Iron maidens

Among the many just-over-the-top amenities at my Fancy Gym: an iron and ironing board in the ladies' locker room, tucked away in a handy cabinet. It's only a little surprising that they don't also provide a lackey to do the pressing; you still have to wield the appliance your own self. (Should you prefer, of course, they also offer drycleaning drop-off and pick-up services.)

It gets reasonably steady use, even occasionally by me, when something emerges from the dryer or my duffel bag just a bit too wadded to cram my body into. But I suspect that "ironing," generally, is slipping off into the realm of rotary phones and Conestoga wagons. With our miracle wrinkle-free blend fabrics, not to mention the fashion sensibilities of the tech industry in which I find myself, where Shirt + Pants = Done! ...well, who does that any more? Who has the time, really?

When I was a kid, my mom ironed and ironed and ironed. It seemed she always had a monstrous pending pile of linen tops and cotton peasant blouses and other earthy, natural 70s fabrics, teetering on the laundry-room shelf. Mom would actually organize what she called ironing parties: she'd throw the clothes and us kids and a huge tangle of wire hangers and the ironing board into the car and drive us over to Cookie's. At the time, she drove a Chevy Manza hatchback. The ironing board perched in the driver's-side rear seat and angled across the car to butt against the front passenger window. Sis or I would wrangle for the coveted shotgun position nonetheless, but if the ironing board was in there, you had to tilt your head to the side for the whole trip. This was in the days before safety had been invented, when we never wore seatbelts or bike helmets or had the least lick of common sense between us, so: not a problem. We'd tool over to Cookie's and work out our neck cramps while Cookie and Mom set up their boards side-by-side in front of Guiding Light or One Life to Live or whatever, and they would iron for hours, together. HOURS.

Really the most shocking element of this, now, is not the ironing, or the fact that Cookie hosted because she had not yet learned to drive, at 30; it's the fact that my mother at one time willingly planted herself in front of soap operas.

Anyway. So for some reason the random ladies in the locker room today were chatting about the ironing board and its corresponding lost art, or the art that we pretty much avoid like the plague. One woman's daughter had received a secondhand dollhouse from a friend, and among its furnishings was a wee ironing board that she held up to her mother in bewilderment: "Mommy, what IS this?"

"Honey, that is a TABLE!" her mother informed her cheerily. She checked back in later to find the doll family, sitting down to dinner 'round the old ironing board.

Right on, little sister, right on!

Why I resubscribed to Entertainment Weekly

Charo, quoted in a 30th-anniversary retrospective on The Love Boat: "'Cuchi-cuchi' showed me the way to the bank. That bullshit make me rich."

Or as I like to call it, "Monday"

Woo woo, represent: September 16-22 is "Unmarried and Single Americans Week." According to the Seattle Times, "This week provides an opportunity for the unmarried to celebrate their spouse-free lifestyles and denounce the stigmas surrounding single people." I don't know how well I've done my part, considering: after a brief stop at the natural pet-foods store for kitty litter, I came home, put on my red sweatpants that make me look like Santa, and took the finishing swipes out of a pint of Half-Baked, while planted in front of Fox's season premiere night. Seriously, why haven't I been snapped up? Line forms to the left, gentlemen!

Long in the tooth

Here is a fun fact--okay, actually a dull fact--you probably don't know about me: I have been going to the same dentist my entire life. For 34 years, Dr. Morton the Younger has been rooting around in my mouth twice annually. It's a family affair: his father, Dr. Morton the Elder, tended our mom's teeth from the time she was about 12 until his retirement in the early 1990s. Dr. Morton the Younger inherited a lot of his father's schtick, such as holding the little water-squirty thing further...and further...and further from your mouth. "Don't move," he'd say mildly, spritzing your ivories from three or four feet overhead, just to see if he could make the shot.

Thirty-four years. I have vague memories of sitting on the floor of the exam room, coloring, waiting my turn while Sis was in the chair. Dr. Morton is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a geezer...but I'm wondering now if he simply ran directly from his commencement ceremony to my first appointment: yanking off his mortarboard and peering into my toddler mouth. Was the ink even dry on his diploma?

Several years ago, Dr. Morton's office was switching to a new filing system; during my appointment, they had my entire old file, all the old records, there in the room. I mentioned the unusual longevity of my dentistry arrangements, and the hygienist began flipping through the file. "Oh, my GOD," she blurted suddenly.

"What?"

"Oh, it's just...well, you had your first appointment in 1973. Cleaning, fluoride, and exam..." she said, hesitating, her voice still hushed with awe.

"And?"

"It cost eleven dollars!"

I may have harbored a bit of a crush on Dr. Morton during my prepubescent years. This is not as odd as it might sound, because for decades now he has been doling out slightly oddball compliments, every six months like clockwork: "Beautiful teeth!" he'll exclaim, in conclusion. "Gorgeous gums!" I don't know. I didn't get a lot of flattery from male authority figures in my youth (and don't, pretty much, in my present middle-youth). So I kind of relish the praise when it comes. I cling to it, a little. Once, after the "gorgeous gums" incident I believe, I remarked brightly "That's what every girl longs to hear!" and Dr. Morton became flustered. Heh. On the other hand, I still remember a visit, years past now, where it was plain that Dr. Morton was having a lousy day and was crabby as hell and, after a cursory exam, he didn't say it. He stomped out of the office without a backward glance and I have to tell you, I was a little hurt. For a couple of days.

"Pretty teeth! Pretty gums!" he exclaimed to me, after this morning's exam. It was a happy relief. Secretly, I do still long to hear it.

I stopped to say goodbye to Barb the receptionist on the way out. She has likewise been a fixture there for an eternity; this summer, Sis discovered that Barb lives something like three blocks away. She came to Sis's housewarming party.

"It was nice to see you on the outside, too!" she told me today.

"Yes! You look different, holding a beer," I told her. "And not in a little box."--indicating the sliding window that enclosed her little countertop and reception area.

Keeping the world safe from inadequately pumped Softsoap

Affixed to a sink in the women's bathroom is a note:

Do Not Use

(broken)

soap dispenser

--Security

Security?

Well. Heckuva job, there, Secretary Chertoff!

So very toilet

Fred Milton, the beat-poet poodle in Lynda Barry's cartoons, frequently has that refrain--declaring that O! things are toilet indeed. In this vein, I'm also thinking of when little Pancake was in co-op daycare, and a vogue of toddler cursing swept the school--people calling each other "poopy" and such. After some debate with the teachers and parents, an approved list of benign expletives was established, which included the word "diaper." "That is totally diaper!" Michelle and I went around saying for weeks.

So. The bathtub in my 65-year-old home has been a bit lethargic of drain since I moved in; when things worsened periodically, a slug of Drano or some other store-brand caustic usually did the trick. But this week it got grim indeed, burps and blurts of rusty crudwater backfilling into the tub when I ran the sink. Tuesday night I plunged and Dranoed and plunged anew, assaulted the clog with a boiling teakettle, followed the directions in my most excellent Dare to Repair ladies' guide to home maintenance (hi, Holly!), unscrewing the drain trap and the overflow stopper mechanism and plunging and plunging again. Around midnight, I thought I had it beat; God knows the plunging was a fine upper-body workout.

But no. Wednesday morning shower, and again the cloudy soapscummy water pooled around my ankles, going nowhere. I groped muttering for my towel...and then noticed how the toilet had gotten into the act, overflowing across the room and submerging the bathmat. Toilet water! Yes, it was "clean," from the bowl...but that remains a toilet bowl. I deployed a plethora of curses, none from the approved daycare list, and squelched off to call a plumber and my boss, in that order.

"Tub and toilet--so, that's a clog in your main sewer line," announced one of the two wrenchmeisters deployed to my home. Of course my wee ancient cottage is too small to maneuver in; the snake apparatus would not fit into the bathroom or the crawl space or through the mysterious, now-weeping capped port in the linen closet. They had to dig a trench along side my house to get to the main line. Plumber A handed me the clipboard with their estimate. I invoked The Lord, loudly, but He made no comment and so I signed. What else can you do? It's a one-bath house, I'm essentially hostage to the Rooter Rescue Squad: pay, or pee in a bucket. I slumped in my office, crying over my laptop while the crew dug and sawed pipe and rotorooted and wet-vac'ed and had a sneezing fit and cursed a little in Spanish, lending some cultural variety to the stream of invective that hovered over my bathroom all day long.

$1667 and change later, I once again have the privilege of modern conveniences. On the plus side, the ditch-digging operation tore out approximately 654 linear miles of morning glory I'd been meaning to get to, so hey: no need to salt the earth on the north side of the house. On the negative, there goes the flat-panel LCD television I'd been saving up for, literally flushed away. That, and the knowledge that toilet shenanigans of any sort occurred in my bathroom and were presumably tracked hither and yon through the house by the plumbers. I mopped like a fiend (more upper body, plus cardio!), but there is a part of me convinced I will never feel clean again; I kind of want to boil and bleach the floors. And possibly myself, from the knees down. As soon as I stop rocking back and forth, cradling the stump of my Visa card to my chest and crying.

Department of Homeland Security

Sis alerted me to this MSNBC headline this morning: Man hides monkey in hat, smuggles it into N.Y. You know that if he'd flown directly to New York first, instead of via Ft. Lauderdale, he'd have gotten away with it; stroll through La Guardia with a marmoset in your chapeau, no New Yorker is going to notice. They're too busy pulling me out of the security line because I failed to empty my pockets and remove my shoes in the correct order. I'm sorry, they have to swab my entire laptop down with a bomb-detecting Q-tip--no one has time to spot A MONKEY IN A DUDE'S HAT.

I also appreciate the fact that, once detected, the spirited but well-behaved Peruvian marmoset stayed in the man's seat for the rest of the flight. Obviously some good parenting going on there, which is often in short supply in the jetosphere.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Safe is burning

Oh, dudes. Doods! Look what I missed, at last night's "Turn Back the Clock" Mariners' game:




Yes, that is THE Erik Estrada, looking not-too-much the worse for wear as he cruises past the dugout. Apparently, after roaring from the outfield tunnel in a great cloud of smoke, Officer Poncharello threw out the ceremonial first pitch. Oh my golly, he certainly was the coolest...back when I was in the second grade.

I do love the retro, "Mr.-Pibb-fonted" uniforms (a perfect turn of phrase I am stealing from Slate's Michael Schaffer), with the cornball trident "M" logo. I dimly remember my first game, in the late, not much lamented Kingdome; the kids' giveaway that night was an electric-blue plastic batting helmet with that screaming yellow trident on the front. I am sure we lost; I think Grandpa disconsolately took us home along about the fifth inning. Too bad that Kawasaki isn't a time machine, Ponch, because I would give most anything I own to either revisit that night or haul Grandpa back with me, to see what those hapless Mariners have become.

I have tickets tonight, actually--good ones; thanks, Steve-o!--but I don't expect that anything will quite live up to the above. Sigh.

Mulder, it's me

(Which is the one thing I have ever/will ever want to shout into a cell phone, whenever the spirit moves me.)

I have to confess that I have been something of an inadvertent Luddite when it comes to mobile phones. I kept meaning to get one--my interest spiking each time we lost Mom somewhere in the wilds of the baseball stadium, or a piece of my old car fell off onto the highway--but I continued to forget about it with great regularity. For, oh, ten years. I was finally inspired to act by my recent college reunion (which was two months ago), when my peers were frenetically logging each other's numbers and calling each other from seminars and dorm room to dorm room and across the picnic table. I couldn't remember which rooms we'd all been assigned to, and without a phone was reduced to standing in front of various doors stage-whispering "Emily? Margaret? Emily? Hello?"

So. Today I have succumbed to a cell-phone offer from the auto-club, and then conducted a whirlwind pop-cultural volley with Sis over the IM.

Kim says:
Just signed up for a cell phone. Now the Borg OWNS me.
Sis says:
eeek
Kim says:
yeah. but also I am a teensy bit excited.
Kim says:
do you remember when I called you from the AirPhone ™ once when I was flying back to college?
Sis says:
yes
Kim says:
it was something like $4 a minute, and the size of a brick. heh.
Kim says:
anyway, cheapo AAA deal, $20/month for 100 minutes.
Kim says:
I figure I will never come close to using that much, as it's only for 1. "Where the fuck ARE you?" 2. "I have been run off the road by a truck, help" and 3. "Hello, Snappy Dragon? I'm on 520, have the potstickers ready for me."
Sis says:
are you going to start voting on America's Got Talent now?
Kim says:
Oh. And that too, of course.
Sis says:
hee hee hee
Kim says:
10 votes for BoyShakira, coming up
Kim says:
Or I can play the Hell's Kitchen games: "Which chef will give Ramsay an embolism tonight?"
Sis says:
Christ, that man gives me high blood pressure
Kim says:
funny, he makes mine all just float away!
Sis says:
Fuckin' donut
Kim says:
DONKEY! DONKEY! DONKEY!
Sis says:
GET OUT
Kim says:
If I had it in me to behave like that as a boss, this week would have gone a lot different


(Mark Blankenship via both PopPolitics and Elastic Waist, today; potstickers via the wildly careening Dragon!Wagons, if you live in the delivery zone, you lucky duck.)

Cardio funk blast

This morning at the gym, I'd finished my workout and was stretching in the little carpeted area set aside for such purpose. It was fairly crowded, with other stretchers and with various folks and trainers prodding them through this or that activity. There was a man being made to do situps and bicycle-type (lying down) calisthenics by his trainer, and I am telling you, this guy ripped a series of explosive, sputtery, EXTREMELY LOUD farts. I mean, me and several other ladies were LOOKING AROUND in amazement. They were whoopie-cushion-esque; they sounded fake, like someone was making the noise to be funny, but no.

So then in the locker room changing we were all still marveling at it. We agreed that only a man would just blithely "push through the set!!" with indifference, whereas had I made such a racket I would be all "well, time to join a new gym!" I am sort of impressed with his perseverance, really, because at the very least, if I had unleashed such a veritable thunderclap of farting, I'd still be lying there paralyzed with laughter. Before crawling away to my car and never going back as long as I lived.

Gryffindorky

It's okay, there will be no spoilers in this entry.

I thought about going up to the Harry Potter bash at the local indie bookstore, Santoro's, last night...but by 11:30 I was drowsing on the couch. Getting too old for this shit, apparently.

But I stopped in just a few minutes ago, to lug my own final J. K. Rowling doorstop home. There were still red and yellow helium balloons, bobbing aganst the ceiling; the door to "the loo" was plastered with crayon renderings of Harry and his pals. The staff looked groggy and blissful. "I'll remember this for the rest of my life," my cashier commented. I was one of four adults in the space of two minutes, queueing up to get the book; also present was a dad with two little kids, the elder of whom was begging for a second copy.

"Are you fighting over it?" I asked, laughing.

"No...they're just so...wonderful. We need them!" the boy said. The dad pulled out 60-some dollars for the boxed, color-illustrated deluxe addition; the little sister was dragging the store's slightly battered, almost life-size Harry cardboard cutout around the display tables like a dance partner. "Come on...let's put Harry back and go home," Dad said, fanning the kids out the door before him.

When I got on the bandwagon, along about the fourth book, I remember feeling like I wanted deliberately to read them under the covers with a flashlight on late summer nights...despite the fact that I was a grown woman in her 30s and could read them when and however I damn well pleased. I saw a couple of FedEx drivers on the news, describing the experience of delivering the latest Potter to household after household on the due date. "This has been the best day of my life," one said with wonder. "Every house I go to, little kids run out and HUG me!"

Home, where I cracked the behemoth open to its dedication:

The dedication of this book is split seven ways: to Neil, to Jessica, to David,
to Kenzie, to Di, to Anne, and to you, if you have stuck with Harry until the
very end.

So, yeah. Pretty much already crying, and renderered virtually twelve years old. Thanks for that, J. K.

This is a dark ride

I got a twinge of puzzled nostalgia from this Seattle Times article on the late, lamented (?) Flight to Mars ride of the Seattle Center amusement park. I don't think I've been to ye olde Fun Forest in twenty years, but somehow I had not realized that the Flight to Mars was no more.

As haunted-house spook shows go, the best you could say of the Flight to Mars was that it was...eclectic. What was the deal, with the nodding mechanical alien-pirate-skull (with fedora!) that bobbed above the facade? I think I rode through in one of those little cars exactly once, on a trip with the Girl Scouts; I was completely petrified and spent most of the ride with my eyes screwed so tightly shut they nearly burst out the back of my head. I was a very timid child. Two gags have remained in my memory: a mechanical bat that swooped at your head, and a mineshaft-collapse faux timber that likewise veered at you from above. Neither of which would seem to have anything to do with intergalactic travel, unless I'm missing something. Maybe my eyes were closed for the Mars part.

I'm also bemused by Mike McCready's reminiscence of makeout dates in there. In the eighth grade?! Clearly I was both timid and somewhat backwards, because no such opportunities arose for me at 14.

Although actually I do have a very specific Grade 8 memory of the Fun Forest. My class was on an end-of-the-year trip to the Pacific Science Center; the teachers had basically turned us loose in there, and a dozen or so of us snuck out of the educational pavillions and down to the amusement park portion of the Center. We pooled our funds enough to buy a strip of tickets. Our ride of choice? The carousel. Yeah, that's right--we bad. But it was a beautiful day in May and I remember circling and laughing and shrieking, on a bejeweled painted pony while 80s pop blared overhead, and thinking I was the shit. It was probably the most subversive thing I'd ever done, at the time.

After the ride we ran to meet our buses; one teacher noted the non-scientific direction we were coming from and ticked off names on a clipboard as we sprinted past. Most of the kids were busted and had to do a week of lunchroom duty, slopping down trays and wiping tables...but I didn't get caught! Woohoo! Heh. It's a funny little slice of heaven now, an innocence so thorough I can hardly believe it.

Beezus !#*&@! Christ

Worked from home today, waiting for an exterminator to come and deal with the bumblebees that had taken up residence in the flower bed, directly against the foundation of my house. I felt a little bad about it: bumblebees are so fuzzy and dopey and fat, you know, konking into the windows, a little confused. Plus all of the END IS NIGH hypothesizing about the decline in honeybee population. Still, this was preferable to me going out there in a moon suit and giant netted hat, ineffectually waving around a smoke pot from a healthy distance of 40 feet.

Kim says:
eeek. so I'm typing, and the bee whisperer is right outside the window, and he just sort of jumped and banged the wall. stung, maybe? scared the shit out of me.

Sis says:
yi

Kim says:
I can hear a low mumblebuzz, dunno if it's his radio or, you know, ENRAGED BEES.

Kim says:
forming the shape of an angry pointing finger in the sky.

Sis says: christ...ask him thru the window

Kim says:
well, now he's yakking on his radio, so he seems unperturbed.

Kim says:
$195, btw. Better him than me!

Sis says:
don't you like owning a home?

Kim says:
oh yes. so fun.

Sis says:
what's he going to do to eliminate them?

Kim says:
I believe for this kind, they poison the hole and then seal it up. Most of the bees should be out and about, doing their bee jobs...so if they come back and find no hole, they move along. I think.

Sis says:
ugh

Kim says:
I am totally RADAR EARS right now, and convinced I can hear them, buzzing and plotting their revenge.

Sis says:
are they shaped in a giant finger yet? Pointing at your house?

Kim says:
an exclamation point of outrage.

Sis says:
uh oh...now they're forming the "at" sign....followed by a number sign, and asterisk

Sis says:
they're really pissed

How to secure a standing invitation

Talk at our adolescent-mortification-themed book club meeting (a whole 'nother story I'll fill in later) turns to John Hughes movies. One end of the couch is holding forth on both Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club, but I dismiss each as "too Messagey."

"Sixteen Candles, no question," I say. "It's the first one and the only one I can pretty much recite word-for-word."

At which point the newest book-club attendee, Kristin, turns to me and declares without preamble, "No, he's not retarded!"

Lost in the supermarket

After work, gym, and shower, I hit Trader Joe's to pick up some goodies for tomorrow night's book club. The joint was jumping even at 9:00 p.m. As I made my way through the narrow, kooky luau-themed aisles, I couldn't help noticing a trio of shoppers, two women, one man. I'm bad with ages, but I'm guessing all three were in their early to mid-twenties; I noticed them because the guy was talking, loudly and nonstop, about their selections, as they dropped things into the cart. He was sort of narrating and...instructing his companions, as they moved through the store. "Now, see, this is two for $2.99, so that's like a buck fifty apiece. That's a deal! Okay, this here is a whole meal."

We seemed to be following the same trajectory through the store--I'd round a corner and there they'd be, coming up the next aisle. At first I was just annoyed, at the blah blah blah and the way they shuffled along in my way, three abreast, the cart blocking traffic in both directions as they conferred over the freezer case. But I started to get kind of fascinated, because why was this dude describing the entire process to these women as if they'd never been shopping before? On and on he went--comparing prices, urging them to "scavenge" for the less-manhandled packages toward the back of the shelves. It was like some sort of weird grocery tutorial. How to select food items and place them in the basket for eventual purchase. The women did not seem grocery-incapacitated; they were not, apparently, aliens or visiting foreign dignitaries, slumming and soaking up the mysteries of TJ's economical domestic brie and frozen chicken burgers. If anything, the group seemed roommate-y. I couldn't figure it out--was dude just a know-it-all blowhard, incapable of NOT vocalizing his shopping in real-time detail? Or had the girls survived to post-college age without somehow learning how to procure comestibles for themselves?

When I left the checkout stand, I found one of the women smoking a cigarette in the parking lot. (Did she barter goods and services for the smokes, I wonder?) I guess Groceries 101 had gotten to be too much and she needed a little break. I hope they selected a lot of prepackaged meals; if they'd gotten this far without mastering the whole food-market thing, they sure as hell weren't gonna be able to cook.

If I know her, she's busting out the Alice Cooper right now

Word to my mother, who today punched her very last clock after 17 years with the Mukilteo, WA school district (and nearly three decades altogether in the public school system). I imagine that, just like the kids in "Grease", she ran screaming from the building, throwing papers in the air, and sailed away in a flying hot rod. Probably not sewn into the black spandex catsuit, though, I'm hoping.

It was cool, having my mom on summer vacation with us when I was growing up--going to Baskin-Robbins or the pool, staying up ridiculously late, me, Mom and Sis all lying on the living room floor directly in front of the big box fan on the hottest nights. Mom agreeably scared the living shit out of us with inappropriate horror movies on the late show; I remember being so freaked out by "Wait Until Dark" that we cried, sobbing in terror but too afraid even to approach the t.v. to turn it off. Which was what you had to do, then, because remotes were for the Jetsons and rich people.

It got a little less cool, I suppose, when my mom took her hard-earned summers easy while I had to trudge out to some dipshit teenager job: frying corn dogs, selling ugly purses and vases in a gift shoppe. When I regrettably stumbled down the adult career path that requires me to show up at work FIVE WHOLE DAYS IN A ROW, EVERY WEEK, GOD, I grew impatient and irritated with Mom's obsessive day-counting in June, and the anticipatory fog of gloom that descended over her two weeks before Labor Day. I don't think the transition has fully registered with Mom, yet (and probably won't until September). This summer, Cookie is spending six weeks on a language-study program in Italy (go, Cookie!), and Mom is at something of a loss, not having her best friend handy for the first summer since they were 12 years old. "I'm going to have such a rotten summer," she wailed to me on the phone, two weeks ago.

"I do not want to HEAR it," I snapped, annoyed. "It is going to be summer EVERY DAY for the REST OF YOUR LIFE! You can do whatever you want, every single DAY!" It is my fondest DREAM, y'all, seriously.

But I'm sorry I barked at you, Mommy. You have done a good job--as an interpreter for the deaf, for mainstreamed kids; as an advocate for countless other special-needs students, and physics geniuses, and illiterate teenaged miscreants to whom you explained, "This is how the world works, not just high school. Do your time, go along to get along, and then get out while you still can!" You got bitten, by that one little horrifically neglected wild child...and you managed to ensure that that poor kid saw a dentist, later that year. You interpreted dozens of commencement ceremonies and no doubt have the words and signs to "Wind Beneath My Wings" committed to memory by now. You taught deeply autistic Pedro to exclaim with delight over "po-la bear!" and "butterfly!" And you were never above putting on a black plastic garbage bag and dancing around as a California Raisin for a pep assembly.

Congratulations, Mom. Turn your tassel! Now let's blow this popsicle stand!

Defensive, driving

Perhaps it is just my finely-honed editorial and comprehension skill, I don't know. But let me try and explain it to you. The sign says LANE ENDS/MERGE RIGHT. So I did that. For future reference, the sign doesn't say LANE ENDS/DRIVE BLITHELY ALONG UNTIL IT TAPERS TO OBLIVION, NEARLY SIDESWIPE KIM'S CAR, AND THEN IN YOUR PANIC GIVE KIM THE FINGER.

Glad I could help. Keep practicing, you'll get it...fucking donkey.

Let's go, Hokies

I feel like I have no business commenting on the Virginia Tech tragedy. Not that that stops me. I'm not affected, I know none of the victims personally. It's a horrific event, to be sure--I am moved and appalled...but who gives a damn what Random Mid-Thirties Blogger thinks about it? My thoughts bring nothing new to the table, but I'll launch them into the cyberfray anyhow:

1. The media are vultures (and shame on you, Slate, for choosing as a cover image the photo of nutbar Cho aiming a pistol directly in my face, thanks a lot).

2. Gun culture in the U.S. is entirely out of control. Conservative pundits' assertions that the victims were cowards for fleeing, and that they should have all been armed to drop their assailant in a wild-West shootout, physically sicken me.

3. It doesn't have dick to do with video games, seriously. Tell it to Charles Whitman.

4. It also doesn't have to do with crappy creative writing. If I had a spree killer to associate with every grotesque, gross-out, shoddily written story I've endured in various workshops and slushpiles...well, I'd be dead. Gory fiction is not a direct indicator of mental health, or Quentin Tarrantino would obviously be property of the nut factory.

Cho was obviously deeply disturbed, and the university did the best it could to get him help. Ultimately, they failed each other. Numerous faculty tried, Cho resisted...and he was 23 years old, a grown man. A sick, deranged man who was solely responsible for his own terrible actions, in the end.

Anyway. Salon covers the creative writing angle very well here; Erin also has a good roundup from teachers and writers. (I see she's added the Salon article too, so we can create a Mobius strip of linkery.)

Meanwhile, over the last few days I've had a few conversations with colleagues, openly wondering if such a thing could ever happen here, at NerdCo...and, honestly, why it hasn't happened yet. It's a huge company in a deliberately collegiate "campus" setting, and chock-full of smart, creative, obsessive, borderline-Aspbergers-type people. Actually there's a strong enough Ren-faire contingent that I would be...no less surprised, I guess, if someone ran amok in here with a broadsword.

On the back of each office door hangs NerdCo's little tablet of emergency response guidelines. A couple of us dug into that, this week. Instructions are provided for medical emergencies and creepy mail, hazmat spills, fire, and both severe snowstorms (sadly, "do not drive like an asshole" is not listed) and "volcanic eruption"--a nice feature of our particular location on the Pacific Rim. (The floor is made of LAAAAVAAA!)

The first recommended response to workplace violence included locking your office door. Interesting, because unless you are a super big deal in the management structure, these doors have no locks. Also a large floor-to-ceiling window next to each door, facing the hallway. Hmm.

I contemplated jumping from my second-story window, leaping for the spindly tree outside. The trees that border my building are notorious for whipping savagely about in the least breeze; it occurred to me that, should I launch myself into the tree, it would no doubt bend dramatically and then slingshot me back into the room, directly into the path of the hypothetical crazed gunman.

Okay, I don't have a point. Unless it's that random violence is, in fact, random. In the fraction of a second I might have to make a decision, if my life were at stake...well, there aren't really any good decisions to choose from. The advantage, sadly, is with the homicidal maniac, for whom it is far far too easy to get all the guns he pleases.

Oh no, guns don't kill people...people kill people. Frequently, deranged fucking lunatics WITH GUNS.

Shit.

I get no kick from cremains

Oh, Slate's Explainer column. I do enjoy learning about things I never wondered before, but will lie awake fretting over for many nights hence (yes, still haunted by the "how to pop out your eyeball" episode).

This week's column addresses the rumor that Keith Richards purportedly snorted a combo of cocaine and his late father's ashes, and speculates on whether that might be bad for him. Let's find out!

Only if he made a habit of it. There are diseases and conditions that can occur from getting small particles in your lungs, but they develop after repeated exposure—for instance, coal miner's lung occurs after years of breathing in coal dust. Experts say Richards should be more concerned about the health effects of the cocaine, his cigarette smoking, and past drug use.

The column goes on for another four paragraphs, further detailing other health woes that might befall Mr. Richards under the circumstances: traces of embalming fluid, the risk of mercury poisoning from any of Pop's dental work, etc. It's exhaustive and very sincere, which delights me no end...because who are we discussing here, again? That's right, KEITH FUCKING RICHARDS. The "concern for health effects" ship HAS SAILED, my friends, likely well before I was born. LOOK AT THE MAN! Inhaling his dead dad, taking a header from a coconut tree: all in a day's work for ol' Keith, I'm thinking. He should team up with the indestructible cheerleader from Heroes, maybe.

In two weeks you'd have a diamond

A series of observations upon witnessing Ferris Bueller's Day Off on cable, over the weekend:

1) My God, everyone is so, so, so, so YOUNG.

2) After careful consideration, I must reaffirm that Ferris...is kind of a dick. He bullies and nags his friends into playing along with his schemes! He scampers off unpunished, leaving literal chaos and destruction in his wake! That's no kind of friend, man, seriously. I still would much prefer Cameron as my mopey, no-doubt devoted boyfriend, because PRETTY and because of this exchange:

"What are you interested in?"

"Nothin'."

3) Provided, of course, that Cameron's father didn't simply KILL HIM OUTRIGHT, later that afternoon. Twenty-one years later, and I'm still a little bit genuinely afraid for him, fictional character or no. I know collector-car people, and they are batshit crazy.

4) Even so, the "Twist and Shout" parade sequence is one of my favorite movie moments ever, period. What I wouldn't give, to have been there dancing for however long it took.

5) Ben Stein. Same schtick, two decades of steady employment. Who saw that coming?

6) Must get on iTunes and acquire some Sigue Sigue Sputnik immediately.

It could be worse: a case in point

I'm in the winter doldrums, a bit, and it's a self-perpetuating cycle: I struggle to wake up and face the drippy gray weather; I haven't been to the gym in two weeks; I exacerbate that particular problem by self-medicating with bread. I was truly in a grim, glum mode, this morning. But a chat with Sis made me realize that it could always be worse--they're dealing with rats.

They've caught two, already, in the basement of the new house, with classic snap traps. I'm a little surprised at this, considering that Sis is a big ol' nature sap and once adopted us each an endangered manatee for Christmas. Of course, a big tub-o-lard manatee, floating about dreamily and getting konked in the head by reckless jet-skiing assholes, is much more appealing and sympathetic than...vermin. Sneaking around sneakily.

So. It is Sis's duty to set the traps; then she hovers about in the background while forcing Mr. Sis to dispose of the inevitable result. "Today's catch was a big one," she informed me. "And what was disgusting was that the pretzel/peanut butter bait was stuck in his mouth!"

And I suppose I am a horrible, heartless person, because this announcement caused me to erupt in horrified, hysterical laughter. "He looked really surprised," Sis commented, as I choked and guffawed and pounded my desk. "Like, 'hey, look, a pretz--' SNAP!"

Oh, God. Just think of it, y'all. The poor little filthy bastard just wanted a snack, and here was one, lying right on the floor! The cruel caprice of fate, all for a mouthful of peanut butter. Dude. My mood, by comparison, lifted considerably somehow.

I am just glad that my personal trainer has not set up some sort of punishing mechanism by which she breaks my neck if I abruptly lunge for a chocolate sprinkle donut.

Soulmates

Sis and Mr. Sis have purchased a new house, and just listed their current abode for sale this week. Already they have been besieged by agents, shoppers, and snoopers. Also something that rhymes with "snoopers." In today's IM/real estate ettiquete lesson, Mr. Sis proves that, while they have been wed a mere eight months, they are clearly matched for life:

Sis says:
man, someone crapped CORN floaters in our toilet!
Kim says:
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahhahaah
Sis says:
[Mr. Sis] asked, "Did you poop???"
Sis says:
and I said, "No, not today....why?"
Sis says:
And he screams, "CORN!"

Nobel Prize! Nobel Prize!

Science can make life worth living: a North Carolina man has figured out how to bake extra caffeine directly into donuts (and bagels). Clearly he is the Einstein of the 21st century.

According to the article, he is not yet selling the Cornholio specials directly, but is marketing them to some of the big chains. What he ought to do, though, is open a franchise right here on the NerdCo campus. He could amass a fortune of supervillain proportions, and Mike and I would probably be punching and kicking strangers and perhaps even each other over the first place in line.

I won, eh!

I try to go up to Vancouver, B.C. once or twice a year, for a purely self-indulgent vacation of spa visits and art galleries and meandering through the Granville Island markets. You know how people will say, upon visiting a city for the first time, that they felt an immediate affinity for it--completely at home there? I have deep love for New York City, and a swoony infatuation with Paris...but Vancouver is the only place I've ever felt that immediate click. It has the physical beauty of Seattle, but there's something so much more vivid and multicultural and...continental, about it, somehow. I suppose I'm lucky that it's convenient.

So I visit, usually at least in late summer...and every year I pick up the brochure for the Vancouver International Writers' Festival, and then curse myself for not better coordinating my vacations, because I always manage to miss it. This year, I noticed the invitation to their short story contest, in the back. What the hell, I thought, and sent off a story I'd been kicking around for multiple years at this point. It had been a long time since I'd submitted anything anywhere. Despite my 2006 NaNoWriMo total flameout, however, I'd been trying to goad myself into better writing habits again.

I got home to a voicemail last night from one of their coordinators, last night--she'd sent me an e-mail, which the NerdCo servers had blithely routed into junk mail sight unseen. Get this: I won the damn thing.

No, really! No, REALLY! I screamed so loudly the cats leapt and scrambled and crashed into each other, fleeing under the bed. I did the English major's version of a touchdown dance in my kitchen, playing the message over and over again before calling up my e-mail and rescuing the original notification. I called and e-mailed a lot of people and it was kind of late by then so if I woke any of you, jabbering like a monkey...well, I've had 24 hours to calm down and I apologize. I was very, VERY excited.

I still am. This is my first fiction publication, truth be told, and I am over the moon. Bless you, my adopted enlightened city to the north!

"You realize what this means, don't you?" my mother said.

"That I am in the wrong job?" I asked. Don't worry, I have not yet quite planned to retire on my $350 CDN.

"Well, no. But...now you have to keep working towards your dream," she said. "You have to keep writing!" Aw, look at my mommy, coming out of nowhere to play so astute a card!

Full disclosure: this is actually the second contest I've won based on the written word. The first was when I was about 12, and triumphed in my age division in the "Why My Mom Should Be Queen for a Day" essay contest sponsored by a local mall, for Mother's Day. (Steve: the following Avocado Green-tinged memories are for you, man!)

In the early 90s, this particular shopping center, University Village, got a major makeover, with boutique facades, an Apple store, two day spas, a gigantic Barnes and Noble. When I was a kid, though, this was the crap mall, a straggling row of assorted meek dives two blocks from our dentist. We'd go to the Hole in the Wall donut shop after our six-month fluoride treatments. (What do you mean, dentistry + donuts = idiocy? Shut up.) Anyway. I tore the contest entry form out of the back of the weekly sale flier and sent in my essay by stealth; probably I had to steal the stamp from the dish on top of the refrigerator. Heh. I don't remember what I wrote, only that my mom cried when they called to tell her, and hugged me blubbering in a mortifying manner. (Twelve, remember.)

The stores in the then-seedy mall had also donated a variety of gift certificates and other prizes. Most have faded from memory...but I do know that Mom got herself a purple silk blouse--tres chic!--and that she was also allowed to choose from a selection of record albums. She picked Kim Carnes--the one with Bette Davis Eyes on it. On vinyl. Good times!

Anyhoodle...as weeks go, it's been a good one.

Frosty the axe murderer

...was a jolly, happy soul! With a corncob pipe and a button nose, and one arm made out of a hatchet. The other one's a rake, and bitch, he will cut you.

Complete with bucket hat, Frosty is close to eight feet tall--an anomaly I don't think I've ever seen on Seattle streets; it's warming rapidly and I was a little afraid to approach Frosty for a closeup, for fear he would topple and smush me.

Also I am now a little scared of the neighbors.

Buddha bubble bath

Taken on my deck, this afternoon.

Note that that's only about an inch of snow; Buddha's maybe five inches tall and sitting in a terracotta pot. Yes, all the plants were well and truly dead before this.

So we are experiencing a second Arctic BLAST!! of the season, with varying amounts of snow whipping the local news media into a froth. Get Jim Foreman into his parka and hip-waders and send him out into the polar conditions, man! Go! People from places that have actual winters like to laugh at us in Seattle...but the terrain is hilly and almost no one has chains or snow tires, and the snow days are infrequent enough that we don't have a lick of sense, or any snow-driving experience to speak of, either. Pretty much the only emergency-preparedness response we're really good at is panicking. This led to a complete, hysterical exodus from NerdCo premises yesterday afternoon, when heavy hail-like snow pellets began pouring out of the sky at 4:00.

My office is about six blocks from the highway; it took me at least 45 minutes to get to the on-ramp. This included an interval where my windshield wipers either froze to the glass or became so overburdened that they gave up, and I had to get out of my car and claw them free by hand. Naturally the people behind me immediately began trying to creep around my car on the ice-packed gentle slope, despite my frantic hand gestures to please not slide and kill me, this would take 30 seconds, we've already sat through 11 cycles of this light for fuck's sake, just WAIT ALREADY. Sigh.

Confidential to you in the Jeep: the best way to regain traction is not necessarily to floor it. Neither is it to floor it and floor it and floor it and floor it and FLOOR IT, standing on the accelerator with both feet until it pops through the bottom of your vehicle. I wonder if you ever got home last night, or simply burned down through the ice and have now reached the Earth's molten core.

It took me 2.5 hours to get home, a distance of about 15 miles. I left at the right point, however; later the frenzy grew until there was an hour's wait, just to get out of the many NerdCo underground garages. Facilities personnel had to go around urging people not to just idle and idle woozily away down there. That would have looked great in the media, no? "Mass Suicides at NerdCo; Will this Impact Hugely Hyped New Product Release?" Film at eleven!

So I'm working from home today, and took the noon hour to walk up to Greenwood again for a mocha, and one of those styrofoam insulating boobies for my outdoor spigot, a vast improvement over my Grandma-esque arrangement of torn-up dishtowels and a plastic bag. A sign on the door of the hardware store read "Sorry, no salt or sand!" This might have been because the city, listening to the local weatherfolk, had dumped what is probably their entire supply on the highways the day before the snow arrived; driving to work yesterday morning was like tooling through Baghdad, my car scoured with a steady flow of hissing grit. At any rate, the huge box of foam doodads was directly inside the doors. I strolled home with one absently hooked over my left hand, and I'll be damned: they totally work. That hand was much warmer when I arrived home.

Oh, THAT giant brown square

I upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 and finally saw the formatting troubles several faitful Pagooey readers have been grumbling about. Bleh. So I've also upgraded to the shiny new Blogger, and fiddled with the template. It's going to look a little sparse around here, maybe, until I get all my pitchers hung back up. Let me know if this is moderately more legible!

The tree you really are

Last week, I spent $25 on a used CD: a children's Christmas album by Nat King Cole, one I'd worn out in both vinyl and cassette form over the past 34 years. You can't go too wrong with Nat; "The Christmas Song" is a musty old roasted chestnut indeed, but that butter-rum voice of his just pours into every fissure in your soul. It heals what ails you. This particular record has been rereleased multiple times, even recently...but the latest CD has a slightly altered track listing; hence, my costly acquisition from Eric in Texas, who surely has no idea how deeply he's improved my Christmas this year. Brace yourselves, everybody--this will be both long and sentimental.

In December 1972, I turned three years old. My parents and I were living with my maternal grandparents, waiting on the completion of our split-level ranch in the suburbs; Sis was still a seven-months bun in the oven. For my birthday, my great aunt Nannie, Grandma's sister, gave me a record, on vinyl, Nat King Cole's "Christmas is for Children." I can still see the album cover perfectly in my mind's eye: late-60s graphics, broad vertical stripes of red and green. In each stripe was a photo illustration of a little kid opening (or staring with bewilderment at) a glittery wrapped present. All of those pictured kids are comfortably in their 40s, if not 50s, today.

The most current version of the album is missing "Buon Natale," the loopy Eye-talian verve of which is sorely needed, I think. Because the core of "Christmas is for Children"? Is a first-class tearjerker of the highest order. For example: "The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot," the protagonist of which looks enviously on at other little fellows' holiday bounty, and then goes home "to last year's broken toys." "I'm so sorry for that laddie...he hasn't got a DAAAAAADDYYY," Nat sings. Apparently this was a big hit during World War II. As a kid in the divorce-a-riffic 70s, a few years later, it meant something different to me...but that's another story. No, the weeper I'm going to talk about here is "The Little Christmas Tree." Penned by Mickey Rooney (!), as I was dumbfounded to learn from the newest liner notes.

Little Christmas Tree
No one to buy you, give yourself to me
You're worth your weight in precious gold, you see
My little Christmas tree

Promise you will be
Nobody else's little Christmas tree
I'll make you sparkle, just you wait and see
My little Christmas tree

I'll put some tinsel in your hair
And you'll find that there's a strange new change
That you have never seen
I'll bring my boy a toy
He'll jump for joy
To see his bright new queen

With me you will go far
I'll show Saint Nick the tree you really are
And there'll be peace on Earth when Daddy lights your star
My little Christmas tree

You're big enough for three
My little Christmas tree

I can only guess, now, at why this song completely devastated me, at three. I think it's partly that reality, when you're that little, is not made up of points on a spectrum, but exists as a level plane. Santa, God, your parents, your pets, Mickey Mouse, stuffed animals, the t.v. clown who hosts the morning cartoons, Sunny Jim smiling on the peanut-butter jar--all are equally valid and sentient beings, with needs and longings as simple and straightforward as your own. Hell, I'd probably just seen Charlie Brown's limp, needle-dropping tree for the first time, too. For whatever reason, I was utterly convinced--and entirely destroyed--by this song. Somewhere out there was a tiny tree, unloved and forgotten on the salesman's lot...no one to take it home, decorate it, wrap its base lovingly in an old flannel sheet to keep its toes warm. I was inconsolable; I cried, even as I begged the adults to play the song over and over, lift the needle and reset the little tree tragedy time and again. I went to bed in tears, cried myself to sleep.

And my Grammy listened to me. If I know her at all, I am sure that she first turned on Nannie--why would you buy such a horrible album for a little child!--because she and her sister lovingly, tirelessly bickered every single solitary day of their adult lives, over the trivial and the extremely trivial. But after she finished chewing out Nan, Grammy went to my father. She stuffed a handful of bills into his pocket and told him, "Go out and find the tiniest tree you can buy. Don't come back without it." She was five feet tall and weighed maybe 100 pounds with her wig on, but Dad knew what side his bread was buttered on; he went.

Why did Grammy listen to me, after all? I was three years old, three days before Christmas; I'd had one rough night, but in the morning surely I could be distracted by toys, her clip-on earrings, a frozen waffle. From my friends with kids, I know that parenting toddlers is largely a long daily litany of tiny peace-keeping fibs and distractions: oh, the battery must have run out! oh, Barney isn't on today! sorry, sweetie, but there IS no more candy! But she saw something in my grief, that night, that resonated with her. As an adult, I can look at the story now and see Grammy's own thread running through it. When she was three years old, she lost her mother to breast cancer. December 25, 1925. Merry Christmas.

So she thrust money at my dad. I don't know where he went--a florist? a nursery? Maybe the drugstore, because I saw a few Little Christmas Trees at the Walgreen's last week, exactly like the one he procured: a tiny dwarf evergreen, not 12 inches high, a live tree in a colored-foil-wrapped pot.

And that's what I remember, the confusing Christmas-light haze of being roused from bed and carried to the kitchen. My father sat me on the grey Formica-topped kitchen table next to the tree, and my Grammy said "Look! Look what your daddy found! It's the tree. It's the Little Christmas Tree! Your daddy saved it and he brought it home!"

And I BELIEVED. I sat on that table in complete awe and I BELIEVED with all my heart, that my father had saved that tree, that a genuine Christmas miracle had occurred. Grammy came up with a handful of ornaments the size of gumballs, a garland that might have been one of her own beaded necklaces; we decorated that dinky little tree and stood it on the bookshelf, and for days I stood near it and whispered to it and stroked its bright-green blunt needles like it was a pet. Surprisingly or not, it thrived. It's planted in front of the house I grew up in. It's about the size of a Volkswagen Bug, 34 years later--too big really to dig up under cover of darkness, though there have been tipsy nights since we sold the old homestead when I have thought about it.

I got an embarrassment of riches from Santa in 1972, and all the years afterward--toys I remember playing with, some toys I loved. In between I've had magnificent Christmases, and kind of crummy ones, and at least one where Santa brought everyone the stomach flu and we all spent the hour of Jesus's birth fighting over prime bathroom real estate. But nothing has stayed with me quite like waking up to that little tree; nothing has matched the absolute wonder and joy of that instant, a true Christmas miracle in my eyes, and that rooted my love of the holidays right into the core of my soul. It's the first Christmas I remember, and on some level it remains the very best.

Happy Holidays, everyone who's reading; I hope the closing of the year and the birth of a new one bring you as much astonishing happiness and complete wonder as they bring me. Then, and still.

Winter blast blasts

So! We have survived the great Windstorm '06 here on my block of Ballard. Despite the fact that I have a gigantic evergreen on both the northwest and the southeast corner of my lot, I was not crushed to bits in my bed last night, perhaps because I lay awake keeping the two trees firmly rooted by sheer force of will. The power to the NerdCo campus in its entirety was out, and so I have spent the day in slippers, congratulating myself on my good fortune and wondering why so many service and delivery trucks were driving up my street in reverse.

Whoa! Turns out the south end of the block wasn't as lucky, and another huge honking pine tilted out of someone's front yard and covered the entire road, sidewalk to sidewalk. New tenants, in that house--they've been there maybe a week. I trotted down to check, and aside from pulling down the power lines, nobody had so much as a scratch; the tree just rolled over and settled gently between parked cars, away from the house. So of course we all had to stand around in the street with coffee mugs and camera phones, marveling at this grand, playing-hooky development as well, giddy with our own safety.

I didn't have a restful night, however, between storm terror and the wretched cold/flu I've battled all week. For some reason this one started as a sore throat and has migrated upwards; my sinuses were so swollen last night that I could feel the pressure shift in my gums as I rolled to one side or the other. I am wearing my contacts instead of glasses right now because the bridge of my specs actually hurts my face. I tried to blow my nose this morning and figured it shouldn't hurt in the back of my head, to do that.

So. I finally hauled myself to the hippie co-op and bought myself a neti pot; it was that or a gun. I've resisted this for a while, mostly due to the "ew" factor. A little Interweb research suggests that the average user is way too happy about using his or her neti pot:



The lady pictured on my neti pot package and accompanying materials is positively grinning, something I found too challenging as I hung my head over the sink wearing a towel bib and pouring salt water into each nostril in turn.

But it worked, sort of. It felt a bit like doing an overzealous cannonball into the pool, as a kid--that faint tingling burn--but my nose was actually clear. For about 15 minutes. Sigh.

Oh well. Between this and regular gulps of Safeway-brand CoolBURST nighttime minty blue cold liquid not found in nature, I should be right as rain in a couple more days. Plus, my new nostril kettle informs me it is dishwasher-safe. Good to know.

They're jingling, baby

Sunday morning, I did the 22nd annual Jingle Bell Run 5K in downtown Seattle, to benefit the local Arthritis Foundation. Mr. Sis decided to do this race, too, but because he is an Accomplished Triathlete, he left in the first wave of high-speed runners, clad in his aerodynamic, body-hugging, moisture wicking, solar-powered tracksuit. I was slotted in the third wave of slow-ass plodders, wearing the giveaway t-shirt and with a few Christmas bows stuck on my head. There was a costume contest, which some folks took quite seriously; if the gent in the full-on Bumble suit a la the Rankin and Bass "Rudolph" special reads this, I'd like to buy him a coffee. Or a beer.

The route took us on a veeeeery subtle-but-deadly incline through the festive holiday streets of downtown Seattle, kicking up a twee cacophony via the free jingle bells distributed to one and all. Then we doubled back uptown through the express lanes underneath I-5, which was fun for about a minute--I'm running on the freeway, yo!--and then dark, echoingly loud, and exhaust-a-riffic for many minutes more. Eh, it was for a good cause. Plus the last four blocks or so were all downhill, so you could make a dramatic show of barrelling through the finish chute Rosie Ruiz-style.

Anyway. The disparate finish times gave Mom, Sis, and Mr. Sis ample time to appreciate some of the other wonders of the season...DOWNTOWN! (cue Petula Clark belting here). To wit:

1. The big Macy's, nee The Bon Marche, has for years set up a Christmas train window, with model trains in assorted scales tootling around and around, airplanes whirling from fishing line, etc. This year, it seems there's been a tragic derailment at Gingerbread Gulch:



Note the little plastic child, once innocently frolicking on ice, now cruelly pinned beneath the coal car.



Mommy? I'm...so...COLD, Mommy...

2. The drunk hobo who leaned directly into Mr. Sis's face whilst the fam was awaiting my return, and said "Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck." According to eyewitnesses, his belly did indeed shake like a bowlful of jelly, and could perhaps have used a shirt.

3. Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Sis, stop acting so corny!



It's that little corn arm waving that makes it art.

Another reason for the season

A semi-rural church in western Washington is drawing crowds with its "Live Nativity" production that includes sheep, goats, actors (in their dads' bathrobes, I'm guessing), and an eight-foot-tall, 2000-lb, one-hump Arabian camel named Hannibal.

Here is my favorite, favorite part, a quote from pastor Chris Hill: "We'd like to think that it is Jesus, but the camel is the main draw."

And somewhere, John Lennon is no doubt rolling in his grave like a pig on a rotisserie. But laughing, probably.

14:57...14:58...

Well, gracious. Two different people e-mailed me messages headed "OMG!!" this morning, noting that my post on cafeteria tray affirmations had been linked by Seattlest. I did a little flattered capering around, then wrapped it up by notifying Sis, who said "What's Seattlest?" But I enjoyed my 15 minutes. Meanwhile, both Gael and Erin flagged my commentary on poor James Kim. I feel a little like I ought to tidy up around here a bit. Sorry about the cat hair and Starbucks cups everywhere, folks.

In an earlier entry, Erin also prodded us to reveal our blog crushes (via Mitali): who would cause you to dork out and stutter a bit if they gave you a mention in their blog? In all honesty, I got plenty excited by the props from the aforementioned ladies I actually know, never mind the Ist-a-verse. I'm usually astonished enough to find that someone besides Mike Pope is reading this thing.

But there are a few writers I aspire to emulate, and who would no doubt reduce me to a blushing, tongue-tied dolt if they had the least clue I existed. Sarah Bunting at Tomato Nation inspired me to start my own blog; likewise, Heather Armstrong of Dooce is so awesome that I am occasionally tempted to compose a grammatically unsound, loony hate mail just to merit her attention. When I grow up, I also want a cool husband, a ham-obsessed daughter, and the ability to hold my liquor just like Mimi Smartypants.

Of course, my ultimate dream job is to be the announcer on "Supermarket Sweep" (speaking of ham! Watch Gloria load up on those smoked hams! Meanwhile Howard is going for the jumbo bricks of Velveeta. But will anyone find the Tide Super Bonus?)But my second-tier dream job would be to recap just about any damn thing on TWoP. Then I would totally be welcomed into the DHAK stable of hilarious smart people, and we would all be BFF and go to the same parties and be the funniest people ever, on Earth. And it would be even better than the time I won the Olympic Gold Medal in figure skating with Scott Hamilton (he learned pairs, for me), or when I got my Oscar and totally thanked everyone except my dad, for holding up the child support checks, and Joanna J. from 4th period social studies because we all know she's a complete bitch. Yeah, man, it'll be awesome!!!

Lost

I'm wrecked by the James Kim story. It seems such an appalling caprice of fate: that these people made a simple mistake, one wrong turn, and that single choice spiraled into horror and tragedy. I don't pray, exactly, I am unconvinced that there is any particular higher power in charge...but for a week I followed this story, sent up a periodic silent supplication to what or whomever might be listening--mostly a litany of just please, please, please. Redoubled when the mother and girls were found on Monday...but there is no happy ending here.

A commenter on Seattlest nailed the excruciating familiarity of this story, I think--pointing out that the Kims are a scant few degrees from being "us." A cute, smart, young family of appealing tech nerds; James Kim a blogger, a technical editor--that detail particularly resonant in my mind. They came north for a Thanksgiving vacation, and on the way home Saturday they stopped for dinner at a Denny's, that road-trip staple of every family vacation I myself remember. Back in the car, they missed their turn, and consulted a map for another option. Probably James and his wife put their heads together over the Rand McNally road atlas, angling it under the dome light. Maybe as they headed into the woods, there was a little friendly ribbing: Honey, are you sure? This is the bucolic wilderness!

The first night was probably still an adventure, scary but a tiny bit thrilling. Tell the girls we're camping out for the night, and count on backtracking out of the snow by daybreak. How long did it take to become a nightmare, to realize they were well and truly trapped? They had a few snacks in the car, baby food and bottles of water, but they must have blown through that quickly. When it was gone, Kati Kim began nursing not only her infant daughter but her four-year-old, kept the girls hydrated and alive. When the gas ran out and the heat shut off, they started burning the tires. How, how did they make the decision that James would walk out for help? What must husband and wife have said to each other, after four days, five, seven, watching their babies grow visibly thinner? One report noted that the little girl had lost so much weight, when she stood up her pants fell off. Yes, that would drive me out into the snow in tennis shoes.

James Kim told them that if he couldn't retrace their path back to civilization, he'd be back in a few hours. Back by 1:00. I can't begin to imagine what Kati Kim went through at 2:00. At dusk. For two more days. Her husband left them to save them; he was a smart man, he knew, of course they both knew, that the lost should stick together, stay put, wait to be found. But it had been more than a week. He left desperate to save them, and he didn't come back.

Actually it shames me, that I can so easily imagine it, a lot of it...let my mind run down that narrow lane dense with snow and contemplate the full love and terror and anguish these people experienced. It's sickeningly easy, a glittering bleak fiction I can conjure out of the air. Except it's real, heaven help them. A holiday drive turned hellish, James Kim a geek with a cell phone who plunged out into the snow in sneakers in a heroic effort to save his family.

No, I don't pray. But I am thinking hard about the Kims tonight, pleading with the universe in my clumsy agnostic way to please please give them any small measure of peace.

Yes, you too

The NerdCo complex is vast enough that we have multiple cafeterias, most of them set up much like those at large universities: there's a salad bar and a pizza line, a burger grill, a Hot Entree of the Day station. When you first walk in, there's an area where you can pick up your tray from a huge stack of identical, neutral-institutional-gray plastic slabs and make your way in to select a meal.

The first time I noticed this, maybe a week or two ago, I thought it was a nice fluke, a random act of kindness: scrawled across the bottom of a tray (they're stacked upside-down) in black Sharpie were the words YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL. It was charming and forgettable. But I just saw it again. Different handwriting, too, so for certain another, a second, tray. YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL.

And maybe it's just a copycat thing, I don't know. But maybe it's a movement. A meme, a message from the universe, spreading the word one dull cafeteria tray at a time. YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL, whether you pick up this tray or not. Whether you falter, like I did today, and get the chicken strips instead of a salad, or not. You in the sweatpants; you, engineer in smudged glasses; you in the heels; you in the food-service apron. Me, you, everyone who saw that tray this afternoon--listen. I hope you were paying attention, because hello, we're beautiful.

While I was standing there woolgathering a cafeteria worker appeared with a cartload of freshly washed trays and began randomly piling them onto the existing stacks. He evidently took no notice of the message tray, and covered it up. It's now buried, somewhere in the middle of a clattering gray pile. But too late--I saw it. I know it's there...and now you do too. You are beautiful; pass it on.

God Jul

Yesterday Mom and I decided to attend Yulefest, the annual Christmas festival at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard. Neither of us had actually been to the museum before, and clearly we need to go back when the aisles and exhibits aren't crammed with vendors and musicians and sugared-up children...but it was a fun couple hours.

The vendors offered up an interesting, peculiar mix of objects: there were mugs and flags and imported licorice, but also Fimo clay jewelry and pashmina shawls in sealed plastic bags, labeled by someone with a tenuous grasp on English. Of course there were also more Nordic sweaters than you could shake a stick at; you couldn't turn around without getting hung up on somebody's silver buckles. I was honestly more curious about the food. I did not see any lutefisk on offer, though I suspect that it brings a unique array of liability issues with it.

But there were pastries: a whole table spread with cookies and little cakes and, to my delight, lefse. (I'm also delighted that both lutefisk and lefse appear in Wikipedia, hee hee...but since I had to explain the latter to my personal trainer this morning--a confession, if you will--I'll do so here as well.) Lefse is a Scandinavian flatbread, basically a tortilla made with potatoes. There are savory versions, served with ham or summer sausage in them...but we always had it sweet, growing up: spread with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, rolled into a narrow cone. They had both kinds on offer at the Yulefest booth, a dollar apiece; outrageous, but I nonetheless paid up and eagerly took a bite.

Margarine. Instead of butter, it was spread with margarine.

Which was revolting, and yet made me well up a little, because that was how we had it when I was little. We were cheap, and butter in the 70s was somehow ostentatious and bad for you both, like a rare steak. So my Grammy would spread slices of lefse with Nucoa brand margarine, a soft stick of which was always present in her bright-yellow Melmac butter dish, and that was the flavor of my heritage when I was six or eight or twelve years old. Manna from heaven.

I remember margarine-ing and rolling up dozens and dozens of little lefse tubes with Grammy one night, for a presentation on My Family History in seventh-grade social studies the next day. Did she come to school with me that morning? I want to say yes, but she would still have been pre-retirement, so maybe no. I brought family photos, and my great-grandmother Dina's apron with its handmade lace insets. Even at 13, my waist was too wide to fit...though it occurs to me now that poor Dina might have been crammed into a corset. I rambled on for some appropriate interval and then plied Mrs. Taylor's first period with sugared vegetable shortening on white bread, basically. I was a big hit.

So that rolled lefse tasted ambrosial to me, as Mom and I wandered through the rest of the museum. The building--a former elementary school from the early 1900s--has a tricky and peculiar layout, and at one point we found ourselves peering through an open door into the kitchen. I deeply regretted not bringing a camera, at that moment, because here we discovered the crack lefse assembly line: four snowy-haired Scandinavians at a long table--three ladies, one gent--carefully buttering and sprinkling and rolling a truly enormous quantity of lefse, on down the row. The Costco-sized yellow tub of Gold-n-Soft margarine stood before them at the ready. God bless us, every one, ya sure you betcha.

Two things that made me laugh yesterday

1. An editor, after several days out with a nasty cold, is whooping it up (slightly phlegmatically) in the hallway. I poke my head out to see what the ruckus is all about. "Oh, that's just my codeine!" he exclaims merrily.

2. Sis IMs me compelling evidence that we might be adopted: "I sent Dad a link to our wedding pictures online. He didn't respond, but he did forward me a joke about peckers."

Make like a tree

I had a meeting in another building today and had to traverse part of the NerdCo campus. Across the street, I watched a guy walking parallel to me: a grown man, coffee in one hand, NerdCo ID clipped to his hip pocket. Deliberately and with visible pleasure, he was scuffling along through the ankle-deep leaves that covered his portion of the sidewalk. Shooff, shooff--kicking up great swirls of yellow and orange around himself, 1:00 on a brilliant October afternoon.

Why I am Easily Amused at the P.O.

Among the stamps on offer in the vending machine is a set depicting snowflakes, with "four different designs." Shouldn't that be "an infinite number of designs, no two alike?" I think, and giggle all the way back to the car.

The toughest job, whether you love it or not

Yesterday was the United Way Day of Caring, an annual event where local corporations, NerdCo among them, sponsor their employees to take a day off to volunteer in the community. It's a Wonderful Thing, of course, but also so earnest that it's easy to make fun of, which we all do--perhaps spurred on by the manager I'll leave nameless, who once blurted "Eh, I cared last year" in front of the wrong audience. So for the past week, many statements have been made along the lines of "I am trying to care, but you are making it difficult!" and "Excuse me, The Needy, but could you please go and need outside maybe so I can finish painting your subsidized housing?"

The big boss in my division picks a huge project from the list each year, something that can absorb up to 100 people. Unfortunately, it seems always to be "weeding," in some form or other. Clear this ivy-infested slope next to the highway for eight hours! Pull dandelions from 50 acres of parkland! Big Boss loves to weed, apparently. I do not, which is why my yard looks the way it does. So, this year I chose my own project, and descended with a mob of like-minded souls in matching ugly free t-shirts on Sacajawea Elementary, in Seattle's north end. (Seriously, United Way: you do good work, but this year's shirts are particularly unattractive, as well as being sized for individuals that evidently average seven feet tall.)

The original plan, weather permitting, was for groups of us to repaint four-square grids and hopscotch squares on the playground's surface. This being Seattle, dark clouds threatened. A surfeit of outdoor volunteers set to...weeding. I was relieved to be dispatched to a first-grade classroom instead, to do pretty much whatever the teacher asked for six hours.

And good lord, I don't know how they do it. My mom has worked in the public schools for 26 years, I went through the system myself for 13...and I have absolutely no idea how anyone does it. I enjoyed myself thoroughly, even as I felt...ashamed, nearly, of my cushy NerdCo job, the ridiculous salary I draw to sit in an ergonomic chair and type all day. The kids were cute as hell: ages six and seven, mostly, so their teeth are going every which way, as is their hair in many cases. But they're too little to just sit and drill in rows, you know? So they were in constantly shifting groups: playing with clay or letter puzzles, poring over library books, listening to Caps for Sale on headphones, coloring apples and turkeys and pumpkins and leaves on that day's worksheet. It's school, it's fall.

The building smelled like wax, both floor and crayon, of pencil shavings and rubber erasers, of hot lunch. Though not of chalk, any more--they've all got whiteboards and dry-erase markers. I entered the new students' names in classroom computers, xeroxed mountains of handouts, labeled folders; I sat in a wee blue chair and reviewed sight-reading word lists with individual kids. Some smoked through the columns of "go" and "good" and "like" and "make" like it was a race; others shrugged and sighed over anything longer than three letters, groaning "Are we done now?" Boy, you'll be President one day, I thought darkly. Through it all, the din was happy but controlled, and the teacher was cheerful and magically omnipresent and never had to raise her voice. We should pay these people millions of dollars.

One dreamy, towheaded Walter Mitty child completely cracked me up. The teacher carefully went through a long list of activities kids could choose from after finishing the worksheets: puzzles, writing journals, etc. Immediately Walter raised his hand: "What are we supposed to do?" The teacher laughed, to her credit, and gently reviewed the list again. Whereupon the kid, I guess nonplussed at these choices, asked "Well, what if we fall asleep?" Oh, honey, THEN you are ready to start attending meetings at NerdCo! And again, the teacher laughed, and said "[Walter], if you fall asleep, I will pick you up and carry you to the couch"--a well-worn loveseat, crowded with cushions and stuffed bears, tucked into a nook of the classroom. This, I think, is actually a service we could benefit from at my job.

Lunch in the cafeteria with the kids: hot dogs, tater tots, and little cartons of milk (which, I can assure you, is pretty much exactly what hundreds of other NerdCo minions were also eating, in one of our many cafeterias). After lunch, I was handed off to a pleasant but frazzled kindergarten teacher. "Can you stay?" he and everyone kept asking. "Do you need to leave?" Many of the volunteers had indeed slipped out at noon, taking conference calls in the parking lot, already distracted, their faces clouding over with Real Jobs. I wanted to take in the full day, though. I was ridiculously tired already, amazed at these people who were calmly responsible for HUNDREDS of CHILDREN, educating THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY, for six hours a day and a mere pittance. Put me to work, teachers. I like my job, but in the bright hubbub of the school it seemed ever more distantly absurd.

The kindergarten teacher set me up in the supply room with a die cutter, punching hundreds of shapes out of construction paper: orange squares, green triangles, blue diamonds (aye, me lucky charms!). I did that for more than an hour, breaking a sweat as other volunteers tag-teamed the two copiers, cranking out reams of handouts. (Remember the heady purple ink of mimeographs? Good thing they didn't have us in there doing that for hours; we'd have been high as kites.) "Well look at this," the teacher laughed when I came back in at the last bell with half a dozen envelopes, a representative colored shape taped to the outside of each (yes, I'm compulsive). "We'll use these for years," he told me.

The yellow buses were still loading as I passed up the line to my car. "Bye, Miss Kim," shouted a voice: one of the first-graders, a wild-haired little girl hollering from her lowered bus window. Between snacktime and jump-ropes and turkey-coloring, she'd remembered my name.

It was the most fun I've had in months, even though I went home and passed out on the couch for two hours in sheer exhaustion. Millions of dollars, I'm telling you. They don't print enough money, for what we owe our teachers.

Mrs. Bacon, Mr. Wilson, Mr. Hathaway, Mrs. Eskenazi, Mrs. Chinn...thanks. I'm thinking of you, tonight.

Because the sky is blue, it makes me cry

I remember. Who I called when I sprinted for the phone that morning, how I ate breakfast in front of the Today show in a fog of routine, not knowing what else to do. I chased Peanut-Butter Bumpers around a bowl and watched the towers burn, a fact that still shames me five years on. I was still watching, live, when Matt Lauer said wait, something's happening, something happened, run that back. The first tower was gone, and I stood in my living room, wept and stamped my feet like a tantrumming child, in utter disbelief. Three thousand miles away, three thousand levels of magnitude below "helpless."

When we were still in college, David took me to dinner at Windows on the World. He wore a charcoal suit procured by his uncle, who worked in the Garment District; I had a little black jersey dress I'd gotten at the mall in Yonkers. We met under the clock at Grand Central Station and took the subway allllllll the way downtown, a surprise for me that I figured out halfway. It occurs to me now that we were broke-ass broke, and where did the money for that dinner come from? Uncle Phillip, I have you to thank for this evening as well.

In the elevator, my ears popped twice, it was that high.

We had a table at the interior of the room, rather than being flat-up against the mind-boggling view; I don't know now whether I am grateful for that or regret not having the opportunity, now lost, to take it fully in. I remember that we had pheasant consommé as an appetizer, probably because David mispronounced it. Pheasant! What Richie Rich was always having under glass! The rest of the meal has slipped away from memory. The waiter was unfailingly polite and solicitous and clearly bemused at our youth, our concerted effort to behave as classily as we could imagine people might. We spent $100 and felt like royalty. Afterwards, we convinced ourselves that we could've gotten wine if we'd mustered the nerve to ask, despite being underage. That waiter would have brought us wine, we were sure of it.

I have thought of that waiter a hundred times in the past five years. I don't know his name, can't take even a wild guess as to his age, couldn't choose him from a lineup today. But I've thought about him. Even on that terrible day, I did, and I wondered: do waiters at high-tone restaurants stay on, for years, for a decade? was there a morning shift at Windows? There was, I know that now. Staff and attendees, gathered for a breakfast conference. Those people died horrific deaths, they roasted and strangled on the blackening air or chose a different devil, chose to jump. Would you jump? I've asked and been asked, any number of times. Would you jump, do you think? I want to believe that yes, yes I would--that I would seize upon a method to my fate, that bravery, a last act of defiant will. But I say that knowing I fear fire more than I fear heights. And knowing that I didn't have to choose.

All this to say that I have not forgotten, that I won't. I'll remember, even as the President squanders the world's goodwill and leads us ever onward into a morass of war that will take thousands more lives, American and not, than were lost that day. I remembered, when I looked into that yawning hole myself last year--Ground Zero just a huge construction pit to the naked eye, if you didn't know what had happened there you never would. I think of it. I think of that waiter. For me he is its public face, even as I would fail to recognize him if he walked past me on the street. How I hope he might, though I can never know.

Panic in the skies (okay, panic maybe 20 feet in the air)

I pulled up to the Starbucks near my office this morning and was momentarily jarred by the sight of a uniformed police officer, standing on the roof. Oh my God, I thought, there's some kind of terror incident at the Starbucks! This notion flared through my mind pretty much simultaneously with But will I be ABLE to get my coffee?!? Because if there are no mochas, Al Qaeda has won.

I was much relieved to discover that the local police department had simply organized a breast-cancer research fundraiser. Officer Rooftop was actually dangling a plastic bucket full of bills and change from a fishing pole; other volunteers flapped signs below, around his merrily-yellow-tape-bedecked cruiser. Whew, and yaay! coffee! (and yaay, boobies, of course). Once caffienated, I happily threw a fiver in the pot, and called up to the cop about my initial alarm, which made him laugh.

"Yeah, right now this is the SAFEST one," he noted. Arguably true, though he had pulled his stepladder up there with him and I'm not sure how fast he might have been able to fling himself down and tackle a perp from on high.

It was very entertaining, however, to listen to Officer Rooftop use his loudspeaker to chastise other customers in the parking lot. *krrrk* Don't walk in the middle of the street, sir. *krrshk* --as jaywalkers flinched and looked around wildly. That's right, buddy, move it along, on orders of Officer GOD, who can totally see you.

Commitment

It's perhaps common knowledge that the tech industry, NerdCo not excepted, has a distinctly lackadaisical dress code. "Business casual" dips to new lows round these parts; we have a few folks who are sharply turned out, and probably an equal number who can scarcely be bothered to put on shoes (which, EW, because a) stop tracking your toejam cooties through the common KITCHEN, and b) you don't know what I or ANYONE ELSE has tracked in on OUR shoes). The vast majority of us fall in the middle, schlumping around in jeans and one or another of the free NerdCo t-shirts that rain from the heavens at regular intervals. One of my writers once complained, "I wish they would start handing out some NerdCo pants; then I'd have some complete, branded outfits!" NerdCo doesn't care as long as you show up, clad at all, and do the work...and I imagine that if even putting some damn clothes on bent your fragile little spirit too much and you complained to the right person, some sort of accommodations could be made.

Recently I and several editors from my group have been working with an editor from another team who happens to be a very dedicated goth girl. Like us, she scorns dangling modifiers and appreciates the unintended hilarity of a poor comma splice; she just happens to do so while wearing a black lace corset top, a hoop skirt, and pink fishnets. Goth Editor is serious, yo. She is very likeable. I can't help being deeply impressed and kind of fascinated by her, because the level of commitment and time investment her daily ensemble and makeup clearly requires is beyond my ken. If I achieve the "shirt/pants/nothing hanging out" trifecta, I'm good; if I've moisturized and actually blow-dried my hair, that's a bonus. I can't imagine--though I would much like to see--Goth Editor trying to get 12 black crinolines into a gym locker, say.

Today we had a meeting in Goth Editor's office, which I was eager to see. It did not disappoint, chock-full of Edward Gorey ephemera and string lights in the shape of bats, plus the huge ergonomic FitBall she sits on--it stands to reason, I suppose, that wearing such a detailed and extensive wardrobe does require real attention to one's core strength. The thing that most blew my mind, though? She had black Post-its. Black! She had them stuck here and there, little notes on them in bright metallic pink ink.

I could not help myself. "Where do you even get black Post-its--Goth Depot?" I blurted. To her credit, she laughed.

"Actually, I found them at Michael's," she said.

And that was the best thing I'd heard all day, man. The thought of this woman, in her skull rings and black lipstick and gypsy-vampire-squaredance clothing, trudging up and down the craft aisles among ladies hoping to make goose-in-a-bonnet suncatchers or whatever--that, Internets, filled me with boundless glee.

Paging George Costanza

Further evidence that New York City is the finest metropolis on the planet: as I heard on NPR yesterday, they cater to the modern businessperson with specialty boutiques just for napping.

MetroNaps has both Midtown and Wall Street locations (as well as, mysteriously, the Vancouver BC airport), and franchise opportunities are available should you want to open your own shop of crazy ergonomic reclining space pods for people to pay to doze in. They offer punch cards (buy six naps, get one free!), and (my favorite page) a selection of Nap Strategies. For when you feel like nodding off at your desk, but aren't sure how to make that most productive, I guess.

I'm so in love. And I'm sure I would need a little nap in my Sleep Egg after ordering in a different variety of mac and cheese for lunch every day, so it's all good. My Manhattan career plans are virtually set!

Broasted

Holy Jesus, it's hot--high 90s and humid for the second day in a row; it feels like New York. Granted, I imagine that actual New York is worse, but you have to understand that this is extremely unusual for the Pacific Northwest and we have no clue how to cope. Big companies might have air conditioning, but virtually no homeowners or small businesses do, since this shit happens only two or three times a year. So we're stumbling around limply, all Boneless Chicken Ranch, making unfortunate displays of near-nakedness. A small, sad percent hurry out to the lakes and rivers to drown. Everyone and everything stinks a little. I've been moving myself and the fan from room to room as the sun blasts different quadrants of my house; I sprawl in front of the hot breeze as if dropped from a great height.

This morning I walked (ve. ry. slow. ly.) up to the Greenwood business district for coffee. I find the snippets of life from wide-open doors and windows oddly touching and funny, somehow: the Dopplering drift of the ball game from one home, the 70s Gold hits that perpetually blare from the Tiki Torch Party House. Someone shouts "I can't, I'm all soapy! I'm all SOAPY!" from the shower. The proprietor of the Turkish rug shop is planted on the sidewalk outside, gabbing into a cell phone and incongruously drinking hot coffee; at the faux German bier hall, the door is locked but the high casement windows all yawn open in defeat: if you want to scale the building, topple in, and steal beer, go ahead, they give up.

I went to Starbucks for the air-conditioning. Yeah, yeah, giant ruthless billion-dollar corporation, yadda yadda--my dollars BUY that air-conditioning. It was delicious, and I lingered as long as I dared. Outside again, the heat clapped down like a heavy arm around your shoulders: the boisterous, blowhard colleague, the close talker you just cannot shake off.

In high school, both Holly and I worked in a weird little gift shop on Capitol Hill, selling greeting cards and exotic chunky jewelry, crystal vases and wedding-present-type items. The owner was an older woman with a pronounced Norma Desmond streak; she'd swan around the place in palazzo pants and the occasional turban, and was given to breathy, dramatic declarations: "WATCH these babies fly out of here!" she'd proclaim over a new shipment of lurid handbags, or "I don't want any STOOL-SITTERS." This last meant that you could not simply perch behind the cash register, but had to appear busy, usually by dusting. "Norma" kept vast bales of rags in the stockroom and an endless supply of Windex. Holly and I spent countless Sunday afternoons poking around the dozens of shelves and rearranging the film of dust that lay over every piece of china and stemware.

Norma had several wretched prejudices. She or her husband would count in the cash drawer in the mornings--frequently wrong. The register was ancient, the kind where you had to punch keys for each decimal place: TEN dollars and FOUR dollars and SIXTY cents and FIVE cents, putting your whole weight behind it so that the correct little tabs would pop up in the glass window on top. The till rarely balanced at the end of the day, and Norma would give us the fish eye. More than once, Holly and I crawled on the floor searching for every last dropped coin, or even scrounged change out of our own purses to remain above suspicion. Far, far worse were the occasions when a customer of color would come in while I was working, because if Norma was present she'd sidle up to me and hiss "Watch the BLACK." Oh my God. I was seventeen, mortified but not bold enough to defy her, and so I'd miserably trail around the store behind the rare African-American shopper. I am still sorry about this, still ashamed.

But Norma had her moments of strange tenderness and generosity, too. When Holly and I finished our last summer at the shop and were leaving for our respective colleges, Norma presented us each with a big honkin' footlocker. (Because she'd known my family since I was in kindergarten, I was also shocked to receive two pieces of Oleg Cassini luggage.) At one point or another, three generations of my family worked in Norma's store: my mother had, when she was newly divorced and back in college; my grandmother, when she was freshly widowed and half-mad with grief and needed a distraction. I don't think Norma needed her, frankly--but she saw Grammy's anguish and found space in the budget for her wages, kept her busy dusting dusting dusting and allowed her to empty her mind, an extraordinary kindness.

This is how I prefer to remember her, and what I'm thinking of now when it's blistering hot. The store was in a small brick building that held heat like a pizza oven, and on certain summer days it was easily 20 degrees hotter inside than out. One day like today, Holly and I were drooping like our own dustrags while Norma sat in her windowless office in back, even hotter, a wet towel wrapped around her head to cut the misery. It wasn't enough, and finally she emerged, gruffly booming "It is entirely TOO HOT! We deserve A TREAT!" She stomped regally out the door. Holly and I shrugged at each other.

Ten minutes later, Norma stalked back. Carefully aligned between her fingers were three already-dripping vanilla ice cream cones from the place down the block. "Here," she said grandly, and the three of us loitered at the counter, chasing the rivulets of vanilla, trying to outrun the inevitable mess. No more dusting that day...just a momentary cooling off, a quick sweetness that, it turns out, has lingered.

The greatest city in the world

I said IN THE WORLD.

S'MAC: an East Village restaurant that specializes exclusively in varieties of macaroni and cheese. Evidently served up in big ol' cast-iron skillets. And they deliver.

The mountains and lakes n'all are pretty, but occasionally I have no freaking idea why I moved back home, man.

Decisions, decisions

A mysterious sidebar ad on the Seattle P-I's Web site declares simply "Vote for Ann Coulter!"

Unless that's "...to be fired from a goddamn cannon into a solid brick wall," then no, I don't believe I'll be clicking.

It's probably just my clamshell bra

I was in a public restroom at the mall, running a comb through my hair, when a mom with two little girls came in. One kid goggled at me for a moment and then blurted, "Mommy, she has RED HAIR!"

True enough: Feria "Cinnamon", $9.99 a box at Bartell's, dear heart. I chuckled.

After a pause, the kid elaborated: "She looks like ARIEL!"

Well, now I know what to say in my personal ad under "Celebrity you resemble most."