riddle is a social faux-pas that has managed to escape the notice of etiquette books, the bratty child who thinks dangling french fries from his nostrils is the height of hilarity, oblivious to the fact (as are his parents) that everyone else in the restaurant wants to see the little moppet gag on his so-called comedic props.

What did the fish say when he hit a concrete wall? "Dam".

The riddle is a hollow, dirt-flavored truffle. It plays the role in humor that a fortune cookie plays in literature; it is to cleverness what the underwear section of the Sears catalog is to pornography. If there is a hell, they tell a lot of riddles there, and none of them are funny. (In that way, hell is just like here.) The riddle is that person who enthusiastically accosts you in the restaurant----"Hey, remember me?!" Well fella, does the fact that I'm recoiling wide-eyed without a hint of recognition on my face provide any clue of the likely answer to that query? Likewise, the punchline of a riddle is the metaphoric equivalent of that person saying, "Sure you do---you passed me the Sports Illustrated at the barbershop. Great to see you again! Mind if I sit with you?" The enthusiasm I have for that guy is the same regard I have for the riddle.

Why are there so many Smiths in the phone book? They all have phones.

Immediate cause for suspicion about the value of the riddle: it can be made up on the spot. The punchlines are so impertinent and (usually) mediocre that new variations of the jokes mutate like the influenza virus, much too quickly to maintain a safe immunization. I recall being 13 years old and hearing a crowd of kids exchanging "what do you get when you cross..." riddles, and my neighbor Greg contributed, "What do you get when you cross a freeway with a skateboard?" The answer? "Hospitalized." Most amazing, this dumb joke made up on the spot by a 12-year old C-student is better than most of the riddles heard that day. Or any day. That's how low the riddle bar has been set---rank amateurs can be riddle champions. (Of course, that's a medal you don't want to be flaunting in public. In the history of the cocktail party, no one has ever uttered the phrase, "Damn, that riddle guy gets all the babes." Women might be able to get laid on the apparent strength of a riddle, but let's face it, if that's their goal, women can get laid by reading a Thai food take-out menu aloud. The man, more than likely, is simply enduring the particulars as he patiently waits for nudity.)

Did you hear about the dyslexic Satanist? He sold his soul to Santa.

Finally, I......well, okay, I admit, that one is kinda funny. But I still hate riddles.

#96 - He Shoots, He Scores, He Loses

2007-01-30T00:23:00.000-08:00

He Shoots, He Scores, He Loses

9/17/06 (#96)

Between my 6th and 7th grades, my family moved from Massachusetts to Maine. My oldest brother had gone off to college that year, so the three remaining siblings experienced the common yet brutal discomfort of leaving a school at which we knew everyone and had lifelong friends, and becoming "the new kid" at schools where everyone knew each other and had lifelong friends. When we moved in, we were greeted warmly by a neighboring family who had a 7th grade son of their own. The father assured me that Morgan would love to walk to school with me the next morning and introduce me to all of his friends. Morgan nodded along silently, but I recognized the burden for which his father had carelessly volunteered him. A few mornings later, I met him at the end of his driveway, and we walked the five blocks to Garland Street Junior High benignly probing into each other's life. When we arrived, he dutifully found me my homeroom, bid me farewell and then disappeared to find his friends. I understood---he had extended more courtesy than a 7th grader should be required to display, and didn't want to ruin his own day in an effort to make mine.

At least that's how I remember my first day of school in Maine---a collection of facts, devoid of emotional context. Junior High is like a mental scrapbook full of semi-animated photographs of individual episodes: The day they were teaching dancing in gym class and the lovely Virginia Macintosh selected me as her partner---and her subsequent request that I "loosen up a little" (a request I was unable to grant, as her beguiling allure left me with two left feet, both made of granite) or the first week of football practice, overhearing an older student remark how easy I was to knock on my ass moments before he easily knocked me on my ass. (I quit football shortly after---I was terrible, and the sport had no appealing aspects except that most of the school's pretty girls seemed to date guys on the football team, which made the squad plump with second and third stringers hoping that one of the school's dark-haired maidens came included with the ill-fitting shoulder pads.) When I think of these events, I can imagine what emotions I felt, but those feelings are not imprinted along with the memory. I don't think it's a matter of imperfect recollection: At 12 years old, we are all so much a work in progress---why would I know myself in hindsight if I didn't know myself then?

There was one evening during junior high, however, that I recall with distinct emotional clarity. It was early in our 8th grade year---Morgan and I had become friends, but I was always second-tier to the kids he had grown up with and always felt like an outsider in his crowd, which happened to be the "cool" crowd at Garland Street. We knew each other's names, but little beyond that.

Morgan was hosting a party, and all of those cool kids were going to be there---the prettiest girls, the jockiest guys, and (most likely at the behest of his father) me. Morgan's folks would be chaperoning the party, and they had helped prepare by getting the basement all cleaned and organized, setting up card tables for his rod-hockey rink and flip-up Battleship boards, creating an atmosphere that would have been ideal had it been offered a few years earlier in Morgan's life.

But these kids were now 8th graders, that transitional time when parents suddenly reveal their latent squareness. Many of the attendees were already dabbling in pot and hard liquor, so they snickered at the board games while joking about spiking the fruit punch, and delighted when more "mature" entertainment arose---Morgan produced a bottle of maple syrup made to look like a whiskey bottle and invited Jason Lewis to partake, the gaggle of boys bursting into laughter when he grabbed the bottle, took a big swig, and spit a thick, sugary plume of disgust into the air. Boys huddled behind the water heater and examined sloppily rolled joints, girls sat by the stereo and talked about whatever it is that 8th grade girls talk about, and I stood upstairs next to the grill making labored small talk with Morgan's dad. I felt like an awkwardly shaped puzzle piece that had found its way into the wrong puzzle box.

Eventually I tried to mingle, and felt relieved when one of the boys from my English class challenged me to a game of rod hockey. (For those not familiar, rod hockey is a classic tabletop game that involved a simulated hockey rink and a little black puck slapped around by opposing teams of two-dimensional metal cut-outs who were controlled by movable twist knobs at opposite ends of the table.) I had been schooled at the game by my older brothers, and had no trouble holding my own against the football-centric crowd. In the first game to five, I allowed only one goal.

Despite having scoffed at the game upon arrival, a couple of my classmates were eager to play the winner. I faced another kid, a braggart who raised the level of trash talk but not the level of play, and dispensed with him quickly, my confidence growing along with the crowd of people watching. The third game was heated---Warren Caruso could play (and more importantly, stop shots with his goalie), and there was never more than a single goal lead. We berated our sheet-metal cutouts when they flubbed a pass, we cursed our barely-mobile goalies when a shot blasted past, and we reveled in the electric atmosphere that had begun to fill the basement. It felt good to be a part of that energy---even the source of that energy; everyone was enjoying the show as we battled for our mock Stanley Cup.

The game was tied at four for several minutes, each of us thwarting certain defeat with dramatic defensive plays. Even the girls had crowded around, and I felt a pubescent rush when the adorable Debra Chason touched my shoulder to console me on a heart-breaking in-and-out shot that would have won the game. For a few glorious minutes, I wasn't the outsider I had been all night, or all year---I was just one of the guys playing rod hockey, and I was one goal away from victory. I offered animated commentary, took every opportunity to explain to Warren when his moment of doom had arrived (as he did to me), and enjoyed every sensation of the game---the brittle sound of the rods moving beneath the plywood "ice", the thin slap of the wooden puck against the plastic "boards", carefully planning a strategy for victory. I got the puck on the right wing, slid the rod out to move my player to center ice, and unleashed a slapshot into the left corner of Warren's net. Game over!

There was a minor swell composed of both "yeahs" and "ohhhhs", and then as Warren stood up, the crowd quickly dispersed. Naturally, they had all been rooting for their friend, not the eternal new guy, and while they could cheer a competitive battle, they fully expected Warren to emerge victorious. When he didn't, the game that had held everyone's attention moments before was again just an adolescent toy, fit for a child's birthday party, not a teenager's no-occasion bash. I had become the champion of the lamest thing at the party, and witness to the moment when the thrill of victory becomes the agony of a much larger defeat.

I recall nothing else from that night---I may have slipped out the porch door and gone home, I may have retreated grill-side with Morgan's dad, who knows. I just recall the burning shame of my too-enthusiastic performance, the awkwardness of having fancied myself the star of the circus, only to realize I was still a side-show freak.

I suspect the diplomacy of letting Warren win would have served my social standing more effectively, allowing the hero to be a hero while providing me the status of hard-working up-and-comer---maybe Virginia Macintosh might even have sat to console me. But I was too young to recognize the value of such political maneuvering, and wouldn't have done it even I had weighed the perks of taking a dive: when you play, you play to win. You can regret not playing your hardest, but there's no shame in losing.

At least not as much as there was in winning.

#95 - The Man-Purse

2007-01-30T00:15:00.000-08:00

The Man-Purse

9/7/06 (#95)

At the cusp of 40, the vanity of my youth has faded---my jeans no longer need to be Levi's (though they are, because I haven't purchased new blue jeans in years), my khakis don't need to be Gap (I got my last pair on clearance at Target for $4.34, though they look like I paid twice that), and my shoes are selected purely for comfort. (Actually, my shoes are usually selected by my wife, who has much more patience for shoe shopping than I do, and who has found me, consecutively, the three most comfortable pairs of shoes I have ever owned. Left to my own devices, I'd have gotten them at Target for $4.34, just like I did before my wife's shoe intervention.)

Thus, I was nothing but amused when I showed up at work and one of my co-workers exclaimed, "You've got a man purse!" After all, he was right. Had I arrived with a backpack or a stylish messenger bag I would have escaped comment---even notice---but my tote lacks the size of both of those bags. It's much more like...well, a purse. (In fact, it's much smaller than either of my late grandmother's purses, which could have easily been used for shoplifting cantaloupes or smuggling infants.) I prefer to call is a bag, but as Shakespeare said, "A rose by any other name..."

There's an adage among purse carriers that you tend to pack as much stowage as the purse will allow, which explains why many women can shame even McGyver when it comes to problem solving: if an unexpected dilemma can only be solved with a needle and thread, a saltine cracker, two Canadian quarters and a pen with green ink (I have no idea what issue these items would resolve, but then, I don't think you can stop nuclear fallout with a candy bar, and McGyver managed that), just look for the woman with the largest purse. You might even have your choice of Bic or Pentel pens.

I was exactly that type of packer when I carried a messenger bag---items were regularly added to the inventory, but nothing was ever removed. Scotch tape? Had it. Sore throat? Two types of lozenges. Stuck with an unexpected delay? Voila, a book of Barbara Kingsolver's essays. Tissues, Swiss Army knife, protractor, French-English dictionary, recipe for margaritas, a deck of cards, extra silverware, spare clarinet reeds, 4x6 picture frames, a bottle of ketchup? I'm sure I had them all in there, and I don't even play clarinet. The damn thing weighed about 22 lbs, and would barely fit into the overhead bin of a DC-10. I justified this portable department store as "being prepared", but over the course of a year, the only items I ever used were the knife and the lozenges. I was packed for anything possible, yet lived a life that stayed well within the confines of probable.

So I first switched to a smaller shoulder bag. Sure, I felt a bit naked traveling to the coffee shop without my unabridged thesaurus, baseball glove, folding backgammon case and matched set of 16 oz coffee mugs, but I had committed myself to minimalism. I proudly showed off my pared down portable to my wife, who inspected the contents and asked when I had last used the full-size paper cutter, and why I needed the mortar and pestle. (I had no answer, except to say that I wouldn't have put it in there if there hadn't once been a legitimate need. Ditto on the lawn dart set.)

So I scaled back again---gone were the road flares, the assortment of jams, and the propane camp lantern; I would learn to live without the down comforter and the road atlas of the western hemisphere. I had finally pared it back to the bare essentials, and by coincidence, received a new bag for Christmas that would contain these items and nothing else, a bag barely the size of...well, a purse. But it was more than just the right size---it was filled with slots and pockets and zippered compartments, an organizational euphoria for someone like me, one of those nuts who gets visibly excited when circumstances require a trip to either Staples or Storables. (The only thing better than having a clever, convenient storage container for each of my items is to have a clever, convenient storage item for all of my clever, convenient storage items. It would qualify as a secret shame if I made any attempt to keep it a secret, or if I felt any shame.)

Now the contents of my bag are purely essential: a small pad and a set of crayons in case my daughter and I need to pass time while waiting for the scrambled eggs to arrive; my PDA and folding keyboard; three pens (though none with green ink), and of course, my swiss army knife and some lozenges. It's a clear case of function over form, and I'm secure enough in my masculinity (or oblivious enough to it) that I can fling my little bag over my shoulder and go wherever I need to go. And as a coworker said in my defense after the initial "man-purse" comment, "At least it's not a fanny pack." (I have friends who once used, and probably still use their fanny packs, and while I love those people, I admit to emphatic agreement with that defense.)

Of course, you know what's going to happen now---I'll be out in the far reaches of Northeast Portland and a diabetic Frenchman who barely speaks English will approach me with his broken clarinet and an incomplete map of Montana, struggling to explain that he needs something to raise his blood sugar so he can get to a part of Montana that isn't on his map and perform a concert, assuming he can find new reeds for his clarinet.

And all I'm going to be able to say is, "lozenge?"

#94 - A Little Room to Read

2007-01-29T23:56:00.000-08:00

A Little Room to Read

8/31/06 (#94)

I confess, I have given more coverage to the (usually) unspoken nuances of a visit to la salle de bain than most writers. Yet there's one topic I have not yet broached---the loo as library.

George Costanza is likely America's best known bathroom reader, forced to purchase an expensive art book that he had taken from the shelves to accompany him to the bookstore's facilities during an episode of Seinfeld. I'm not sure how the rest of America responded to this storyline, but for those of us who find the written word to be, at times, the perfect laxative, the responses were likely the same: The art book was good for the gag, but it was a terrible choice for the task at hand: a coffee table book is much too cumbersome to handle in the confines of a public stall. (Frankly, it would be an awkward handful in my bathroom at home, too.)

I know for a fact that it's not just Costanza. Not because I have a stack of old New Yorker magazines in the bathroom at home, and not because I often find those magazines on a different page than where I left them the previous day---I know because I sat on the train one morning while an exasperated woman in the seat next to me struggled to assure her Mom that despite his not answering the phone, Simon was definitely at home. Her side of the conversation went something like this:

"He's home, Mom........when did you last talk to him?........he doesn't have a car, Mom, he wouldn't have gone anywhere. He's probably in the bathroom............no, that's not that long for Simon...........I don't know, Mom, but...........Mom, trust me, he's not like us. That's not that long. Call again in 10 minutes, I'm sure you'll reach him."

"He's not like us." The phrase rang in my head as if the woman had said, "Well, you know how white people are." Since when was reading an act worthy of judgment? Simon was home alone, and of all of the unmentionable things he might be engaged in, knocking off a chapter of Clive Cussler before getting on with the day's events ought to register pretty low on the sin-o-meter.

Some folks see any activity in the bathroom as pure necessity, a chore to be dispensed with as quickly as possible. If you want to curl up with a Barbara Kingsolver paperback, schedule some time on the living room couch or relax in the backyard hammock. This is clearly the attitude of someone who didn't grow up in a house full of kids, where neither couch nor hammock offered the requisite atmosphere for concentration.

I grew up the youngest of four siblings, in a house full of noogies and charley horses and near-perpetual adolescent harassment. The bathroom was the only door with a lock on it, so the bathroom became a sanctuary, a respite from the slings and arrows of daily life. (For all of us---I understood the finer points of the charley horse well enough to dish it out, too.) At eight years old, it was enough to simply enjoy the silence, but boredom eventually got the better of me and I started reading. (Though there may be some nature/nurture issues in play, as I have a vivid image of a small stack of Reader's Digest magazines resting somewhere in every bathroom of my folks various houses.)(Reader's Digest is arguably the ideal choice to employ for this literary service: lots of short articles, several longer human interest pieces, various pages of humor and anecdotes, a word-power quiz----all in all, the prefect companion for either an efficient visit or an extended stay.) Reader's Digest, Golden books, superhero comics---any book that could safely sit on the back of the toilet when the lid was open was a qualified candidate for bathroom literacy.

As I grew older, I came to realize that reading on the toilet was more than a means to pass time---productivity, it often seemed, was closely linked to available verbiage, a disconcerting fact when having to use the commode in the house of bathroom non-readers. It's bad enough when he only book available is The Complete History of Chester A. Arthur, Volume 1, but sometimes the selection is even worse: I have read shampoo bottles, aspirin side-effect warnings, return policies printed on receipts found in my wallet, even the side panels of various Tampax products. It's a cause and effect conditioning issue, and if I wanted that effect, I sometimes had to find a few lines of cause. If that cause had to come in the form of a can of Edge shaving gel, then three cheers for Edge's patented blend of moisturizers that help to prevent painful nicks, cuts and razor burn.

Now I'm a homeowner with a very active 4-year old, and when I feel inundated by the day job, dirty dishes, dog walking and doll house games, I still retire to the smallest room of the house to lose myself in a bit of fiction. (Perhaps this was how I developed a love for the short story---reading a novel at 15 minutes a day would make the lifespan of a character feel like it's unfolding in real time.) Sure, leaning my elbows on my knees for the duration of a David Sedaris essay will cut off the circulation to my feet, and I will be forced to hobble out to the couch with the grace of the Tin Man and wait for the pins-and-needles sensation to pass, but Sedaris is a funny guy, and the opportunity for focused attention is worth the mild discomfort that follows.

I've noticed that my daughter Sage, not quite four years old, seems to have inherited this gene. She can't read yet, but she refuses to take care of business (our dog-walk inspired euphemism) without having a pad of paper and a crayon to sketch angels and dogs and abstract office buildings. (Or perhaps it's mailmen, cats, and our cereal-box shelf---tough to know without asking.) I found it quite endearing until I suffered an alarming realization: Bathrooms. Art. Good grief, have I spawned the female Costanza? If she starts asking me to call her Sage Vandelay, the Crayolas will be confined to the living room.

#93 - Your Cheating Heart

2007-01-29T23:53:00.000-08:00

Your Cheating Heart (But Not Mine)

8/23/06 (#93)

Psychologists, sociologists, and Maury Povich have long theorized on the motivations that lead a man to be unfaithful to his wife. Inquire with the web and you can find a variety of non-scientific top-ten lists that chronicle the reasons for such transgressions---and depending on the author, it might be a scathing call-out (female authors) or preposterous justifications (male authors), all of which claim to answer the age old question, "What's so hard about keeping it in your pants?" (No pun intended.) But these theories are all wrong. With apologies to Maya Angelou, I know why the caged bird wants to bang the cockatoo in the next cage.

Misconception #1: He's bored.
No, that's why he does crossword puzzles. Jumping the bones of the waitress at Romano's Macaroni Grill as a means of alleviating boredom is like hunting wild boar as a means of alleviating hunger---it's just too much work. (Besides, Romano's is to delicious pasta what Schlitz is to delicious beer---there is little chance of late-night passion if "courting" means having to eat one of their mammoth bowls of penne every time you want to clean the pipes.) Adult male boredom is a leading cause of Lionel Train sales (and their accompanying HO scale trees, general stores, and period accurate 1941 coupes), but it doesn't cause infidelity. (Unless your railroad store of choice is staffed with a nymphomaniac with long lunch hours, but that is not the case with my local hobby shop---though Ed is certainly a charming enough fellow.)

Misconception #2: He's not getting any at home.
Wrong. While the accepted view that a married couple's sex life wanes as the years pass seems to be true, it is a gradual decline that occurs over years, even decades. Think of it like heroin: If you were shooting up 6 times a week and had to quit cold turkey, you'd be jonesing for a fix by Tuesday; but if you were to ween yourself off the drug slowly, over the course of several presidential administrations, the withdrawal symptoms are much easier. Every now and then a strange and vaguely familiar sensation might come over a man, but it can usually be solved quickly with the sexual equivalent of methadone: the quick tug. That way ten minutes later (or even two), he can get back to his crossword puzzle.

Misconception #3: He's collecting trophies.
While this myth is often applied to the whole gender, I suspect it was the activities of a small percentage of men that spawned this myth. Sure, if you got to take home an actual trophy it might be fun---like getting to take home the day-glo green stuffed puppy if you score at the ring toss at the Rose Festival---but no one I know has ever been awarded a statue of a gold-plated couple going for the brass ring on a faux-marble pedestal. Instead, you get souvenirs like unsightly hickies, awkward 10 PM "wrong numbers" on your cell phone, and medical conditions that make your story about sitting on an infected golf cart seat seem suspiciously implausible. Besides, all women (like men) have their own scents, textures, and flavors---some of which are much more appealing than others. Just as a champion bowler would think twice about winning if the trophy emitted a musky effluvium that seemed noticeable no matter how many times he washed his hands, most men are careful about the awards they accrue. Besides, what if your trophy decided, post-victory, to hit "play" on Yoko Ono's solo album and purr about how happy she is to finally have a person with whom she can share her musical tastes? Horniness might lead a man to banging his way through side one of a Yoko album---heck, horniness has apparently led men to actually knock boots with Yoko herself---but once the baby batter has been distributed into the condom, no prize is worth laying through side two.

Misconception #4: He's afraid of getting old.
C'mon---if you have a genuine fixation with aging, is there any combination of hair color and cup size that will distract from that thought process? Sure, it's nice to be 20 years past your prime and sitting across from a woman who is the same age as the woman you were sitting across from 20 years ago, but the blank stare returned when making references to Larry Bird, H.R. Pufnstuf, or Steely Dan's "Hey Nineteen" hardly makes a man feel young. No woman can make a man feel young. Only tequila can do that.

In fact, there are not ten motivations behind infidelity, or even five---there is one reason that a man cheats: It allows a brief escape from the reality that is himself.

We are all a composite of our lives, and our baggage travels with us. My wife knows almost everything about me----she knows I have spent 15 years talking about being a writer without truly committing to writing; she knows that, left to my own devices, I'd probably pull up my socks to my knees, even when wearing shorts; she knows I'm going to cry anytime I see the "Dad, wanna have a catch?" scene in Field of Dreams. And frankly, who wants anyone to know that kind of crap about themselves? I'm certain I'd have a much better chance of doing the naked pretzel when I get home if my wife had not witnessed me making full use of the airline vomit bag last time we flew into Boston, or inexplicably getting motion sickness during the inane movie Made (Suffice to say, Blair Witch Project it was not), or seen me plow through 60% of a Breyer's half-gallon in one sitting. That's just not attractive stuff. Meeting someone new allows a man to be the person he wants to be, not the man he actually is.

That's why other men cheat. The reason I don't is because I recognize the futility of trying to score a few of evenings of mattress surfing with the flirtatious barista at Starbuck's---the initial attraction would surely be heady, but I would be constantly annoyed with the sound of the clock, ticking down until the moment when she, too, found out that I get nauseous reading a road map in the car, and that, no, I'm not "splitting" the Ben and Jerry's with her. Just one woman in the world knowing these things is plenty.

#92 - Confessions of a Copywriter

2007-01-29T23:50:00.000-08:00

Confessions of a Copywriter

8/7/06 (#92)

Have you seen the Dr. Scholls' ads for gel shoe inserts? Perhaps this will ring a bell: "Gellin' like Magellan"? I'm sure you've seen them---and for that, I apologize. Despite the embrace that the concept received from my employer, and the personal accolades that it has brought my way, I am renouncing that campaign.

Confession: I wrote the entire thing on the train one morning. (Some of you suspected, no?) And it's a fast train ride. And I was flirting with a beautiful Puerto Rican woman who was getting her masters in Pacific maritime history, writing her thesis on a new examination of Magellan's journals. (Apparently there's a possibility that his descriptions of Cebu Island were in fact of Macatan, and that the record of the ensuing battle of Macatan might possibly be the exact opposite of what actually happened. But I didn't care---I just watched her lips form the various vowels and consonants, her tongue appearing momentarily to gently lengthen the word "island" and simultaneously send my thoughts on libidinous tangents.) She got off at 8^th Avenue, and I suddenly had sixteen blocks to change my blank pad into a campaign plan or my boss would likely fulfill his oft-made promise to "chew my ass like a brisket from Sizzler"---and I had nothing. I pondered whether I should have jumped from the train with the grad student when I realized that she had left me with more than just fodder for lusty daydreams: Magellan.

I scribbled rhymes as I navigated the sidewalk, scrawling all the way up the elevator, sculpting my pitch while hoping that all of the other suits in the lift had to get off on a floor before mine. My "notes" looked like a cheat sheet for a test on the rhyming dictionary. As pitches go, this one was in the dirt (frankly, unhittable)--- not even as good as my quickly-dismissed "Gel-atin" story boards, featuring the downtown with Jell-o streets.

Yet somehow, everyone loved the Magellan idea. Atta boys from the gaggle of middle managers; handshakes from my neighboring cube denizens; work propositions from other creative team's graphic designers. It felt like an episode of The Twilight Zone, the office rabidly enthralled with an obviously mediocre idea. Within weeks, there wasn't a football game in America that wasn't interrupted by a bunch of Dockers-wearing nobodies bellowing across a backyard barbeque about the quality of their cushioned insoles. "Gellin' like Magellan", the man enthuses.

Question: What does that mean? I wrote it and I don't know. It's a nonsense phrase, a Dr.Seussian non sequitur that has as its only asset the ridiculously pitiful strength of vaguely rhyming. Of course it rhymes---it's the exact same phonic! Forget simple rhymes like moon and June----this is moon and moon. And why would Magellan require padded insoles? Does sailing around the world take its toll on your feet? How can this utterly vacant catch phrase motivate a person to buy our product?

I'm particularly embarrassed by the non-ironic inclusion of the rejoinder, "I'm gellin' like a felon"? A felon? Is that the demographic we seek? How do you rob a convenience store? Well, first, you need comfortable feet. I have to take the blame for that, too, though I presented it as a joke---"and to reach that lucrative Cops demographic, 'Gellin' like a felon.'" Apparently, nobody realized it was a joke---instead concentrating on the possibility that felons are a lucrative untapped market.

I apologize for wasting so much of people's time, albeit it in 20-second intervals. When I wrote it, I was young, smoking a lot of pot and kinda dating a bartender, so I had a Guinness I.V. for the better part of a year---the applicable adjective is stunted. Fortunately, folks at the office don't really get my sense of humor, so for most jobs I could cobble together some grossly pedestrian treatments at the last minute and when it was dismissed, indignantly moan, "Y'all just don't get me." I was throwing darts at newspaper articles, scribbling concepts into the dirt on the side of my dingy Toyota, taking pictures of them with my cell phone and calling them story boards---that's how hard I wasn't working. None of my last-minute ideas ever saw the light of day, and I didn't think this one would, either.

But the damn thing emerged, Dr. Scholl's version of the Frankenstein monster, refusing to obey its creator. It grew into print ads and direct mail cards, web banner pop-ups and bus stop billboards. I felt no pride---just a low, sinking feeling that my parents might find out that I was the one who wrote it.

I finally cornered my boss in his office, explaining my concern. "It's memorable, " he attested, "it keeps our gel insoles in the forefront of people's minds." These assurances didn't help, they merely confirmed that he didn't know what "Gellin' like Magellan" meant either. Besides, when it comes to insoles, aren't we already in the forefront of people's minds? Who else are they going think of---we've got something like 94% of the cushioned insert market share, and 97% of the odor control insert market. Our racks are ubiquitous in every department store in the nation. I'm surprised the government hasn't investigated us as an unfair monopoly.

I have sent a memo to management requesting that the campaign be terminated. It's older now, and can be retired quietly, replaced with something less insipid; something that promotes the product in a positive, creative light. I've even asked them to reconsider my "Gel-atin" concept. See, there's the whole spongy angle, the streets no longer hard and fatiguing. It's a much more cohesive campaign---though I admit, we're probably going to lose some popularity with the felons.

#91 - The Letter S

2007-01-29T23:44:00.000-08:00

The Letter S

7/20/06 (#91)

In the yearbook of the alphabet, S is superlative---"Letter most likely to start a word." One might mistake S as the most frequent letter in the language, but sadly, it is not, beaten out by a cartoon handful of vowels---hardly a fair fight considering that the vowels are required by etymological law to appear in every word this side of an acronym. Consonants have no such affirmative action guarantees---even when it comes to plurals, S is offered no promises: "deer" and "mice" are ample proof of that. Yet despite the vowel's requisite advantages, only four of them actually outnumber the S. Few consonants can make such a claim. (Frankly, E's status as the letter-frequency leader reeks of political maneuvering, having gone so far as to squirm its way into even the very spelling of its significant consonantal rival. [Ess].)

S is sinewy---one of only three letters whose composition is devoid of sharp angles and straight lines. Serpentine and simple, S is a shoe-in for the smart letter selection on Wheel of Fortune, and one of the few letters that allow a single tile 17-point score in Scrabble. (That this spectacular letter is honored with only one point is a sinful devaluation by the folks at Milton Bradley.)

S is springy and smooth, an essential element of comic semantics such as "spoink" and "splat", and has more fun on a single page of text than V has in a whole chapter. S can softly smile or sarcastically sneer, and it will sweetly soothe just moments after it suddenly smites.

S is specific---while its sister sounding C might borrow its sibilance, the C too often sneaks off to impersonate the sonic of a K, bragging about versatility when it simply lacks backbone. H might make a noise or might not ("a herd of herbs"), but S refuses to sit by silently---employ its services and you will hear its sound.

S is essential to so many savory, satisfying words---several of which I will sing the praises of here:

Sully---Mr. Webster defines this word as "To mar the cleanness or luster of." Taint and tarnish and contaminate all sound like the aftermath of a a genuine soiling, whereas if someone told me that after the flight they were sullied by the southern-accented stewardess, I would likely be slightly jealous. Somewhat less so if the recipient of said post-flight checklist had been "tainted" by the same woman.

Strumpet---Not recommended for poets (unless writing an ode to crumpets or lambasting the floozy trombone in contrast to the chaste trumpet), but strumpet ("a woman adulterer") possesses a certain not-quite-wholesome sexuality without having the rudeness of those nasty words listed beside it in the thesaurus. If the man sullied by the stewardess lamented that she was only a strumpet, my jealousy would not subside. (Sigh.)

Swagger---the dictionary says it means, "To walk or conduct oneself with an insolent or arrogant air". I prefer to define the word by what swaggers and what does not: southern band The Black Crowes swaggers; The Grateful Dead did not. Matthew McCounaghey can swagger; Matthew Broderick cannot. The paintings of Pablo Picasso swagger; Norman Rockwell's do not. The letter S has swagger; The letter Q does not.

Sofa---the meaning ("A long upholstered seat typically with a back and arms") is as soft (yet supporting) as the sound itself. (Say it----see?) Couch is cold and uncomfortable; divan is distracting and difficult; being done on a daybed seems demeaning---but sullied on a sofa by some swaggering strumpet? Well, keep this a secret, but that sounds simply splendid.

#90 - Something More Comfortable

2007-01-29T23:41:00.000-08:00

Slipping into Something More Comfortable

6/30/06 (#90)

Today I'm going to talk about slippers. But first, I am compelled to pay homage to Andy Rooney, 60 Minutes humorist and my first exposure to a "social commenter." (It's hard to believe Andy Rooney and George Carlin have the same job description---I doubt their respective high school guidance counselors would have predicted convergent career paths.)

The line I remember best from Rooney is his commentary on footwear: "You can tell a lot about man by his shoes. For instance, 'The Loafer'." Though ironically, I'm not sure if Andy Rooney delivered the line at all---it might have come from a frumpy-suited Joe Piscopo or Dana Carvey. With apologies to Mr. Rooney if his most lasting impression was made by an impersonator, I can't talk about slippers without paying respect.

However, I will resist any effort to emulate Andy Rooney, in part because I'm not a student of his style, and in part because I do not want to associate myself too closely with a man whose ideas on personal grooming were formed during a viewing of Lon Cheney's The Werewolf.

I'm talking about his eyebrows. And in his case, "eyebrows" is an gross understatement: Rooney doesn't have eyebrows, he has pets. They're huge---surely visible even when one is standing behind him, considering that from the front it looks like he's planning to adapt them into the world's strangest comb-over. (A dubious superlative considering the fierce competition among combovers.)

Let me go on record that I am not a proponent of vanity when it comes to physical appearances---I am opposed to rhinoplasty, face lifts, botox, even colored contact lenses. Especially when it comes to me: I am often unshaven, occasionally disheveled, and chronically unconcerned about such things. (To my wife's chagrin, I not only fail to see bedhead as a grooming flaw, but consider it a point of pride.) Yet even I have trimmed a few random hairs from my brows now and then.

With eyebrows, it's not simple vanity. Eyebrows take a great deal of pressure off of the vocal chords---raise them in surprise, furrow them in thought, angle them to demonstrate a foul mood. They are valuable facial accessories, and they need to be maintained for efficient use. (Unlike the nose, which is a freeloading facial feature---one can turn up their nose, but when you do, it's the neck doing all of the real work; look down your nose? Again, credit the neck for that disdainful expression.) The eyebrows are working overtime. Grow them out until they look like the pasted scalps of two troll dolls and their expressive quality is notably compromised. ("Hey Morley, was that an expression of disbelief on Andy's face, or was it just the wind?")

But Mr. Rooney's brows are not the stuff of mere vanity---they are patches of unmowed hay amongst the barren soil of his forehead; they are shoots of bamboo exploding from an otherwise manicured lawn. To even the casual observer, it appears that his face is hiding within a duck blind.

That he can look at the clutter of white weeds that grows above his eyes and not care is impressive. Perhaps he is growing them defiantly, a reaction to a 1974 comment from Mike Wallace that "The green is starting to look like the fairway" and he has been thumbing his nose at the 60 minutes brass ever since, daring them to call him on his anti-star grooming techniques. I like to imagine Rooney releasing his inner-Wilfred-Brimley on his bosses: "You think you can get anyone to come in here and talk about the frustration of toothpaste tubes or how hard it is to navigate through those automated touch-tone message systems at the bank? You think some chump like Adam Corolla can step up and entertain a demographic as broad as mine in three-minutes flat? Well, I've heard Loveline---and that potty mouthed punk couldn't do it, so lay off the primping tips and make sure Ed Bradley stops drinking my Evian."

Perhaps he's under the mistaken notion that a thick bush of eyebrow helped Mark Twain to be the brilliant social commentator that he was---though such esoteric connections should have been dispelled when a nation of writers heard that Hemingway kept a bottle in his desk and they did the same---creating one of the most populous waves of drunken hacks the nation has ever seen.

What about the make up people at 60 minutes? Surely they talk amongst themselves; maybe they even have a wager running, $100 bucks to anyone who can convince this octagenarian Sampson to trim that bristley mess back to something close to "just shaggy". I'm sure there's some perfectionist beautician at CBS who is slipping Nytol into his coffee in hopes that he'll fall asleep in the chair and she can extract the hedge trimmer from the bottom drawer and right that annoying wrong.

No, I'm no Andy Rooney, and the only time I'll ever pretend to be is for Halloween---I'll loosen my tie, clip the handles from a couple of whisk brooms and glue the bristles to the top of my eyeglass frames, and kvetch to people how modern life requires me to remember too many passwords.

Anyway, slippers----I love slippers. More comfortable than shoes, but more formal than bare feet. If you don't have some, you should get a pair. I don't recommend the home knitted type--too much like socks, and if done with anything larger than a #8 needle, the texture is rough on your heels. Also, avoid the huge faux-bear feet or cartoon characters---not because they aren't cute, but because they are cumbersome to tuck underneath yourself when you fold into the corner of the couch. I recommend the simple, classic slipper, the ones that look like...well, loafers. (Queue the big stopwatch.)

#89 - Driving to Work with Doris Day

2007-01-29T23:40:00.000-08:00

Driving to Work with Doris Day

6/14/06 (#89)

While my years of musical history (read: obsessive/compulsiveness) have made me a reasonable choice for anyone assembling a pop music competition trivia team, my value to the team would plummet if the categories included jazz. While I have a few seminal jazz albums in my collection (and I like several of them very much), they are mere samplings of a massive genre, and by no means a solid knowledge base anymore than you could understand the wide array of flavors available within the category "fruits" by process of eating a couple of grapes.

Jazz has simply never spoken to me. Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is a phenomenal album, but when I saw Cecil Taylor in concert, I thought it was a joke---the audience being the brunt of the punchline. (Midway through, my date leaned over and whispered, "This is the music they would use to torture my mother." True---her mother, and her boyfriend.) Some of John Coltrane's riffs catch my ear when they approach me via the retail store's background music (at least I think it's Coltrane---might be Sonny Rollins, or Charlie Parker, or anyone, for that matter), but my exploration of Charles Mingus (recommended by Joni Mitchell) led me to wonder how I could love Joni Mitchell so much when she had such inexplicable taste in music. I am a novice with the form, I have no understanding of the motivations, and I don't pretend otherwise.

That type of pretension is one of my biggest pet peeves---a mindset I refer to as "The Jazz Tourist." You know the type---the kind of person who reads a brochure about Montezuma while riding the "Aztec Nation" tour bus and by dinner time opines about the 15th century Mexicas culture as though he were a learned scholar---the whole time incorrectly referring to the Mexicas (the historical name for the peoples of that region) as "the Mexicans". This type of person is likely to close their eyes and utter passionately, "I love jazz", and when asked about favorite artists, say, "Anything on Blue Note. First and foremost, Norah Jones." (For the record, Norah Jones isn't jazz. She's "jazzy". She's perfectly fine (to steal a phrase from Dorothy Parker), but she's decidedly more Kind of Pastel. As a guitar instructor once told me when I asked if I could learn some jazz, "It is not something you learn that way---jazz is simply an advanced form of melody and time signature, and you have to know the fundamentals completely before you can 'play jazz.' But I can show you some chords that sound jazzy." I was 15---that was good enough for me.)

Jazz is like calculus---you can't learn a few simple postulates and expect to be able to contribute to a discussion on how best to measure the volume of air contained within a balloon. The jazz tourist is one who jumps at any opportunity to talk about it, then throws in esoteric misunderstandings that not only fail to contribute, but actually detract from the quality of the conversation. When subject comes up, my friend Nick can get involved with the discourse, be it big band, bop, free jazz, latin, and a dozen other sub-genres that I do not know. For me, it signals the perfect opportunity to freshen my drink.

I say all this to explain the oddity of me stopping the radio on a jazz station as I drove to work last week. I was borrowing my boss' truck for the commute, and his radio presets were different than mine (an understatement of comic proportion), so I was punching the scan button like I had a tic, relentlessly searching for something other than morning show inanity and refried political posturing. Eventually the dial came to rest on KMHD, Portland's Jazz Station (I know the tagline from a sticker on a jazz tourist's office door at my last job, a self-appointed hep cat who counted Rickie Lee Jones among his favorite jazz artists---see previous reference to Norah Jones), and since it was, at least, actual music, I gave my index finger a few seconds off to see if it would hold my attention.

I have no idea how to classify the music I was hearing---it had the rolling beat and easy melodicism of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, but delivered by a small, energetic combo like those that became popular after the big band era. Yet despite my inability to name it, I knew the style fairly well---not from records, but from cinema: This was the soundtrack to Rock Hudson suavely stumbling to woo that year's blonde bombshell; this was the music that accompanied Tony Randall's futile efforts to spruce up his apartment for a soon-to-be-failed romance; these were the strains heard in every late-50's reel that featured a visit to a late night club that was described by the stylish stars as "really swinging" or "totally now". It was buoyant without being cheery, urgent without being manic. I was suddenly driving to work in a campy romantic comedy.

What surprised me most was that the world seemed to be listening to the same radio station. Stop lights turned green on the downbeat, cars changed lanes with seamless, syncopated grace, traffic glided to the pace of the high-hat. My commute is usually a non-event, an ennui between a happy home and the hectic mayhem of the job. But today, the world seemed to vibrate with the music. It felt like 1959, and Doris Day was sitting in the passenger seat, arms folded and brow furrowed, lamenting that while men in general were a scurrilous lot, that arrogant Brad Allen was first among them. (Even in my daydreams, I am the Tony Randall character, never Rock Hudson.)

The music made for a wonderful few miles of travel, and an important perspective-changing experience: we inevitably respond to the various stimuli to which we are exposed, and it is within our power to control much of that external bombardment. Several minutes of brushes on a snare accompanying a perky piano groove and my day was uplifted.

At least until the tune ended, and KMHD opted to follow this lively number with a schmaltzy power ballad that sounded like the bastard child of Muzak and Kenny G. (If you aren't familiar with one of those sources, let me assure that the kid was a spitting image of both parents.) My finger made an involuntary movement toward the scan button, and there I was back in present time, trying to find something other than self-righteous pontificating and so-called morning humorists. Doris Day was nowhere to be found.

#88 - A Picture of Me in a Stranger's House

2007-01-29T23:34:00.000-08:00

A Picture of Me in a Stranger's House

5/24/06 (#88)

Of all of the guests, I knew Denyse, and David. The rest were strangers.

The demographics of the party were skewed toward David's crowd, David being Denyse's older brother. He was in his element amidst the 30-strong guest list (they were his friends, officially) and Denyse had that cherished "cool little- sister" role in everyone's heart, easy rapports that had grown naturally since they were all pre-teens, a neighborhood of children who joshed like it was a junior high ball court but everyone's vocabulary and tolerance for alcohol had increased exponentially. I felt as conspicuous as a peanut in a bowl of blueberries.

Denyse and I had been dating for a short time, and there are few more revealing moment in the getting-to-know someone process than when you observe someone in their natural element; in these jovial and energetic environs, my new friends seemed endlessly charming. Denyse is irresistibly likable, and "the big kids" had a great time falling into the easy, unstudied rhythm of her chatting. (I confess to a bit of jealousy in that regard, each party goer seeming to have an infinite supply of past-life experiences to leverage as items of intimacy, but I would never have spoken of that except to say, "I'm fine. Have fun. Enjoy your friends.")

As David and Denyse worked the crowd (or vice versa, as it sometimes seemed), I found myself adrift in the house without a chaperon. I made small talk with the de facto bartender (who claimed to be rationing the hard liquor, but one taste of my drink indicated that he was quite misinformed as to the meaning of "ration"), asked a couple of meaningless baseball questions (the only type I know) of the guest of honor (Mike Bordick, who had returned home to celebrate his signing to a Double-A pro team, a career path that would later lead him to a spot on the MLB all-star team for his play with the Baltimore Orioles), but mostly I drifted alone through the stranger's home. I had been informed moments before entry that host of the party had lost his parents to an accident the previous year, and that he had not changed any of the decor of the house; that fact went far toward explaining the distinctly "adult" furnishings: Tastefully realized in colors like salmon chiffon or toasted eggshell, large porcelain lamp bases with fabric shades, the meticulously decorated house was fully deserving of the adjective "grandmotherly." I ambled with my Shaw's cola spiked with too much rum, pretending to be interested in the porcelain knickknacks and satin throw pillows, trying to disguise my conspicuousness behind a thin veil of aloof bravado. I'm certain I fooled no one, but they were happy to humor me and talk amongst themselves.

Eventually, my wandering led to me to a little room that the host's father likely called his study---too small to be a library, too comfortable to be an office. There was precisely enough room to house two Naugahyde chairs that bookended a small end table and a shaded brass lamp. The mood was decidedly LL Bean, a theme common to many rooms in many Maine homes, but the lure for me was the art---every wall was covered with framed snapshots of this family's life, and while the room was small, there was little more than an inch between each frame, so I was viewing dozens of milestones in their various lives. There was our host, as an 8 year old boy, proudly holding up a foot-long fish while his Dad hilariously mocked disappointment with his own catch (a fish that could easily have been mistaken as bait); there he was in his little league uniform, flanked by the guy who poured me the too-strong libation and the guest of honor; there was David, a decade younger than the man I knew, standing with the host, both grinning in ill-fitting rented tuxedos, a snapshot likely taken moments before the boys drove off in the parent's Buick wagon to pick up their sherbet-gowned dates.

At first, I felt like a voyeur, worried that someone might step through the door and find me looking too closely at the intimate memories (especially since I had slipped behind one of the leather chairs to see the pictures more closely), but I became so engrossed that the rest of the party ceased to exist. Fortunately, excepting a few quick cameos from guests who had mistakenly thought they had discovered a shortcut to the kitchen, I had the room to myself.

Absorbing this chronicle of a family's life, spanning from a black and white wedding photo of the parents to a picture of many of the night's attendees outside of The Drydock (the local restaurant David had purchased 18 months previous), there was one element that was consistent through every snapshot: irrepressible smiles. Sure, the camera is mostly likely to make appearances for celebratory moments, and few of us hang pictures that reminds us of anything except joy, but this was more than mere careful curating--this room was evidence of a life well-lived. It was easy to imagine the sensation of warmth and pride that this Dad felt every time he sat in this room, and it illuminated why the decision to not redecorate seemed like the only choice. A day would come when the salmon chiffon couch and the toasted eggshell lamp shades would be updated, but I am certain that if he still owns the house, that study looks exactly the same today. The thought of lining these frames up in a box would be inconceivable.

Yet the most compelling feature of this gallery was not simply that I was witness to these particular people's lives, but that this could be anyone's life. This could have been my life---so many photos from my family's scrapbooks could have fit seamlessly onto this wall: my brother Tim and Craig Bellevance with their 70's shag hair and powder blue suits, smiling for the camera before stepping out for their own senior prom; my brother Tom at 10 years old, kneeling beside our sandbox-turned-reptile-pen, beaming proudly with his latest quarry---a dinner-plate sized snapping turtle---scrambling in the background; My sister Jane and our neighbor Pam Comey, preteen with their colorful floats (baby strollers adorned with crepe paper and streamers) for some Girl Scouts parade I was too young to remember. It seemed as if the subjects themselves were almost irrelevant to the pictures. The star of each was life itself.

There are many factions of society that seek to exploit the differences between us (politicians, corporations, religious groups, advertisers, and journalists, to name the obvious), but the truth is, we are all far more similar than we are different. I like to think about that 8-year old boy dangling that silvery fish, his lips stretched to capacity to accommodate his happiness---I have never posed for a fishing photo, but I have no regrets about that; I've already seen myself in that photograph. Not a great likeness, but I recognized the smile.